Red Baron Flies the Kickstarter Skies

Andy Chalk

One Flag, One Fleet, One Cat
Nov 12, 2002
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Red Baron Flies the Kickstarter Skies

[kickstarter=madottergames/red-baron]​
The famed First World War flight sim Red Baron has taken to the skies of Kickstarter, with original creator Damon Slye at the stick.

Developed by Dynamix and released by Sierra Online in 1990, Red Baron was a critically-acclaimed combat flight sim set in World War One, in which players took to the skies in famous German, French and British fighters of the era for tight-turning dogfight action. It was a big hit, earning the 1991 Simulation of the Year award from CGW - and now Slye is trying to bring it back with his new indie studio, Mad Otter Games, and funding support from Kickstarter.

Red Baron is intended to "hit the sweet spot between simulation and game" by providing an intuitive yank-and-bank experience for newbies along with a complex "under the hood" simulation that players can grow comfortable with over time. "It is not just about documental realism," the Kickstarter states, "but about confronting the player with the same challenges and psychological reality that WWI aces faced."

The updated version of Red Baron will provide an offline and DRM-free single-player campaign running from 1915 to 1918, plus a persistent multiplayer experience with both historical and MOBA-style maps. Players will experience "historically authentic events" as they progress through the game, and gain access to new and better aircraft as the war wears on, including "at a minimum" models from Sopwith, Spad, Nieuport, Fokker, Albatros and Pfalz.

The Red Baron Kickstarter is seeking $250,000, a relatively modest goal made possible by the fact that team has already sunk that amount into building the current prototype. "It is relatively close to alpha testing; this is why our development cycle is shorter than many of the other Kickstarter games," the team explained. "We also have a frugal and responsible development team with strong leadership and tiny overhead costs (unlike a big publisher). All of this lets us put all the value straight into the game."

Red Baron fans from back in the day have probably already left to throw money at this thing; the rest of you have until November 22 to do so. Buyer beware and all that, but as a man who owns three joysticks (none of which have been plugged in for the better part of a decade) I hope this one turns out to be a big success.

Source: Kickstarter [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/madottergames/red-baron]


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Berny Marcus

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May 20, 2013
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Interesting, while I never will fund a kickstarter project of any sort. I hope this gets the funding it needs. Flight sims are an endangered species in this industry.
 

Muspelheim

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Apr 7, 2011
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Warthunder..? Is that you?

Cheap shot aside, looks rather interesting! I've missed my good old Albatross.
 

Weaver

Overcaffeinated
Apr 28, 2008
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So Kickstarter has just become a nostalgia factory of long forgotten devs rebooting games people liked 15 - 20 years ago.
 

GonvilleBromhead

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Dec 19, 2010
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This...looks exactly what I have been looking for since "Knights of the Sky" on the Amiga.

However, I am...somewhat concerned about the idea of focussing on the feeling and psychological reality of pilots. Don't get me wrong, I think it is a far better starting point than overt aeronautical nerdiness. I just don't want to develop severe post traumatic stress disorder that manifests itself as, dichotomously, a severe personal deathwish and a grave fear of burning to death - which will consume me so much that every time I send an enemy pilot to his death in a flaming aircraft, I will be dancing around the office joyously shouting "Flamerino" in order to hide the crippling emotional problems that are affecting me due causing so much suffering.
 

Neverhoodian

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Apr 2, 2008
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Red Baron, A-10 Tank Killer, Aces Over Europe...it's like a laundry list of games I grew up with. Between Damon Slye, Lawrence Holland and Edward Kilham (co-creators of the X-Wing series), these guys pretty much defined my childhood gaming experience.

It looks promising, though I'm not too sure about some of the new directions they're going. Take the tech tree, for instance. I'm hoping it applies to the multiplayer mode rather than single player. I don't want my campaign performance to dictate if I get to keep up with the rapidly progressing technology of the day. In other words, I don't want to be stuck flying a 1915-vintage Fokker Eindecker against Sopwith Camels because I didn't perform well enough. I'm hoping the upgrades make historical sense as well. I'm all for allowing you to upgrade the original S.E.5 to the S.E.5a with a more powerful engine, but I don't want to see them sporting four machine guns or some other weird non-historical layout. We've got other games for "fantasy" planes (World of Warplanes, War Thunder).

Having a MOBA mode also seems a bit strange for the largely static setting of trench warfare (not to mention over-emphasizing the airplane's usefulness in warfare at that time), but it won't matter much since I'll probably stick to single player anyway.
 

Tiamat666

Level 80 Legendary Postlord
Dec 4, 2007
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I'm pleasantly surprised how much the game action looks and feels like the original Red Baron. I loved the campaign mode in RB, how you started out as a wingman, met famous pilots along the way, or in combat, how you could get wounded and spend months at a hospital, how you could later paint your own airplane... the combination of all these neat little features made it feel very real. I hope the remake will keep and build on these features.
 

octafish

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Apr 23, 2010
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I will be funding this immediately, then reading my Capt. W. E. Johns and drinking gin in anticipation.

MOBA? Gott strafe England!
 

weirdee

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Apr 11, 2011
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Weaver said:
So Kickstarter has just become a nostalgia factory of long forgotten devs rebooting games people liked 15 - 20 years ago.
i am okay with this

the alternative being that we leave this up to the corporations

that's not a world i want to live in
 

Monsterfurby

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Mar 7, 2008
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Weaver said:
So Kickstarter has just become a nostalgia factory of long forgotten devs rebooting games people liked 15 - 20 years ago.
Yes. And that's actually not a bad thing.