When America's Army was first announced way back in 2002, there were a lot of skeptical people – and I was one of them. Ignoring the issues of the army using videogames as a recruiting tool, what the hell could the US Army bring to the table in terms of a PC-based first person shooter when so many other companies were going crazy churning them out?

Well, as it turned out, quite a lot. After some slightly rocky initial releases, America's Army quickly settled into not only a solid action title, but actually became better than a lot of big commercial game releases. This could, I suppose, have had something to do with the funding of the US Army behind it, but I've always preferred to think it has been the result of solid planning, good iterative game design, an organised release schedule and clearly defined goals. And after meeting some of the guys behind the upcoming America's Army 3 at GDC and getting a sneak peek at what is on offer, I'm pretty sure that's exactly what has been going on.



America's Army 3 is a significant update to the game, boasting a huge array of new features and improvements. One of the major ones is the switch to the flashy new Unreal Engine 3, which offers a whole host of visual improvements. A quick glance at the game running was enough to clearly see how much better it looks than the 2.x series – scenes have much more detail and an impressive new lighting engine creates much more realistic-looking environments.

The evidence of the visual changes is pretty clear from the screenshots, so I won't babble on about that because it's much easier to see – I will say though that the game was running super smoothly at 60fps (vsynced, obviously, but it was busting to go higher), and running around feels rock-solid and responsive. I got to see a couple of levels – basically the re-made versions of Bridge and Pipeline – and they look really impressive and a definite visual step up from 2.x.

Even the massive engine changes though almost pale in comparison to all the other new stuff that is getting crammed in. More in-depth training gives you the ability to unlock new items and skills – such as the new MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) system which will open up a new variety of secondary skills for your character. The first to be rolled out (probably in the second release of the version 3 series) will be a Combat Medic, a fairly typical medic-esque class, allowing you to revive incapacitated soldiers and heal wounded soldiers.

The incapacitation is another new feature of the game – if you're wounded badly, you hit the ground and your screen washes out grey (a la Left 4 Dead, although you can't shoot, but you're free to look around). While you're down you're basically useless, but if there's a medic around they can come up and revive you. Assuming they've can remember the process, of course – the level of detail is such that you might need to perform tasks like cleansing a wound before bandaging it, and not doing that might leave your teammate operating at sub-optimal performance.



The weapon system has also gotten a makeover – you can unlock parts as part of your training and then use them to modify your base weapon. So you can pick the M4 rifle and decide to throw various scopes on the modification points (called 'rails'), giving you a custom weapon that suits your preferred combat style. There's also a new loadout selection, allowing you to pick heavy, medium or light loads – so the heavy loadout offers more ammunition at the expense of speed and increased stamina burning.

In keeping with the trends of other games, a new "Achievements" system has been added, differing slightly in that you can hit some of the Achievements multiple times. All these new achievements show up as part of the new character stats system, which has received a massive overhaul, offering detailed performance figures over the lifetime of your character – including kill/death stats with each weapon, a hit map showing where you're shooting the opposition (and in return, where you're getting shot, so you can easily figure out if you're leaving certain body parts exposed more than others), and a lot of other details. The core focus of the scoring system has remained the same – US Army values - so you'll need to stay focused on that to make progress.

Another interesting side-effect of the incapacitation system mentioned above: if you come across an incapacitated enemy, you can actually secure them, which has the same effect as killing them – it knocks them out of the round. This is worth mentioning in the context of Army values, because the natural instinct of most gamers when they see a helpless enemy target would, of course, be to hose them with bullets or knife them or put a grenade in their pocket or whatever. But – this is not in accordance with Army values, and as such is against the Rules of Engagement (ROE), so you're not going to want to do that.



The weapon system has also been enhanced. Part of the revamped ballistics system was demonstrated by turning on bullet tracking, which gives a tracer-like effect on all shots fired, and then shooting through a wall – the bullets careen off wildly in all directions. As if random bullet direction changes weren't scary enough, you now also have to worry about ricochets, demonstrated in a similar fashion – standing in a small room and hosing down a wall revealed a lot of bullets bouncing around back towards you.

Also on the combat front is the new "overpressure" system. Without going into excessive detail, let's just say you don't want to cook off a grenade in a small, enclosed area any more. Because it will hurt. Lots. You should probably try it, preferably while I'm on the other team.

One cool general change to the gameplay is the removal of kill messages. At first this might seem weird – how do you know if you killed someone if you don't see their name scroll up at the top of the screen, right? But remember, the focus here is on realism. If you lob a grenade into a room where you think there's an enemy soldier, you don't know if you got him until you walk in there to see if his insides are decorating the room. So new to America's Army 3 is the death confirmation system – you basically have to enter a room and confirm each target is down (just by tapping the space bar on them as you walk up to them). Another game changer.

As if that wasn't enough, the sound effects for all the weapons have been re-recorded with a view to providing more realism and less "Hollywood". The entire sound system has been reworked to take into account things like occlusion (so if there's a hill or something blocking a shooter, the sound will be quite different). Skilled players will be able to use the new audio cues to help them build a picture of the current combat scenario.



Another very cool audio effect (which will definitely have a gameplay impact) is the addition of noises indicating when bullets are passing nearby (like the crack of the sound barrier as a bullet whizzes pass your head). How they did this was explained, I felt, excessively casually - basically some of the development team actually went out and got shot at by US Army people with actual bullets so they could hear and record the sound of bullets passing by under different circumstances. If that doesn't show the dedication of these guys to making an accurate game, I don't know what does (well, I suppose they could actually volunteer to get shot...).

But wait! There's more. A new Battle Planner allows you to come up with a rough, uh, battle plan at the start of each mission, letting you select spawn points and lay out some initial waypoints. It's not a complete tactical planner – you can only plan for around the first 30 seconds of an engagement, following the simple military maxim: "No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy."

One gameplay change that I fully endorse – no jumping. I have been looking forward to "realistic" tactical shooters ditching this for a long, long time. The jumping system has been replaced with a 'vault/mantle' option – if you walk up to an object that isn't too high you are presented with a prompt letting you know you can hop over it. Rabid fans of jumping might be consoled by some of the new moves you can do, like diving into a prone or kneeling position, which not only looks really cool when you're watching it, but offers some neat tactical advantages as well. You can also lean while prone and execute combat rolls as well.

One final enhancement is to the game setting – rather than fighting anonymous insurgents, a new fictional eastern-European nation has been created that has become the new theatre of war in some struggle for democracy. So of course, I thought about tempting fate and playing the role of obnoxious foreigner and asking why the US felt the need to go in there, but a) I'm a guest in their country and b) there were, like, 10 of these guys in the room with me, one of whom was a their military SME (Subject Matter Expert). He was wearing fatigues and talked quite confidently about scary things like the different weight of various devices made for the express purpose of killing people, so I decided to keep my mouth shut.

So, as you can see, there's an absolute stack of new features. The America's Army team are building on an already-solid gameplay base. The upgrade to the latest iteration of the Unreal engine brings the game up-to-speed with other modern shooters and the huge amount of changes and improvements definitely make this something that many people are going to want to check out, especially as it will be at the right price ($0).

America's Army 3 is due in 2009 and will be released on both the new Army Deploy Client (which I whined about here a while back) and also on Steam – another new surprise. If you're into tacshooters, you'll want to keep an eye out for this one.