Arma 4 release date estimate and Reforger news

When is the Arma 4 release date? At long last, we have at least a window of when PC and console players will get the forth instalment of the world’s best military simulation game – but it’s still years away. This guide tracks everything we know about Arma 4’s development, as well as all the key updates for Arma Reforger – the ‘bridge’ game Bohemia is using to develop features for the final game.

We’re waiting for fresh Arma 4 news with bated breath; Arma 3, the series’ last full iteration, remains one of the best tactical shooters ever made, a consummate military playground that was crying out for Bohemia to take it to the next level.

For now, the best closest thing we have is the ‘test bed’ game Arma Reforger, and it rocks – so we’re keeping a close eye on both games in this guide, to see what clues we can glean about the final version of Arma 4.

Arma 4 release date window

The Arma 4 release date will be at some point in 2027. Developer Bohemia Interactive revealed this during a a music concert to celebrate its 25th anniversary in October 2024 (watch it above).

It’s exciting news for sure – but tells us almost nothing about what we can expect from Arma 4 just yet, and fans now have a long wait to get into the sequel. In fact, announcing a release window three years in advance, with zero specifics about the game, feels pretty strange overall.

There’s even an official Arma 4 website now – though all it shows is the logo; the phrase “ETA 2027” and an email newsletter signup box, laid over an animated seascape.

This means that, if everything goes well, there will be a gap of 14 years between numbered entries in the Arma series. Of course, there’s Reforger, which released into early access in May 2022 and hit version 1.0 in November 2023, to break up that long gap just a little bit. But extended dev times aren’t unprecedented for the series.

We only had to wait a piffling four years between Arma 2 and Arma 3, but that was something of a special case. Arma 3 was a serious step change for the series, selling roughly twice as many copies as its predecessor on Steam, and forming a base for 14 DLC expansions (so far), of which the most recent substantial offering, Contact, came out in 2019.

Moreover, the game’s ongoing engine upgrades and improving user-generated content tools (not to mention the deep ocean of mods) have made Arma 3 a supremely versatile mil-sim playground – and one for which Bohemia was still releasing expansion content as recently as March 2024, in the form of its community-built ‘Creator DLC’ packs.

What is Arma Reforger?

In something of a surprise announcement on May 17, 2022, Bohemia not only revealed that Arma 4 was, indeed, in development – but simultaneously released Arma Reforger, a “creative platform” (playable on PC and Xbox Series X/S consoles) to test out the newest version of the Enfusion engine and “provide valuable feedback for the ongoing development of Arma 4”.

Since then, Arma Reforger has received continual updates. It hit its big 1.0 release in November 2023, and as of December 12, 2024, the latest Arma Reforger update is version 1.2.169.

Set on the Czechoslovakia-inspired, fictional island of Everon – the setting of Bohemia’s original 2011 Arma: Cold War Assault – Reforger’s gameplay takes place in a fictionalized 1980s, where American and Soviet soldiers face off using a roster of “era-authentic weapons, vehicles, and equipment”.

Arma Reforger includes two multiplayer modes:

• Conflict – two teams compete to capture strategic positions from one another by base-building and completing strategic tasks, while AI forces resist them both.
• Combat Ops – co-operative missions for groups of 1-6 players.
• Game Master – one or more “curator” players create “responsive combat encounters” for the other players to take on.

Bohemia says Reforger is also aimed at Arma’s vast army of modders, laying the groundwork for Arma 4 to be as much of a fertile ground for endless modifications as its predecessor.

To wit, Reforger includes a “suite of in-house development tools” called Workbench which reportedly includes the “exact same tools” used to make the game. The modded content users create with the Workbench can then be shared on Bohemia’s “integrated, repository service” – titled Workshop – and can then be downloaded and played by Xbox and PC players alike.

Arma Reforger Roadmap

Bohemia’s published Arma Reforger roadmap is broken into three main parts, ‘Ground Support’, ‘Air Assault’, and ‘Final Strike’, which will pave the way to the full Arma 4 game. The original plan was to deploy these packages of updates in sequence.

However, in October 2023, Bohemia Interactive said it was going to bring out features as they were completed by its team, to ensure the community could use them right away. As of March 2025, Ground Support has been completely deployed into Arma Reforger, and all but one of the features in Air Assault are present. Some functions from Final Strike are also live.

