Description
The Messiah has a name. It is Cutter Slade. The Messiah has a job. It is US navy. The Messiah has a mission. It is retrieval of a lost probe. The Messiah has... a problem. It circles mostly around all that sudden messiah-being stuff, but minor problems like being stranded on an alien world and having lost all equipment add to the flavor. Cutter has been sent to this world, Adelpha, because the malfunctioning probe threatens all life on Earth. To find it, he needs the help of Adelphas' inhabitants. Luckily, they have only recently witnessed the arrival of their messiah (guess who). On the downside, they have high expectations of their savior: He's to rid the world of the evil tyrant who torments it. No revolution, no probe. Okay, Cutter: You've got work to do.
Outcast is a third-person action game with adventure elements. In search for five sacred relics, the protagonist travels through the five continents of Adelpha (plus one tutorial island). Each land has its own landscape (mountains, lakes, forests) as well as dozens of minor problems - small quests that the hero is required to solve. A large portion of the game consists of finding key characters and performing quests for them; some of these are optional, though most must be completed in an adventure-like linear fashion in order to advance the plot.
Apart from exploration and completing quests, Cutter will also fight many guards and creatures. Using six futuristic weapons (railgun etc.) works fine, but sneaking up to the victim and punching him out silently is also possible. Gadgets such as a holo-decoy can be used to help Cutter gain the upper hand in combat. The player character can also jump, swim, dive and crawl.
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Trivia
Cancelled Dreamcast version
A Dreamcast version was planned by
Infogrames, which would feature a new, fully polygonal engine to replace the original one. However, thanks in no small part to
Outcast's small sales and the self-destruction of the Dreamcast console, on September 22, 2000 Infogrames announced the cancellation of the port's development. This is sad indeed, since Infogrames had hinted that a 3D acceleration patch for the PC version would be available thanks to the Dreamcast port (since the console uses DirectX as its core API for 3D acceleration).
Cancelled sequel
On November 1999, Appeal announced a sequel:
Outcast 2: The Lost Paradise, a PS2 game with a PC release to follow. Unfortunately, Appeal declared its bankruptcy on August 12, 2002 and the game was canceled. A major part of the team moved to
elseWhere Entertainment and
a petition was started to persuade Infogrames to allow Elsewhere Entertainment to use the
Outcast license, but with no result so far.
Graphics engine
A common misconception is that
Outcast employs a voxel engine.
Franck Sauer, though, said in an interview with gaming magazine "Strana Igr": "We've all misused the term voxel for what actually is just an height field with some software raycasting".
The engine allows for a complex architecture and a wide range of sight. However, it features only low resolutions up to 512 x 384, does not support 3D accelerator cards and requires a potent processor (preferably 500 Mhz) to run smoothly.
Outtakes
Appeal created 15 movie outtakes for
Outcast. They could be downloaded as mpg-files from the game's
official website. Ideally, any viewer should have played the game, in order to understand the puns.
Promotion
A lengthy gameplay demonstration of the game was shown on the main projection screen at the Belgian demo party Wired 1998, nearly a year before its official release.
References
- Listen closely, and it's possible to recognize the main notes of Luke's Theme from the Star Wars soundtrack being played by some of the flute players in the region of Okriana, particularly those west and east of the palace. Fitting, considering the city is in the desert.
- The word Okriana could be seen as an anagram of the Russian word okraina, which means the outskirts. However, according to an interview with Franck Sauer, it actually comes from ochre, the yellow colour that dominates the area.
Save
The crystalline object used to save your game is called a
Gaamsav. Carefully listening to that name makes its use more than apparent.
Voice actors
In both the French and the German version of the game, the actors providing the main character's voice are the dubbing voices of Bruce Willis in the respective languages:
Patrick Poivey and
Manfred Lehmann.
Awards
- Computer Gaming World
- March 2000 (Issue #188) – Adventure Game of the Year
- GameSpot
- 1999 - Adventure Game of the Year
- GameStar (Germany)
- Issue 03/2000 - Best Sound in 1999
- Issue 12/1999 - #57 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
- PC Powerplay (Germany)
- Issue 11/2005 - #8 Game Which Absolutely Needs A Sequel
Information also contributed by
-Chris,
Lumpi,
Sciere,
shifter,
Supernintendo Chalmers,
Xa4,
Zack Green, and
Zovni.
This entry to the MobyGames database was contributed by
robotriot 
(8642) on Nov 01, 1999.
