ArmA 4 Release Date Finally Announced via Orchestral Performance

4.5

The Czech military simulator veterans at Bohemia Interaction celebrated 25 years in business and marked the occasion with a beautiful orchestral performance by the Czech National Symphony Orchestra.

The big surprise came towards the end, where the big screen behind the orchestra flashed the words most gamers had been waiting for years to see: ArmA 4, coming 2027.

The announcement has had a bittersweet reaction among the ArmA fandom, one of the most dedicated among first-person shooters.

The ArmA 4 project has been public for years now. Bohemia released ARMA Reforger in 2022 to field test the technologies on which ArmA 4 will be based and get modders acquainted with the new tools.

Reforger came out in early access in 2022 and hit 1.0 last year after overcoming a lot of teething issues.

The mature state of ARMA Reforger led many players to think that the foundations were in place for ArmA 4, leading them to assume the game would be released within the next year or two.

More humorous ArmA fans have drawn comparisons with GTA 6 and Star Citizen, games infamous for having comically long release cycles that are yet to reach a satisfactory conclusion.

When Reforger first came out, it seemed dead on arrival. The game packed many promising features, but the execution left much to be desired. Two years on, and it feels like a brand-new game.

Bohemia Interactive did its due diligence to polish the gameplay and add new content, such as the helicopters that were initially missing during early access.

What makes Reforger shine today is the same thing that keeps ArmA 3 perpetually relevant: an insanely talented and creative modding scene.

Reforger is set in the late Cold War period and pits the forces of the United States and the Soviet Union against each other on the island of Everon, first featured in ArmA: Cold War Assault (2001).

While this setting is a fan favorite, modders have made ARMA Reforger a sandbox that, given enough time, could eventually rival ArmA 3.

The Reforger workshop page has new guns, vehicles, and even whole terrain, like the KIOK Milsim recreation of Afghanistan's Kunar province.

Reforger players can ditch the trusty AKM or the eternally fashionable M81 Woodland uniforms with a few clicks.

We are talking tacticool M4 builds with foregrips, holographic sights, and lasers, infected by the multicam virus, and riding aboard modern vehicles with digital weapon control systems.

Purists like to stick to more traditionalist Cold War mods, but the possibilities feel endless.

Reforger is not the only competition ArmA 4 will have though. The new title has a 24-hour peak of 3500 players on Steam, while good old ArmA 3 scores 11600.

The seemingly eternal development cycle of ArmA 4 (and ARMA Reforger to a lesser extent) has made players self-reliant, and it will take a long time for either title to get anywhere near the level of content available in ArmA 3 today.

As Offworld Industries (also of Squad 44, neé Post Scriptum, and Starship Troopers: Extermination fame) have learned the hard way trying to make Project Reality veterans move to Squad, some players are never moving from their old ways.