ARMA III gets player alpha, "extensive beta," new screens

Bohemia's confirmed a "Community Alpha" program for ARMA III, an early player test after E3.

Bohemia's Dan Musil said: "Following E3, we plan to open up the game to our players. This process starts with the release of a playable build of Arma III. We call it the 'Community Alpha'. It's intended to enable people who'd like to try the game early on in development help us to shape it up - and make Arma III the greatest release of the series. Ours is a large and complex game - being developed by a relatively small team - so we really appreciate your opinions, thoughts and feedback.

"The Community Alpha will be quite limited in terms of the assets it includes, with the goal of providing enough content to experiment with the brand new bits of gameplay and technology. It also enables our passionate community to prepare their mods for the very latest version of the Real Virtuality engine. Then, later on in the year, we'd like to open up our game up even further with a more extensive beta program. The exact details, however, we intend to set out closer to their launch."

New shots of the sim were released today. Look how real they are. Real as real can be.

There's some of some men, one of a plane, and one of a chap driving a car.

There's a spangly helicopter, too. Men, guns, flying s**t and some jeeps. Computer war made real. Ish. It's out for PC in the third quarter.