The Arma games always need a year's worth of patches or so to make them even remotely stable and playable. That's not a sign of a good developer, and is likely part of why Ubisoft hired a different team to do the sequel.

ArmA 2 is now in version 1.04, it is mostly perfectly playable.ArmA 2 is ten times as complex than OFP2. SEE:
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=1921533&postcount=329
ArmA 2 - world filled with cities, civilians, animals, almost hundred of drivable vehicles from bike to tanks, boats, planes..all have full interiors etc etc..OFP2 - empty drab world.
ArmA 2 simulated full body dynamics, you can move your head independently from your body, you see your legs, everything. OFP 2 - floating gun.
I could go on an on.No shit ArmA 2 had some bugs, when
1)Its dev has a fraction of a budget CM have
2)It is infinitely more complex than OFP2
last but not least, Ubisoft had nothing to do with the game, first was made by Bohemia and published by CM, second was made and published by CM. And it had nothing to do with "why they hired different team".

My main question, Paul...how is modding going with Arma 2? Has it really gotten cranked up yet? So long as mod development and campaign development has really taken off, I'm interested.

Nice! I'll have to take a closer look but there's definitely plenty to choose from there, thank you. How is the vanilla game coming along? I had tried the initial demo release (which is what my earlier opinions were based on) and...yikes.

Based on seeing OFP2 here yesterday, I'd say it's pretty damn good. My friend brought his laptop over to show me the game (and it ran surprisingly well on a fairly average Dell Studio laptop) and he was playing on default settings and those had a light 'generic fps' feeling but there was no indication of where he was being shot at from, no enemy highlighting or stuff that you'd get in something like GRAW2 or the like and there sure wasn't a linear path to follow.
You seem to bandage wounds very quickly but then he was only lightly wounded so that might have something to do with it, it also seemed like you could shoot accurately without using ironsights/scope which is a bit of a bugger but this is easily something that could be fixed by turning the difficulty up.
The radial menu thing seemed a bit clunky, press the menu button, press the arrows/wasd to select option and sub option then press the menu button again to get out of the menu. Hopefully there'll be an option to make the menu a 'while you're holding it' style shift toggle.
Seeing it in action erased my doubts that they've completely fucked it up, no matter how OFPey the rest of the game feels, the game itself will be good and I'm buying it next week

Yup, compared to ARMA2, OFP2 runs a lot better on mid-end computers and seems to be more optimized, most likely because it was based on the GRID engine.

It is more optimized, because
1) It has empty world, no civilians, no animals, no cities..
2) Only 64 entities at any given time can be running around the world (that's total, including you and your teammates, etc)
3) It has been made for consoles, so of course it will run well on PC that is newer than 4 years old xbox
4) It does not simulate any of the advanced things like Arma does, no dynamic AI, no full body dynamics, no wind..
5) Yeah, Ego engine is pretty good. : )
OFP2 is great as a standard generic shooter, the shooting itself is pretty fun and ocasionally it looks very pretty (thanks to the postprocess filters) so on a layman it makes very good impression.
But as a game with OFP in its name, that was kind of supposed to be OFP sequel, it fails miserably.

I finaly played it and I must say it's good. You may be right that it fails at being an OFP sequel, but I never played the first one. This game is good, difficulty is well balanced, maybe need a bit tweaking sometimes. Some things are a real shame but can be corrected with patches (vehicle driver doesn't have freelook), but overall, it's a fun experience with friends in coop.
It's worth it if you can get the game cheap, like on amazon UK, and possibly after patches it will become really great.

REALLY? GRID as in that fantastic racing game? That engine is pwoering OFP2? Interesting.
Trivia: The original Spiderman engine was a modified Tony Hawk engine...and Defense Grid uses Fallout 3's engine!

Think the same engine powers DiRT2 as well

Exactly. A really versatile game engine.