Arma 3 screenshots

Mission fail (click image to embiggen)

I've been playing Arma 3 with my buddies at Not-Quite-Dead-Yet tonight, as usual (every Saturday and Sunday at 6 PM Central Time), and I took a few screenshots of our mission. Usually, I don't think to do that, but there were a few things which demanded a screenshot this time. :)

The picture above, for example, shows how we failed the mission. We were supposed to steal the vehicle that's burning there and get it safely to the extraction point. Obviously, that's not going to happen now!

Here, I'm standing in front of a building (the same one shown in the next picture), but I was on the second floor when this happened. Unfortunately, I didn't have any anti-air or anti-tank weapons with me, but only a sniper rifle. Well, I stood on that balcony shooting round after round at the helicopters strafing us, without any effect at all.

Actually, the reason I took this picture is because of my buddy - I'm not sure who that is - sitting on his butt to the left of the picture, watching the fire burn. (Click on the image to enlarge it, if necessary.) I thought that was pretty funny, especially since you can see two more of our team lying dead in the fire.

(Obviously, the advantage of a game, over real life, is that death isn't permanent. So he was waiting for the fire to die down so he could revive our dead comrades. But I still thought this was funny.)

Not the shelter I thought it was

This was the two-story house I was in, sheltering from the helicopters as I tried (futilely) to bring them down. There were still enemy around, so I went back up to the second floor to look around. I was mostly watching to the south, but I went across to open the balcony door on the north just as an enemy tank drove up and started firing at me.

I hid behind a wall, feeling pretty smart,... until the tank blew the whole house up! It was really pretty funny. Remarkably, I wasn't killed. I was injured, as I fell through the floor to the lower level (when the floor itself disappeared), but there was enough of the lower level still standing to give me some cover.

So I huddled down in the middle of the ruin as the tank continued to rain shells on the house (in fact, I think there were two enemy vehicles firing at me), such that my whole screen shook. I didn't think to get a screenshot then, but this is what it looked like afterwards.

The really funny thing is that I hate to be without an anti-tank missile launcher, so I almost always grab one whenever I can. My buddies laugh at me, because I'm always so loaded down with equipment that I can hardly move. But this time, I just kept the sniper loadout I'd started with. That'll teach me, huh?

Anyway, we'd already failed the mission, but we still had the assignment to escape, ourselves. Unfortunately, this is how I ended up:

Dead in a crater, next to my burning quadbike

I was driving a quadbike, an ATV, which doesn't offer any protection but is fast and maneuverable. We were supposed to meet at the top of a high hill, and when we started to take fire, I raced ahead and set up with my sniper rifle, to try to cover my teammates coming up behind me.

That worked OK for taking out infantry (although I was shot, and nearly killed, by an enemy who managed to flank me), but we ended up under fire from two more helicopters, and I still had no way to bring them down. (I kept firing at them, but I've never brought down a helicopter with a sniper rifle.) Still, the rest of the team made it to the hill, and we tried a mad dash for the boats waiting to take us home,... and ran right into more enemy armor!

Again, I had nothing which would take out a tank, either, so I just gunned it. I'm a pretty erratic driver in the best of circumstances, and I was going cross-country at full speed. But it didn't do me any good. That's my quadbike burning in the screenshot above, and I'm lying dead in the crater from whatever hit me.

The rest of my teammates - there were ten of us altogether - died soon afterwards. I don't know if they were struck by tank rounds, hand-held missile launchers, or helicopter fire - or all three - but it was a complete massacre.

Lots of fun, though. :)

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