Outcast

Moby ID: 358
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In the year 2007, a parallel universe is discovered by scientists. The U.S. government sends a probe to that universe and learns of the existence of an entire alien civilization there. However, an apparently hostile alien damages the probe, leading to the creation of a black hole threatening the very existence of our own world. Former U.S. Navy S.E.A.L. Cutter Slade is assigned to escort three scientists to the parallel universe in an attempt to repair the probe and avert the danger.

Upon arrival, Cutter is separated from the scientists and is greeted by the local inhabitants, the Talan. It appears that their world, Adelpha, has its own troubles: a mysterious being known as Faé Rhan has been assembling an army consisting of Talans who think themselves superior to the rest of the population and willing to rule over them with violence. Cutter is proclaimed the Ulukai, a savior mentioned in a prophecy, and entrusted with the task of retrieving five sacred relics needed to overthrow Faé Rhan - all while trying to locate the scientists and save the Earth as well in the process.

Outcast is a 3D third-person (with optional first-person view) 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), populated areas, as well as dozens of minor problems - small quests that the hero is required to solve. Most Talans populating the world can be conversed with about a variety of topics. 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. Cutter is free to travel between the continents using special portals.

Apart from exploration and completing quests, Cutter will also fight many guards and creatures. At his disposal are six futuristic weapons (railgun and others); ammunition for those guns is scattered around and can also be produced by mixing items. Aiming help is provided in the form of laser sights. Sneaking up to the enemy 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, climb, swim, dive, crawl, and ride a local animal known as Twon-Ha for faster travel.

Spellings

  • 时空英豪 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

161 People (135 developers, 26 thanks) · View all

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Critics

Average score: 86% (based on 34 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.9 out of 5 (based on 92 ratings with 12 reviews)

Who is Shamaz Keb?

The Good
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to our lecture "Game design -- how to do it right, for those who need it most." Ah, I see many familiar faces in the crowd today -- there's Westwood over there; most of the staff of Nihilistic, hi guys! And, yes, none of the German developers seems to be missing. Very good. Now, how do you get to know the secret of excellent game design? All of you should have received a copy of Outcast upon entering. Now do the following: Go home. Play Outcast. Learn. That's it. Class dismissed!

I do not want to go into the obvious details, such as the technical brilliancy or the immersive game world that make Outcast an outstanding experience. But there are a few things that are easily overlooked, and which add to the overall atmosphere and playability a lot. Outcast is full of ingenious answers to those little questions that come with the complexity of a huge world. How do I find a certain person in a crowd? By asking your way through, as anyone will point you to the one you seek. How do I find small objects in the wilderness? By following the marks that your visor draws around them. How do I cut a long walk to the other end of a continent short? By using portable teleporters that you can deploy anywhere you like. These features are small, yet a boon for fluent gameplay.

Another thing that has earned special attention are the excellent sound effects. From the smooth splashing of the waves in Okasankaar to the busy chatter in the city of Okriana -- the FX underline the character of each continent. From the soft humming of the teleport daokas to the shouts of approaching guards -- the FX help you orientate yourself. The FX are not only decorative, they're important -- but never obtrusive. This is a lesson that many a software company has yet to learn. Oh, and did I mention the impressive orchestral soundtrack and the perfect voice acting?

The Bad
Who is Shamaz Keb? This is a question that'll keep you occupied in Outcast. It's the only downside of Appeals' exotic game world: the names. It's okay to design a credible culture. But it's not necessary to scare inexperienced players with an overkill of expressions. In a typical mission, the Ulukai'd have to ride his Twon-ha through the daoka to Okasankaar and fight Gamors to collect zlingtog for Jeokaze in Okriana. See what I mean? As a consequence, you'll need quite some patience to make yourself familiar with Adelpha (that's the world's name, by the way).

The Bottom Line
Outcast is one of the Top 3 games of 1999. An admirable piece of art, technical as well as in terms of design, it is one of those few milestones that prove that computer games have evolved from being toys to a serious and independent form of modern entertainment.

Windows · by -Chris (7762) · 2000

This game looks at me while I'm naked and calls it's friends.

