Outcast: A New Beginning is gearing up to drop its long-awaited sequel to the nineties sci-fi adventure game, with its newly-announced release date landing almost a quarter of a century after its predecessor. If you’re new, or have just forgotten what happened in the first Outcast - of which there’s a good chance given that time gap - you should apparently still be able to jump in here.
]]>Hello, the 90s are calling and they'd like to offer you sequels to games you've probably forgotten about. Outcast 2: A New Beginning is the newly announced follow-up to 1999's Outcast. It's an open-world third-person shooter that takes place right after the events of the original, where Cutter Slade (the best-named man in the world) has been stuck in time for 20 years after trying to get home to Earth from the alien planet Adelpha.
]]>"We're doing an 8chan AMA and we have no idea why," announced THQ Nordic on their Twitter account earlier this evening. If you're not aware, 8chan is an imageboard website which has been de-listed from Google search results for hosting "suspected child abuse content," and which is associated with Swatting and Gamergate.
THQ Nordic's marketing director has since apologised and claimed ignorance, but both are hard to believe.
]]>In their continuing mission to own memories of PC gaming 1992-2006, publishers THQ Nordic are now buying the intellectual property rights to Outcast. Released in 1999 by Belgian studio Appeal then remade in 2017 as Outcast - Second Contact, Outcast is an open-world explore-o-shooter about a soldier who travels to a parallel universe to save our world then gets waylaid running errands for aliens and riding a spaceostrich. THQ Nordic don't reveal any firm plans for Outcast, but I imagine they're planning a huge line of merchandise daubed with video gaming's greatest protagonist name: Cutter Slade.
]]>Who needs sales when people keep giving away neat stuff for free? Coincidentally reviewed by Alyse Stanley here exactly one year ago, Outcast: Second Contact is an exceptionally faithful remake of Appeal's Stargate-inspired open world action-adventure Outcast, first launched in 1999. Some argue that the remake is authentic to a fault, but I reckon that whatever flaws that may imply, this is still the best way to experience an important piece of games history. Grab the game, DRM free and yours to keep here on Humble (open for the next 48 hours), and check out the trailer below.
Update: Humble's page says that the downloads will be disappearing on November 29th, so make sure to download it and stash it away before it vanishes into the ether.
]]>Despite growing up in the ‘90s, I had never heard of Outcast. And as someone who loves open-world exploration, I don’t share that fact proudly. I’ve only ever known the shinier counterparts of last century’s genre defining titles, growing up with games like Bioshock, Fallout, and Wolfenstein, whose decades-old predecessors continue to influence modern gaming conventions. As such, I was a blank slate coming into the recently released Outcast – Second Contact, a remake of the 1999 cult classic.
What I discovered was a strange amalgam of new and old. Second Contact looks great and it's a clear precursor to the open world games that came later, but how does it all hold together without the rose-tinted lens of nostalgia to cover its weaknesses?
]]>The world of 1999 feels so strange and far away now. So different from the stressful realities of the here-and-now. I was a precocious (but equally nerdy) teenager back then, but I still clearly remember the first time I played Outcast, a Stargate-inspired action adventure exploring environments quite unlike anything else at the time, at the expense of nearly melting most CPUs of the era.
It's a good thing that Belgian studio Appeal aren't going to let a little thing like nearly two decades get between them and their vision, because they've gone and released Outcast again, polished up and remastered to something approaching modern spec. I don't know about you, but I can hear the '99 calling again. Maybe it's time for another trip to the lush alien world of Adelpha, just for old times sake.
]]>Outcast holds a strange and special place in my heart, conjuring up memories of everything great and frustrating about PC gaming. Back in 1999, Outcast was a technological marvel, a Stargate SG-1-inspired story, an enormous alien world and a mixture of polygonal and voxel graphics capable of doing the environment justice. It was the Crysis of its era.
Unfortunately, like Crysis, it was too much for most PCs of the time, and even an upgraded re-release on GOG still struggled to run consistently well. Good then, that original Belgian studio Appeal never stopped dreaming. In three weeks, we'll see the release of Outcast: Second Contact, a modernised remake of the original. Click onwards for a trailer, hot off the trailer machine.
