Arma III/Unused Campaign & Story Content
This is a sub-page of Arma III.
Contents
The East Wind
Story Changes
Early renditions of The East Wind, the main campaign of Arma III, included different characters, protagonists, and events over its development. These can be divided into two different renditions: the 2011 campaign, and the 2012 campaign.
2011 campaign
This version of the campaign was described on the Arma III website in 2011, and was partially showcased at Gamescom 2011.
- NATO and Iran have been at war since the 2020s; the widespread theaters mentioned, from Europe to the Pacific, suggest this is a world war. In the final campaign, NATO and CSAT (Iran's successor faction-wise) are not directly at war with each other, and though their units do fight each other in several campaigns, it's usually small skirmishes by proxy rebels or special forces and not the open warfare implied here—in fact, the final campaign's bad ending is a war breaking out between them.
- The protagonist of the campaign is Scott Miller, a former Royal Marine and Royal Navy Special Boat Service operator. In the final campaign, Miller is a major supporting character, but he is not directly playable in The East Wind nor any other campaigns.
- Miller has a wife, 39-year-old Kate Miller (née Greggs), and a daughter, 7-year-old Susan. These details are never mentioned anywhere in the final game.
- Miller is the leader of the CTRG's "Security Team A", having been appointed there by the CTRG's leader, Colonel Martin Novak. In the final campaign, Security Team A has been renamed to Group 14, and Novak is not mentioned and does not appear, though Miller is shown to have largely the same role as him, being a rather influential and authoritative CTRG operative.
- Security Team A is tasked with investigating an Iranian military presence in Limnos, now "New Greece", an authoritarian breakaway state led by dictator Georgious Akhanteros and his private army of Greek military and police defectors—but is ambushed upon arrival, with Miller being the sole survivor. In the final campaign, Group 13 is on Altis to retrieve a CSAT tectonic weapon, they do not get ambushed during the first act (and are in fact implied to have caused the attack that sparked the conflict on Altis), and several Group 13 members survive to the end of the campaign. Georgious Akhanteros appears in the final campaign as the de facto president of Altis and the commander-in-chief of the AAF, but the Republic of Altis and Stratis is shown to be an entirely separate country from Greece with its own history.
- The campaign followed Miller as he linked up with the Greek resistance to contact the rest of the CTRG for support and ultimately overthrow Akhanteros and his Iranian-backed government. Though the final campaign maintains this premise, the goal of the second and third acts (the final campaign's equivalent of these plot events) is specifically to secure NATO reinforcements and defeat the AAF respectively.
- Colonel Vahid Namdar, leader of the Iranian Armed Forces' Griffin Regiment, would have played a significant role in the plot, being a notable military leader who was involved in a coup against Iran's theocratic government, won several battles in Europe for Iran, and was in charge of an experimental weapons program on Limnos. In the final campaign, Namdar is still the leader of the Griffin Regiment and the CSAT forces on Altis, but his role has been massively scaled down, with him instead being a mostly silent minor antagonist.
2012 campaign
This version of the campaign was described on the Arma III website in 2012.
- The conflict between NATO and Iran is now limited to Limnos as opposed to being fought across different theaters due to the 2034 Jerusalem Peace Accords, which halted Iran's expansion into Southern Europe. In the final campaign, CSAT is still not at war with NATO, while the Jerusalem Peace Accords are a completely different treaty known as the 2030 Jerusalem Cease Fire, which ended the Altian Civil War but established the AAF military junta's rule over Altis.
- Miller is still a playable protagonist, but there are now three others, each representing different combat specializations in a manner similar to the campaigns of prior Arma and Operation Flashpoint campaigns. The three other protagonists were infantryman Corporal Ben Kerry, tank commander Sergeant Rick Hutchinson, and helicopter pilot Jeff Larkin; Miller was likely meant to represent special forces or covert stealth operations. In the final campaign, Kerry is the only playable protagonist, while Hutchinson and Larkin do not appear.
