Painting, New Battle Modes, And Finally... Cows!

04 May 2020

Baron: Fur Is Gonna Fly gets a rich update, adding 4 completely new Party Game Modes!

The update coincides with a price drop, making the overall package even better value.

From the press release:

Go snout to snout with up to eight friends in the brand new Paint, King, Capture the Cow and Souvenir modes. Baron’s anthropomorphic dog fighting battles now come with a new difficulty level for bots and a number of quality of life fixes, all at a reduced price of 14.99 USD / 14.99 EUR.

Despite the difficulties of testing a couch game during COVID-19 social distancing, we're excited about the new gameplay.

New Games

Paint

In the imaginatively-titled "Paint" you leave a permanent trail behind your aircraft as you paint the sky with your team's colour. Meanwhile, your opposition is attempting the same thing.

The aim is simple: paint more area than your opponent (think: Splatoon, only with dashing aerial heroes painting the sky).

As you survive longer, your 'brush' gets wider, meaning you paint the sky faster.

This leads to some interesting strategies: if your teammate has a wide brush, it makes sense to sacrifice your own skin to keep them alive. This mode really rewards team players.

Capture The Cow

If you've ever played a game and thought 'it's nice, but there simply weren't enough cows', then this game should satisfy your discerning tastes.

Pilots race to claim a cow randomly appearing on the map. Hold the cow for longer than your opponents to win. Be as possessive as you want, we're not here to judge.

Retaining the cow is not easy. While holding the cow, your aircraft flies slower, you cannot fire special weapons, and if you roll, stall or crash, you'll drop the cow. All while everyone else in the sky is targeting you.

There's nowhere to hide.

Again, there are plenty of strategies to discover. This is particularly true if you play against someone who lacks basic decency or a sense of fair play. While working together to take down the cow-holder, you may find your supposed 'teammate' starts shooting at you (once victory looks assured) to make sure you don't collect the newly-released cow.

Souvenir

In 'Souvenir', aircraft drop coins whenever they meet an untimely demise. It's like a normal battle, except there is no score for shooting down an aircraft. You only score by collecting the coin a fallen foe leaves behind.

This means that you don’t need to be a sharp-shooter to win, as long as you can swoop in quickly at the right time and snatch the loot from under everyone's nose.

It is always very interesting to review statistics after a 'Souvenir' match. Some people take down a high number of opponents yet fail to collect many coins. Others seem to do almost nothing, yet rack up big points.

You certainly see who is doing the heavy lifting, and who is just coming along for the ride, hoping to snatch the reward for others' hard work.

From experience, they are likely to call it 'being strategic'.

King

In 'King', pilots work together to take down the monarch as they rack up points. The animal who shoots down the sultan becomes the next monarch of the skies

Like Capture the Cow, victory is won by spending the most time as the king, while everyone else is hunting you.

Unlike Cow, however, here the roles are reversed.

Whereas holding the cow makes you weak, being the King makes you the strongest aircraft in the sky. You are the only aircraft with Special Weapons (changing randomly after each use), helping you bully your way to victory.

Smarter Pilots

As skills improve, people have contacted us, asking if the bot pilots can be made more challenging.

In response, we have added a new level of difficulty for the bot pilots. In each game, you can now select bot difficulty to either "Normal" or"Hard". "Normal" is what you are already used to. "Hard" gives an additional challenge, and should keep you on your toes.

The bots are better at aiming, they're better at avoiding special weapons, and they generally make better life decisions.

Bits and Bobs

We recorded new commentary for the new games, and made the round endings a bit nicer (it now shows the name of the winner -- how on earth did we miss that?), and tweaked a few things here and there.

Free soundtrack

If you purchased the game before 04 May 2020, then you're entitled to a free copy of the Baron Soundtrack. For more details, please go here: baronthegame.com/earlyBuyers

What's Next?

Adding four new game modes is our first major upgrade to Baron: Fur Is Gonna Fly. We decided right from the the start that this upgrade must be a patch, and therefore a free upgrade (not a paid DLC).

We love the idea that the next time customers launch Baron, they discover a whole lot of new content to enjoy.

We also hope it will go some way to addressing one of the concerns expressed by some reviewers about longevity. In our office, we're still enjoying sessions of Baron every week, and after two years are still discovering new ways to smash each other. So we're not actually concerned about longevity, but we do see that some of the gameplay depth only becomes apparent after you've been playing for a while.

Finally, we have also received some heart-warming messages from fans of the game, often including great ideas for new Special Weapons they'd like to see, plus other improvements. All of these ideas are very welcome, and we keep a wish-list of features we would like to add in future.

So keep telling us what you think, and keep an eye out for future improvements!

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