The Good
Yes, that was from Dieter ;)

Outcast has so much promise, really it has. It's sprinkled all over with inventive designs and it seems (note I said "it SEEMS") to provide an original gaming experience. There are a lot of touches of genius in this game, for starters the designers have managed to create a fully believable living, breathing world. Populated with hundreds of characters that feel alive and which add a lot of "feeling" to the game. Besides the cultural aspects (which can become somewhat tedious at times) the game does make you feel like you are in a truly believable alien world, with it's own architecture, fauna, climate, etc. And not just a collection of green locations and corridors. Furthermore, the game takes place almost entire outdoors, which show off some truly magnificent (though blurry) vistas that coupled with the awe-inspiring music (specially orchestrated for the game) give the game a tremendously epic feeling. Sometimes you just feel like stopping for a second to marvel at the sheer beauty of it all, contemplating the sheer beauty of the gameworld, a thing which is made possible thanks to the game's laid back pace. Don't get me wrong, you can get into some heated action sequences every now and then, but you decide when to tackle them, and they are usually very serene affairs compared to most shooters. Some might consider this bad and label the game as sedated, but I think it works perfectly if you consider that this is an adventure first and foremost. The shootouts are there only to break the monotony and release some stress.

Another star of this show is the controls, which are strikingly different from other 3D action adventures and more similar to a fps. You don't get an independent camera control, instead you control the camera and your facing with the mouse (as in a fps) and you move around with the keyboard keys. The magic is that the keys control your character RELATIVE to your camera position, plus the combat and jumping is done solely via the mouse using a clever semi automatic/manual aiming system via a laser sight. So essentially the whole affair becomes much more intuitive and simple, I cannot imagine how much fun games like Tomb Raider or similar titles would be if they adopted this type of controls, even Heretic 2 falls behind it when it comes to ease of handling.

So there you have it, inventive, easy to control and on top of that a solid and interesting storyline (though it unfortunately falls in several pitfalls thanks to an endless stream of bad action-movie cliches) and you've got the best game ever right?? Wrong.

The Bad
Sometimes a lot of games come out that have a series of innovative stuff that really stand out on their own, but which are placed in a crappy game. Terra Nova: SFC comes to mind, which is a game that did years ago what Tribes is praised for doing now, but which failed to catch attention due to the fact that it was really a bad game despite the clever things it had. The same happens to Outcast. In essence you could say that it's a piece of doggie crap covered with a delicious chocolate topping. It's epic, it's "magnifico" it's larger than life, but when you look into the game itself... it's the most tedious and uninspired affair ever to be placed in a cd-rom.

If you ever wanted a definition for the terms "Fed-Ex" quests, "Pixel Hunts", etc. This game is the textbook example of it. Ulukai must really mean errand boy to the aliens as it's the main occupation you are going to be doing. Forget about saving the worlds, your most important task in this world is to be "helpful" to the citizens and go from place to place taking messages, and looking to speak to the right alien (and yes, they all look alike). This let's through the level of lazyness the designers must have had doing the game, I can picture them right now: "-Hey Pierre, the game is too straightforward! It's too short!! What are we going to do? - I know! Instead of bothering to give the player a challenge or, coming up with some clever puzzle, let's just make him go through an un-ending series of errands and conversations... yeah!!"

So, the quest that was "Go get the mon" turns into "Go and talk to the only guy who knows where the mon is, which of course is hidden/lost/in prison/etc. and so you must go talk with the guy who knows where he is, who won't tell you until you fix his chair, which can't be fixed unless you have the magical wood of Kuluku which can only be found in an unknown area, and which you can't get through unless you get the help from a certain alien who knows of it, who won't help you unless you get him a soda which can only be made with a certain fruit that only one character in the game has and won't give to you unless you bla..bla..bla..." You get the picture, right?

And once you are done with those, you usually have to contend with the "collect the keys" type of puzzles, which involve going and hunting for the "4332543 keys that unlock the secret to the sacred temple of Koloko and placing them in the right order so you can access whatever the hell is hidden there"....

Wow, so much inventive design choices make my head hurt! This wonderful set of "puzzles" slow the game down to a crawl, and you never get the feel that you are saving anything. You are eternally lost in this world of menial tasks and riding from one point of the world to the other. That this "enlarges" the gameplay is true, but it does so thanks to repetitious, redundant, tedious adventuring. Not by providing an extensive gaming experience. Just consider how long would the game really last if you took all the "red tape" from the game's quests...

