Summer 2026 at Bohemia Interactive: A Look Back

Summer is usually the season when things slow down. Not here. Between anniversaries, launches, the past few months turned into one of the busiest stretches we have had in a while. Now that the dust has settled, we wanted to sit down and walk you through everything that happened across our studios and projects.

Arma Reforger

The big moment came on August 13 with Update 1.8, which brought a wave of new features, gameplay improvements and stability fixes, and also marked the arrival of Arma Reforger on the Microsoft Store with full Xbox Play Anywhere support.

The headline addition was the first iteration of the Far Hide system, our answer to the long standing grass concealment exploit that let players spot prone targets at distances where they should have been invisible. It is a first pass rather than a finished solution, and we are watching your feedback closely, but it already changes how long range engagements feel. Alongside it came specialist roles, deployable razor wire, gesture animations, underbarrel smoke grenades and a rework of foot damage.

Summer also gave us a reason to look back a lot further. Operation Flashpoint turned 25, and we celebrated with a livestream featuring veteran guests who were there when it all started. We also used the occasion for two surprises: the release of Arma: Cold War Assault Remastered, developed by the community, and the publication of the original OFP source code on GitHub. Handing that code over to the people who kept the game alive for a quarter of a century felt like the only right way to mark the occasion.

Then there was the part we could not talk about for months. A group of Arma community members came to Prague. We put them on a bus. We told them nothing. What happened next became #ArmaRallyPointPraha.

Over the course of the event, our guests fired live weapons, rode armored vehicles, solved a series of cryptic puzzles, met the developers behind the game and fought an airsoft battle for possession of a rally car. That last detail was not a random choice. Somewhere between the tanks and the exhaustion, attendees became the first people outside the studio to see the Arma Reforger Rally DLC, days before we revealed it to everyone else. Announcing a DLC by making people physically win the car first is, as far as we are concerned, the correct approach.

Thanks to everyone who made the trip to Prague and went home happily wrecked. Rally has since been announced publicly, and if you have not seen it yet, now is a good time to take a look.

On the community side, we released a collaboration video with former Bradley commander Justin Taylor, held a developer panel Q&A in June, supported the REGIMENT charity stream, ran a Game Master session, published COMRAD #27 and #28, kept Community Spotlight going and enjoyed a steady flow of clips under #ReforgerMoments.

Arma 3

Arma 3 received Update 2.22, headlined by the MH 80 Ghost Hawk DAP helicopter. The update also introduced experimental AI translated language support for Bulgarian, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Slovak and Latin, which is exactly the kind of slightly unhinged idea that feels at home in this game. A batch of fixes rounded it out, and both Expeditionary Forces and Western Sahara got smaller updates of their own.

Arma 3 joined the Operation Flashpoint celebrations as well. We sat down with the Cold War Rearmed team for an interview and streamed a co op recreation of Hold Malden, which turned out to be a very pleasant trip down memory lane for everyone involved.

Elsewhere in the community, Arma Domini 1400AD stood out as one of the most ambitious total conversions we have seen in a long time. Swapping rifles for lances is not something we expected from an Arma mod, yet the knight's tournament stream we ran with the mod team made a strong case for it. We also continued our Unit Profiles series with 3CB and TTT, published Community Profiles #47 and #48, and kept the CONOP social series running. And somewhere along the way, Community Spotlight passed its 200th featured entry, which says more about you than about us.

DayZ

DayZ had a genuinely huge summer, starting with the Nintendo Switch 2 port developed together with Virtuos Studios. It runs at 30 FPS docked and 40 FPS in handheld mode, and supports gyro aiming, Joy Con 2 mouse controls, DLSS, VRR and touchscreen inventory management. Internally it is being described as one of the smoothest releases we have ever had, which is not a sentence we get to write very often.

In the meantime, Survival Camp 3.0 took over a week of our summer. More than twenty creators joined us for real life hikes through the landscapes that inspired Chernarus, a LAN party where we showed an early sneak peek of Nasdara, and a three day post apocalyptic festival that has to be seen to be understood.

July brought the Convergence Showcase, where we premiered an exclusive Badlands trailer, revealed the rebuilding feature and confirmed an October release window. Wishlists have since passed 250,000. In August we headed to Gamescom, where Badlands was playable at the Level Infinite B2B booth, the press got hands on time with the Switch 2 version, and an exclusive trailer in the Xbox Broadcast finally revealed the release date: October 15.

Before that, the Road to Badlands update landed with thematic assets, Nasdara military convoys rolling across Chernarus and Livonia, the SCR 17 Battle Rifle and Brass Knuckles. Our Dev Blogs also moved to a three week cadence, covering the regional identity of Nasdara in Week 70, environment research in Week 73, rebuilding and the code lock in Week 76, where the video reached 1.3 million views, and the Lee Enfield rifle and new dust particles in Week 79.

Vigor

Vigor kept a steady rhythm through the summer with Double XP Days on July 29, an Xbox Sale on July 30 and the launch of Season 28: Frontier on August 5. The season received mixed feedback, and we understand why. It did not introduce new features and focused mainly on bug fixes, including the Burning Barrel immortality issue that had been bothering players for a while. The new Battlepass, on the other hand, went down very well, and that is something we want to build on.

Vigor also celebrated its seventh anniversary with the Mega Booster Apocalypse, more Double XP Days and La Tomatina. We did skip the anniversary stream and the usual competition this time around, and we know some of you noticed.

Bohemia Incubator

Our incubator projects kept moving as well. Everwind announced and released Winds of Creation and Beyond update, which adds a Sandbox Mode, new bosses, new weapons and an entirely new faction. The game currently sits at 1.2 million wishlists, with the full release planned for the first half of 2027.

Nailcrown released a new trailer over the summer. Version 1.0 is also targeted for the first half of 2027, with a stop at Steam Next Fest in February along the way.

Cosmo Tales

Cosmo Tales reached one of its biggest milestones with the Early Access release on Steam on September 3. Getting there took an enormous amount of work, and we want to thank the whole team for the dedication they poured into it.

The run up was special too. We premiered the film Cosmo Tales and the Milky Way at the planetarium, and launched a children's campaign together with Česká spořitelna featuring glow in the dark cards and other materials from the world of Cosmo Tales. At Gamescom we presented the game to media, and thanks to ASUS ROG the public could try it out as well.

We also want to be straightforward about the rest. The launch did not go the way we hoped. Our priorities now are reaching as many potential players as possible and continuing work on version 1.0, including expansion to platforms beyond Steam. There is a clear positive signal to build on: everyone who played Cosmo Tales at our promo events genuinely enjoyed it. The game works. Now it is about getting it in front of the right people.

Looking ahead

That was our summer. Badlands arrives on October 15, Far Hide continues to evolve with your feedback, Rally is on the road, Vigor has lessons to apply and Cosmo Tales has a journey ahead of it. Thank you for playing, modding, streaming, reporting bugs and occasionally telling us exactly what you think. See you in the fall.