Arma Reforger Ground Support update

The Arma Reforger Ground Support update is completely live in the game. Bohemia Interactive’s first of three promised large-scale updates to the game, Ground Support adds:

• Arland – a 16-square-kilometer new playable island area
• Combat Ops mode – Bohemia’s “dynamic, cooperative, multiplayer-oriented game mode” which assigns your team three “randomly scattered” objectives to complete before exfiltration.
• Updates to Conflict mode – enhanced building mode, new support structures, base capture, supply system for deployments
• Sa-58P and Sa-58V 7.62×39 Assault Rifles
• 4×20 Carry Handle Scope – for M16 rifles
• New medical items
• Better destructible assets
• Anti-tank mines

Arma Reforger Air Assault update

The second major Arma Reforger update is Air Assault, bringing helicopters to the game. As of March 2025, all but one of Air Assault’s listed features are live in the game – we’re still waiting for handheld flares to be added.

• Gear and weapons – UK-59L machine gun, M16A2 carbine, NSV heavy machine gun, 1P29 rifle scope, PGO-7V3 launcher scope, suppressors bayonets, flare rounds for underslung grenade launchers.
• Helicopters – adds the Mil Mi-8MT and UH-1H helicopter, which players can pilot, and with scope for player and AI-controlled machine guns.
• Combat Ops – a new scenario set on Everon.
• AI – AI units able to drive all land vehicles on roads; players can issue basic commands to AI groups.
• Vehicles – S1203 van, S105 car added, along with an update to the fuel system: there are new fuel-related assets, vehicles are refuellable, and fuel consumption is improved.
• Supply system – the supply system is enhanced to have greater impact on the game, including having a physical presence, and being modular so it can be used in user-generated scenarios.
• Helmets and body armor – M1 helmet, M69 flak vest, PASGT vest, 6B2 vest, 6B3 vest, and flight suits added.
• Melee – all personal weapons become usable for CQC.
• Unconsciousness – a new medical state.
• Save Slots – for both Game Master and Conflict game modes.

Arma Reforger Final Strike update

As of March 2025, around half the planned features in Arma Reforger’s Final Strike update have started testing in the experimental version of the game, and around one third of the full list of additions are fully live in the main game.

For most players, these include civilian outfits and explosive charges which can be remotely detonated or set on a timed fuse. For the Game Master, waypoints can be linked to specific entities; there’s functionality to pause and resume single-player scenarios; and players can place crewed vehicles.

There’s plenty more to come on the list, however, including new reconnaissance vehicles, helicopter rockets, and an electrical grid for the islands. In Conflict mode, the plan is to make buildings constructible almost anywhere on the map within radio signal range and introduce a building destruction system. Lastly, a new HQ role will be created, which can optionally give strategic oversight to a single player.

Here’s a full breakdown of which Arma Reforger Final Strike update features are complete, planned, and in testing:

Arma 4 trailers

While there’s not yet an official Arma 4 trailer online, Bohemia has released the Road to Arma 4 trailer, including clips from all the previous games and a teaser for the Arma 4 logo, which you can watch below.

And, because we know you want it, here’s that rip-roaring Arma Reforger trailer again, to show a little more of the new and improved Enfusion engine:

When it’s finally time, we wouldn’t be surprised if Bohemia makes the official announcement in the form of a teaser trailer, though, and rest assured: when it exists, we’ll add it here.

Arma 4 leaks and rumors

Unsurprisingly, given how long Arma 3 has been alive and kicking – and especially in the long lull between the last full-scale official DLC in 2019 – broken only by the excellent Vietnam-focused S.O.G. Prairie Fire Creator DLC in 2021 – fans have been ever watchful for Arma 4 leaks that suggested Bohemia may be hard at work on a sequel.

The May 2022 announcement of Arma: Reforger – the early access proof-of-concept preview game for Arma 4 – is the first major official development fans have seen in years – but it’s not the first time we’ve heard that title.

Arma Reforger first surfaced in January 2021, when some apparently leaked game screenshots carrying a logo that read “Arma Reforger” were shared over Twitter by a user called @biostiel – whom some community members (on the Arma subreddit at least) believed to be a genuine Bohemia Interactive insider, with privileged information about their current projects.

Authentic insider or not, @biostiel’s tweets swiftly clarified their claims, saying the game shown in the allegedly leaked photos was not Arma 4, but rather an unnamed, smaller-scale, multiplayer-only shooter project. It seems likely this was the same project Bohemia would finally reveal to the public in May 2022.

Biostiel also suggested the next mainline Arma title was “years away” – something we now know to be true. The @biostiel account, and all the relevant original tweets, have since been deleted.

Discussions of what Arma 4 will look like have continued beyond Arma Reforger’s release. The Arma Reforger project lead told our sister site The Loadout that Arma Reforger was, in part, about “building  community of modding experts for Arma 4”. The June 2022 interview also floated the idea of monetized mods for the game.

Night gathers, then, and our watch continues. As soon as there’s something more substantial – or, ideally, official – to get our teeth into about Arma 4, we’ll let you know here.

In the meantime, you could get your tactical fix with our guide to the best RTS games for PC – or go tabletop with our picks of the best miniature wargames.

Source: Wargamer