So there you have it. The game is lame... but it's still beautiful, right??? Nope. The Voxel/polygon hybrid engine makes a good work of making huge outdoor settings with minimal cpu load, managing to fully populate the areas and adding lots of nifty stuff like one of the most impressive water effects I've ever seen, but it's not perfect. Due to the voxel's nature the entire game has a completely blurry effect, and it renders everything that is not "landscape" a pixely mess. I can't understand how this is so since Comanche 3 which also used voxels had a much more clear visual quality (and I'm not talking about tanks a million miles away, I'm talking about close camera images of the choppers, buildings, etc...). Of course, that is when you are outdoors, when you go indoors the shit really hits the fan. In the best of cases the perspective will close so much that you'll see nothing but the back of Cutter's head so you won't notice the jagged textures (boy, I never really understood how much antialiasing is needed for games!) the clipping problems, but most importantly the blur, THE BLUR! And yes, I had my glasses when I played it.

Ok, so it's not so bad... but there's no question about it: the voxel engine is not the best one ever made, and it's no match for fully polygonal engines in terms of visual quality and the additional bonus of future enhancement (since no matter how powerful a machine you may get in the future, Outcast will run with the same graphics, at the same speed, forever...).

The Bottom Line
So? What the hell is the bottom line?? Is Outcast really that good? yes, but in superficial things that can't hold the game on it's own. Is it really that bad? I guess not either (thanks to those "superficial" things too) So the bottom line is that it's a game born a couple of years too early. It has incredibly inventive details, but it is an obsolete experience game-wise and it's the perfect example of why so many people hate adventures nowadays. To that you have to add that the game is filled with art-house pretentiousness, it's got a "majestic" musical score, it's epic, and most of all: it's European.

I feel at odds with this review in a way, since I didn't hate the game so much and enjoyed playing it to an extent. But I won't fall into the "Dieter" routine of praising it just because it's odd and European. Outcast is like the Final Fantasy movie: it's innovative and interesting, but it's also banal and stupid. And no matter how much innovative and interesting it gets, it will still be banal and stupid.

Now it's the time on Sprockets when we dance! - Touch my monkey!! ;)

Windows · by Zovni (10504) · 2006

Help me find my toothbrush, Ulukai

The Good
The graphics are good, very good. The sight of the huge twin moons hauntingly filling the horizon will take your breath away. The controls are almost always intuitive. You feel immersed in a rich, entrancing world.

Your first chores are actually a well-designed tutorial, fair to you player, with no fire-breathing dragon eager to pounce upon you, without even a plague-carrying sewer rat to bite you into writhing agony. Just tasks to familiarize you with the interface.

The Bad
"Can you help Bippy-Poo find his toothbrush, Ulukai?"

"Where is Bippy-Poo, Shazam-Kaboom?"

"I cannot see him from here, Ulukai, but he is somewhere north-west".

Ulukai is you, a cross of Clint Eastwood and Duke Nukem propelled into a parallel universe, courtesy of... well, game designers, really. Bippy-Poo and Shazam-Kaboom (not their real names, we want to protect their privacy here), are Talants, the only intelligent inhabitants of this world. Your arrival was prophesized, you are the long-awaited saviour. The world has been subdued by ... no, no spoilers... an evil tyrant, whose minions the ordinary Talant slaves, sweats, and starves for, to keep them in the local firewater and in ris (the staple food with an uncanny resemblance to rice, even down to the watery paddies where ris is grown). No women, though. They do exist (read on), but the closest whiff you'll get of the fair sex is a spoof of a poof in the fine city of Samarkand (not its real name, no spoilers please).

By now, Ulukai has run enough errands to know that Bippy-Poo hides right at the opposite end of the map. He even suspects that Shazam-Kaboom is giggling under his breath at the prospect of the Saviour of the World hoofing it for the umpteenth time across a land graced with not much of a fauna and as little of a flora. The Great Western Desert (that's Death Valley for you American readers) teems with life in comparison.

Hold your twon-ha there! (A twon-ha is their equivalent of a bronco, a brumby, a horse in short, only with two legs and no tail).

Have I talked, er... WRITTEN you into giving "Outcast" a miss? My apologies. There are good things which make this game worth playing. It is only once the storyline and the gameplay have spoilt it that you think back on it all.

