The September/October issue of PC Pilot magazine contains a surprise-studded interview with MicroProse CEO, David Lagettie. Amongst other things, David discloses that Falcon 5.0 is in the planning stage, will “support many aircraft on release, including the F-35”, and won’t wrinkle its radome at “gamers who just want to get in and fly”.
He reveals that the company’s remake of B-17 Flying Fortress: the Mighty Eighth should be Early Accessible by Christmas and almost never happened. After years of fruitless source code searching, the aspiring reduxers were on the verge of giving up when an employee discovered the elusive essentials in an attic.
* One of MicroProse’s four B-17 projects.
And tacked on the end of a paragraph confirming that an Apache sim “in the authentic MicroProse style” is coming, was news that MPS had not only signed Combat Air Patrol 2, an Early Access harrier sim assumed by many to be abandoned, but were preparing a “very comprehensive update” for it, and planning to use its bespoke engine to power a new Battle of Britain sim!
I do wonder if they’re biting off more than they can chew with everything they supposedly have in development. Then again. I have been quite sceptical of this Microprose revival since it was first announced. Would be nice to be proved wrong though. Four B-17 projects does seem quite excessive.
A more ‘casual’ friendly modern day combat flight sim could be pretty cool. I gave up on DCS a few years ago when I realised it’ll always be in a perpetual state of half finished systems as Eagle Dynamics continues to chase that Early Access module money to stay afloat. Microsoft and Asobo have seemingly dragged the flight sim genre out of its niche and given it a good shaking up so maybe the time is right for a more ‘sim-cade’ or survey combat flight sim again. There hasn’t really been any since Third Wire abandoned PC development for mobiles, and even then the Strike Fighters series was quite bloody niche thanks to Tsuyoshi Kawahito’s aversion to any sort of publicity.
I have similar feelings about DCS. If they ever manage to sort out VR performance and/or add a dynamic campaign then I’ll return but I don’t hold out much hope.
Pleasantly surprised to hear about the resurrection of CAP2 – having purchased it in early access years ago I’d assumed it was long abandoned. That does have the potential to fill the ‘casual friendly’ slot and it also supports VR (pretty well from memory)
I could not disagree more. With the new multithreading update I’m getting solid 90 FPS with all settings maxed out and supersampling on in my HP Reverb G2 (admittedly, with an RTX 4090). And are you familiar with DCS Liberation? It’s a totally free community-made dynamic campaign available right now with all the bells and whistles: an economy, custom strike planner and ToT, ground units that participate in the combat, and more.
I do share the worry that the new Microprose (it’s amazing how many people seem to assume it’s the same old entity and people rather than a new company that bought the name) is biting off much more than it can chew. Since its inception it’s picked up many of the games I’m most excited about- Task Force Admiral, Sea Power, etc.- but the pace at which they’re announcing new stuff, and the magnitude of those promises (e.g. full-up Falcon 5 with F-35) would challenge any publisher, let alone one that’s brand new to the market. Where are they going to get all the quality developers to make all these wonderful games and make them good? Now granted, they’re a publisher, not a developer, so they can essentially outsource the work of making the games, but now you dilute your quality control. There is no free lunch. I hope I’m entirely wrong and every one of these is a masterpiece and the new Microprose is fantastically successful, but I’ve been around the block enough times to be a little more skeptical every time they announce yet another seeming-answer-to-our-prayers before they get some of the older ones out the door.
I did try the multithreading update and whilst it initially seemed to improve things it wasn’t the magic bullet I was hoping for. My hardware is pretty out of date these days though.
Good to know that it’s working well for you though – if I can ever justify the expense of a 4090 or equivalent then I’ll certainly give it another go.
With the football starting back up this weekend, who’s up for another round of das football boot?
I was contemplating running a ‘Season 2’ launch article next week. If anyone would like to see any rules tweaked prior to the launch, I’m all ears. If realism/fun can be boosted without over-complicating DFB’s already fairly involved bookkeeping then changes will be made.
Good stuff!
The rule I think needs looking at most, for equity grounds, is people getting hit in first half injury time. As it doubles, potentially triples, lethal time for subs 43-47.
I’d suggest making injury time bonus conditions where you can still get kills but no one can take any damage. Or alternatively, if you want to be nasty; where everyone takes wounding hits.
Yep, I’ll play. My team of choice have even obligingly assured they’re not in the top six of their division.