DeveloperBohemia Interactive, best known for the Arma franchise and its popular mod/spin-off DayZ, is hard at work on its next game,Arma 4.
Announced last year, Arma 4 currently has a planned release date of 2027, and as they’re hard at work on the game, they recently spoke withCzechCrunch, who was spotlighting the emergence of games developed by Czech studios, such asEuro Truck Simulator,Space Engineers, and Arma.
“It’s really remarkable that this is happening in the Czech Republic, which is not that big,” said Bohemia Interactive’s Filip Doksanský regarding the emergence of the Czech game studio scene.
During the interview, Doksanský revealed an interesting tidbit about Arma 4’s planned size and scope. Spoiler alert: it’s pretty big.
Bohemia’s Enfusion Engine Is Allowing Arma 4 To Be 900 Square Kilometers Large
Arma 4 will be running in the Enfusion Engine, created internally by Bohemia. As CzechCrunch notes in the interview, popular third-party engines like Unreal are unable to properly simulate the amount of kilometers, physics, and ballistics in the Arma series. " We have a lot of respect for Unreal in the team, it’s an industry standard and a quality tool with really polished options," Doksanský explained. “But on the other hand, it’s often true that an engine is defined by the game it was created for…And this connection is often quite strong and you have to fit into this defined box. But what if you want to get out of it? You start to encounter limitations, until you find out that you can’t use the engine at all.”
So just how big is Arma 4 going to be? I’ll let Doksanský take it from here.
We also rely on our games to look realistic and be large, and by that I mean very large. For example,Arma Reforgeris 160 square kilometers. And Arma 4 will be 900 square kilometers. ForGray Zone Warfare,you also want a fairly powerful computer to be able to run it. Whereas you can run our games on Xbox, PlayStation and PC. These are requirements that Unreal simply can’t handle.
Yeah, that’s a pretty big game, and Doksanský says that Bohemia is already thinking about what the Enfusion engine will mean for the modding community. Does that mean we’ll see an updated DayZ or perhaps a spiritual successor? It’s certainly possible.
“I can imagine that a similar game could be created on Enfusion, or rather on games that use it. It will runArma 4, which we are currently working on at Bohemia,” Doksanský responds when explicitly asked about a successor toDayZ. “But it is already clear that we have made huge progress in terms of moddability and user creation compared to the previous engine.”
