PC gaming's biggest military sandbox will be expanding soon with S.O.G. Prairie Fire, a new paid DLC focused on the Vietnam War.
The $23 (€23/£20) DLC will add a bunch of new era-specific weapons ("pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns, grenade launchers … and deadly grenades, traps, and other special items."), along with 50-plus vehicles from the period, "armed helicopters, gunboats, light tanks, cars, trucks, static weapons, one jet, five small boats, and two bicycles," Bohemia Interactive says.
Maybe most interesting to Arma players will be the new terrain, Cam Lao Nam, a fictional 300 km2 slice of land "representing the Vietnam War's entire Area of Operations, including the Ho Chi Minh Trail which ran from North Vietnam through neighboring Laos and Cambodia to South Vietnam." Based on that, it sounds like the map will attempt to distill distinct features of the region down to a single contiguous play space. Arma maps themselves are major additions to the game, and it'll be interesting to see how this one sets the stage for the jungle warfare that the Vietnam War is often remembered for.
There are separate playable factions for both Vietnamese sides of the conflict, the ARVN and PAVN, but the co-op multiplayer campaign is focused on the American MACV-SOG Special Forces unit. It will feature six missions. Nine other multiplayer scenarios and five singleplayer ones, including "a mission for both MACV and PAVN that introduces you to jungle combat from either perspective," will be bundled in.
The whole thing is created by Savage Game Design, a small studio located in the UK. Bohemia Interactive continues to collaborate with third party devs as part of this Creator DLC program that began with Global Mobilization – Cold War Germany in 2019, which Bohemia says sold 130,000 copies. Bohemia has a history of elevating community-created content, with programs like Make Arma Not War awarding modders and developers cash prizes for their work, partly in an effort to discover the next Battle Royale or DayZ, two breakout projects that began as Arma mods.
Rising Storm 2: Vietnam remains one of the only other recent explorations of the conflict in a multiplayer shooter, throwing players into asymmetrical combat that featured inventive stuff like tunnels that only those on the Viet Cong side could access. Arma has always been more of a toybox than a dramatic stage for scripted storytelling, and it will be interesting to see how a third-party studio interprets one of the most horrific wars of the last century, a conflict that took the lives of an estimated 627,000 civilians.
Bohemia says it will run a small, closed beta test in the next two weeks, open to select members of the Arma 3 community, "to ensure an optimal launch" of the DLC. Find a full description of what's in S.O.G. Prairie Fire on arma3.com.
