Arma 3 is large scale military simulator that's spawned a plethora of mods for those seeking game-play outside the limits imposed by the original content, and perhaps the most popular mods to play is Altis Life. I'll be covering the mod itself and some servers I'd suggest checking out.
Altis Life is a role-playing mod for Arma 3, and as it's name suggests, the goal is to mimic real-life to some degree. It fails quite horribly at this, but on a good server, the role-play can be both fun and quite entertaining. On the other hand, considering there are minimal if any consequences to anti-social behavior, Altis Life can be a pain to play.
The official objective in Altis Life is to make money, and there are many ways of doing this. The typical server includes jobs like mining, fruit picking, fishing, package delivery, police, drugging running/manufacturing, and the ever popular theft. Whether stealing from an npc store like a gas station, bank, or federal reserve or moving into more aggressive behavior and robbing other players or taking them hostage.
The unofficial objective in Altis Life seems to be make enough money for a gun, then go shoot people. While most servers have a strict policy on RDM/KOS without any role-play (random death match, kill on sight without), unless you have the ability to record your screen (thank you, NVIDIA), nothing is likely to happen to perpetrators. This can be extremely frustrating when you've just finished filling your vehicle with goods and get shot without warning. As a PC Gamer article accurately stated in a Mod of the Week, "The criminals are awful and the cops are trigger happy. Is there no room in this world for an honest salt-miner?"
Players also have the option to purchase houses and garages throughout the map. They range in price from fairly cheap, run down junkers to more elaborate prime location, two story wonders. Save your money, though, even the cheap ones cost quite a bit.
The game also has basic survival mechanics. You have a both a food and water bar, and if they reach zero, depending on the server, you either instantly die or start losing health.
I've played the mod for over 100 hours total, and in my opinion, it's very similar to Rust and other similar games. You can play alone, but to really get enjoyment out of the game, you have to have other people to play with. Gangs (guilds) can be formed allowing strong alliances between players. I would not recommend playing Altis Life solo, unless you are a glutton for punishment.
A couple of good servers to check out are the altislife.co.uk server and the Asylum Life servers.
The UK server is a hardcore role-play server, and they take violations very seriously. I've yet to encounter someone who didn't role-play at least a little. The site's description of their server is "Altis Life UK is a serious role-play community, If you are coming from another Altis Life community please erase that memory from your mind as things are much different here and very much focused around RP rather than combat."
The Asylum Life group has four servers when I logged on last week, each allowing up to 100 players at a time and featuring a "hive" mechanic that allows character data to be automatically transferred between servers, so all your money, equipment, and vehicles (but not houses) transfer between servers. It's much more unfettered, and during my stay I've had many role-playless encounters and never had a cop show up to help. You can read upon features, rules, and more on their forum.
So are you an Arma 3 Altis Life player? Tell us what you think (and if you've got a good server) in the comments box below!
