Arma 4 might feature a huge 348-square-mile map, and according to the head engine dev, Unreal just can’t handle that

Arma 4 doesn’t have a specific release date yet, and it’s clear we’ll be waiting a while before Bohemia Interactive launches their next big title. The reason is simple, they’re aiming for something massive, the kind of scale that’s meant to completely blow us away. In a recent chat with CzechCrunch, Filip “Fido” Doksanský, head of engine development, explained how their in-house tech, Enfusion, works and why they’ve chosen to stick with their own engine instead of using something off the shelf like Unreal or Unity.

Arma 4’s colossal map and the tech behind it

Despite the rise of big game studios worldwide, Czech developers, including Keen Software House (Space Engineers), and SCS Software (Euro Truck Simulator 2), often rely on custom in-house engines rather than industry staples. Bohemia Interactive is the same, their Enfusion engine has been in the works for over 10 years, handled by a crew of just 15 people. And it’s not the same old code anymore; they’ve gradually reworked and refined it until basically everything has been replaced.

Source: Arma Reforger; Developer: Bohemia Interactive

Filip “Fido” Doksanský compares Arma to Gray Zone Warfare by Madfinger Games, which runs on Unreal and features a 15-square-miles battlefield. But engine like this isn’t designed for extremely large and realistic game environments. That’s where Enfusion comes in, it can handle massive environments without needing a beast of a PC, and it even runs smoothly on Xbox and PlayStation. By comparison, Unreal games of a similar scale usually demand much more powerful hardware. As Doksanský said in the interview:

The downside of building your own engine is that it takes years to show real results, unlike commercial engines where you can throw together a prototype pretty fast. Enfusion gives way more freedom, you can tweak everything from gameplay and audio to graphics and even build maps with real-world geodata. It also runs on human-readable data formats, which makes life easier for dev teams. They can track changes, work together on servers, and make bulk edits – things that are a lot trickier with Unreal’s less accessible formats.

And finally, some good news for modders: Enfusion will give them more control than ever. Bohemia is hoping it fuels another mod-driven hit like DayZ, which started as an Arma mod and went on to make millions, outshining many new games.

Arma 4

2027

Want It!

• Overview

• Bohemia Interactive Studio
• ArmA (franchise)
• Enfusion Engine