- Kerry is an 18-year-old conscript who conducted Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Target Acquisition operations. In the final campaign, Kerry is never mentioned to be a conscript, and he is serving in a non-combat role at the start of the campaign.
- The campaign followed the four protagonists after a NATO force withdrawal is sabotaged during an Iranian invasion, as they worked together with the Greek resistance to survive on Limnos and Stratis, with the goal of fighting back against Iran. Though the final campaign maintains this basic premise, CSAT does not invade Altis, but rather arrives there to support the AAF.
- Namdar's backstory has been slightly altered; he is now the leader of Iranian forces on Limnos. Though this is closer to his role in the final campaign, he is still suggested to be a major figure in the plot, which is not true in the final campaign.
- Nikos Panagopoulos, the resistance's arms dealer, is stated to be motivated more by greed than any morals or politics. In the final campaign, though Panagopoulos is still an arms dealer, he represents the political end of the FIA, and in the campaign's good ending, he becomes the president of democratic Altis and leads the post-war rebuild.
Apex Protocol
Singleplayer Campaign
Apex Protocol is notably one of the few campaigns in the game and the Arma series to be co-op only, contrasting with the usual "singleplayer first" campaign design of the series. While the campaign is playable solo, it's solo in that the player must make do without any teammates outside scripted sequences, creating an unusual situation where the Raider 2 "team" sent to defeat Syndikat and Viper is just one guy. However, a proper singleplayer version of the campaign was planned, but was never finished due to development issues. In a post-release OPREP, the developers noted that, had they decided to develop the singleplayer campaign, they would have had insufficient time and resources to finish it, and it would have had to be released in a drip-feed similar to how The East Wind was released. As Arma III took some hits in reviews because it lacked its prominently-marketed campaign for several weeks after its launch, the developers were understandably unwilling to do that again.
Unused data in "Extraction", the fifth mission in Apex Protocol, is one of the more telling examples of what the custom singleplayer campaign would have looked like. The player would have controlled Riker, leader of Raider 1 (normally an AI-controlled supporting team). The mission's objectives are more or less the same as the co-op version, except Raider 2 is apparently completely absent, suggesting the singleplayer campaign would have excluded Raider 2, or they simply weren't in this version of "Extraction".
V-44X Blackfish Mission
An unidentified mission, possibly an early version of "Extraction" due to their similar premises, originally had a V-44X Blackfish VTOL provide close air support to assist the players as they progressed through the mission's objectives. Whether it would have been crewed by AI allies or other players—and, if the latter was true, how many players would have to crew it and if a player would have to be the pilot—is unknown. It was cut from the mission due to development issues.
The only proof this mission existed in a playable state is footage from the Apex DLC's E3 2016 teaser trailer that shows a V-44X Blackfish providing covering fire to another player on the ground, and a post-release developer OPREP mentioning that an unnamed mission featured the V-44X Blackfish "quite heavily" before it was removed from said mission.
First Contact
Playable Epilogue
The campaign's epilogue, "Another Earth", was meant to have gameplay associated with it on a unique terrain, consisting of a small island where the player could watch the launch of a rocket by the international space agency Astra, marking the beginning of humanity's attempts to communicate with The Visitors. According to developer Scott Alsworth, the development team was excited to add this rendition of the epilogue, but while conceptualizing the mission, they realized it was too ambitious and would be far too taxing to create with the time and resources they had, and were forced to scrap it. In the final game, "Another Earth" consists of the player listening to radio broadcasts about extraterrestrial contact on the Spectrum Device, with the only remnant of the original epilogue being a news report about Astra launching probes to communicate with The Visitors.
Showcases and Scenarios
"Firing From Vehicles" Late Release
The "Firing From Vehicles" showcase was added with the Marksmen DLC, but noticeably lacks its content: the player is armed with a light machine gun of all things with a short-range holographic sight, and the showcase itself revolves around a feature added in the Helicopters DLC. It seems it was in fact intended for the Helicopters DLC though, as unused text strings from that DLC mention this showcase. It is unclear why "Firing From Vehicles" was changed to release with the Marksmen DLC despite lacking its content.