How you had to go into god mode because, shot at from certain angles, the enemy soldiers just seemed to be invulnerable. How you had to repeatedly hit the "skip dialog" button because you got thoroughly sick of having to listen to the same lines from a Talant, when you only wanted to hear again where Bippy-Poo might hide, and so you were treated to this wonderful audio:

"Greetings Uluglub"

"Can youblip"

"Yes Ulukflub"

and so on, and so on, until you got to the bit that you were after.

By and by, you get to the finale. A movie sequence that gives you the distinct feeling that either the scenario writers were fed up to their eyeteeth with the story, or were marched off under heavily armed escort to bring it to a speedy close for commercial reasons. You stare at your screen and you remember... you remember when you learnt that male and female Talants lived separately outside the mating season, and that, as Bippy-Poo (not his real name) told you, the females were on those islands just north of the long line of power poles that zapped you to death (even in god mode) whenever you dared approach them. You remember how something you did caused those power poles to shut down. Yet, there was no way for you to travel further north. You remember all those tantalizing enigmas without answers (yes, you did download a number of walkthroughs, but to no avail). Your remember the tiny offshore island, a mountain in its middle, with a rough staircase leading up to some giant bird's nest with a giant egg in it. Who, what, built those stairs? No clue, no further quest, no answer, a dead-end good, proper and final, my fearless explorer. Too many such dead-ends, and the side-lanes that did lead somewhere were so short and narrow.

The Bottom Line
This could have been a fine game.

Final score.

Graphics. Fine, well tuned to the storyline, often breath-taking, in their passive sort of way. You can even tell the time of the day by the shadow you cast. I couldn't care less, that's not my cup of tea, but perhaps it's yours.

Gameplay. There is much good about it, much bad. Those occasionally invulnerable enemies are a great let-down. Until you switch to god mode of course. It's never so bad that you quit and uninstall in disgust. It's often bad enough to make you want to strangle the culprits: "You had such a great game in the making, why did you stuff up so?" But the puzzles are logical, even though too many of them require you to travel, not only to the other end of the map, but to the other end of any one of the six maps. Oh well, at least it gets out in the fresh air, just like crucifixion does (you jammy, jammy, bastard!).

Replay value. Almost nil. I found myself playing it again only for the landscapes, once I had cleared them of hostile grunts. Those two gigantic twin moons... they are hypnotic. Of course, they are impossible, such a planetary system cannot exist, but this is where art must be allowed to take precedence over reality. If only there had been more of that. And a deeper storyline. Gentlemen, why did you let us down? (Pardon my Aramaic)

Windows · by Jacques Guy (52) · 2004

[ View all 12 player reviews ]

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Outcast appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

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).

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.

Legacy

On November 1999, Appeal announced a sequel Outcast 2: The Lost Paradise, a PS2 game with a PC release to follow. Appeal however 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. A team called Eternal Outcasts started working on Open Outcast as a mod for different types of engines, first the one of Gothic, then the Crystal Space engine, next CryENGINE2 and finally settling on CryENGINE3. After two tech demos (Oasis 1.0 & 1.1) that can be played as mods through Crysis Wars, the project was re-branded on 1st April 2013 as Outcast: Legacy of the Yods.

On 3rd July 2013 it was announced that Yves Grolet, along with the other two original Appeal founders Franck Sauer and Yann Robert, bought back the rights to Outcast from Atari. The game will be developed through Grolet's company AMA Studios and Sauer and Robert will work for AMA through their own company Fresh3D S.A.R.L. Tentatively dubbed Duality, it was then confirmed that it would become the official successor to Outcast. Duality was already announced as the third AMA title at least one year earlier, but with no details except for the title.

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.

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Related Sites +

  • Open Outcast
    A fan-made sequel in the works. The team intends to use the CryEngine 2 for terrain modelling. Well worth a look.
  • Outcast - Wikipedia
    article about the game in the open encyclopedia
  • Outcast Hints
    Alex Burrell wrote these excellent hints for Outcast for the Universal Hint System.
  • Outcast II.net
    A very comprehensive site with news, resources, art, guides and interviews.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by robotriot.

Additional contributors: -Chris, Unicorn Lynx, Jeanne, Chentzilla, Sciere, CaesarZX, Cantillon, Zeikman, Patrick Bregger, FatherJack.

Game added November 1, 1999. Last modified March 16, 2024.