]]>Outcast - Second Contact, the remake of 1999's open-world sci-fi shooter, is delayed again. It's now due some time in the autumn, according to a new trailer giving a peek at the modernised adventures of Cutter Slade. Have a peek:
]]>A remake of cult classic Outcast is still in the works, says the developer of the original. Outcast – Second Contact is being released in March next year, despite some troubled years in development. The original game was released way back in 1999 and was generally well-received by critics, while being thoroughly ignored by the unwashed masses. By this, I mean you. I was barely alive in 1999, so don’t lay any of that at my doorstep.
]]>I guess it's sad that the Outcast HD Kickstarter didn't work out, but 'New Game From The People Who Made X' tends to excite me more than 'Hey Here's X Again.' Hopefully we'll hear of a new project from devs Fresh3D before too long, but in the meantime there's been a surprise gift: Outcast 1.1, overhauled from the source code to support higher resolutions and multi-threaded rendering. The much-loved, if adorably shonky, openish world action-adventure gets another day in the sun after all.
]]>I understand that rumours are circulating that Outcast is not the 57th best PC game of all time. I say to you that this is a dangerous lie, not to be believed on any account. It doesn't matter what else you may or may not have have read elsewhere. Outcast is the 57th best PC game of all time. This is because it has both good qualities and bad qualities.
]]>Back in the day Outcast aimed for the stars - perhaps even above them - and managed to be surprisingly excellent when you got past its many, many rough edges. The Kickstarter for Outcast's HD reboot took a similarly ambitious tact (to the tune of $600,000), but it's sadly fallen short. The Kickstarter's time on this mortal Internet is now up, and an enhanced remake of the open-world cult classic isn't happening. At least, not without some other form of funding to back it up.
]]>The Outcast HD Kickstarter campaign is aiming high. I know plenty of people who remember the open world adventure fondly but $600,000 is a huge amount to ask for. With just less than two weeks to go, there's less than $250,000 in pledges and it's hard not to think that the most recent update video might have helped if it had been part of the pitch page from the beginning. Although still using some old assets, specifically for "the characters, animations and effects", you'll find the first footage of the recreated HD environments below. Along with the video, there's a voiceover giving an overview of the game for those who may not have played it or may not remember what made it so special. Best of all, you can hear the orchestral score, which contains some of my favourite music ever written for a game.
]]>The first thing I ever got published in PC Gamer was a reader review of Outcast. In the next issue I was being paid to write, but I can assure you the two events weren't connected. In fact, having written about why I really didn't like Outcast, I was lucky to get work at all. "Pixels the size of your fist" I believe I wrote of the not-actually-voxel-based free-roaming action-adventure. Well, I've now got a chance to be wrong all over again, as a bunch of the original developers have bought all the rights from the wow-do-they-still-exist Atari, and have just launched a Kickstarter to see the game remade.
]]>This will inevitably end up on Kickstarter, and in the light of Double Fine's budgeting mayhem that phrase is a far less reassuring one today than it would have been yesterday. But let's cling tight to hope for now, for the good news is that the creators of ahead-of-its-time 1999 voxel adventure Outcast have rescued the rights from The Artist Formerly Known As Infogrames and announced plans to bring the remarkably ambitious old open world sci-fi dear back to life. Hurrah! Hurrah! Thrice hurrah! Please be 100% sure of your required budget before asking people to fund it! Hurrah!
]]>Good Old Games has a page where you can nominate classic games you'd love to see appear on their site. Then if others agree, they can vote to support this game. The theory being, the more votes, the more interest GoG realises there is in procuring the rights to a particular game. There's some naive voting going on, with people asking for games that are actively on sale, like The Secret of Monkey Island or Planescape: Torment. However, appearing on the list with 4603 votes is Outcast. It's available now.
]]>It's almost as if we planned it. In the week where we look back at Yves Grolet's previous work on Outcast (Which remains perhaps the finest game ever starring a man in an orange sweater), his new game gets announced from 10tacle. It's called Totem and it's a third-person superhero platform game with fisticuffs. Yes.
]]>Originally written for the UK's resplendent Edge magazine, this look at action adventure masterwork Outcast features a handful of retrospective comments from one of the key developers from the project, Yves Grolet. Mr Grolet was one of the founders of French Belgian development house Appeal, and was one of the key proponents of third-dimension bearing pixel, the voxel. Grolet is now a senior games bloke at the dubiously named 10Tacle Studios.
I've given the original text a spruce up by replaying Outcast, and erasing almost everything I originally submitted... Because there's nothing quite like rewriting history. Read the entire thing by clinking that the link, down there. Yep.
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