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

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 86% (based on 34 ratings)

Players

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

Zort, Ulukai! Get on your twon-ha and bring some magwa to the shamaz!

The Good
Developed by a little-known Belgian studio, Outcast is certainly a very ambitious game. Created with its own peculiar technology, the game presents vast free-roaming environments of such intense beauty that simply controlling your character through them becomes an aesthetic pleasure. It is mind-boggling how such marvel could be produced using voxels and a fixed low resolution.

I can keep heaping praises on this world, but my vocabulary is too poor to adequately convey the beauty of hypnotic twin moons, breathtaking sunrises, and sensual, lush nature in words. The important thing, however, is the way how this world becomes open to your interaction. Imagine Tomb Raider taking place in generous outdoor areas and populated locations. Even though there are only a few instances actually requiring you to use your physical abilities, you can physically interact with the environment at any time, anywhere. Climb on house walls, jump on roofs, crawl around, swim in the beautifully rendered water, dive for crystals and avoid angry fish.

The main idea of the game was obviously to create a living, breathing alien world. Each of its five regions has a distinct personality: a journey from the deceptively peaceful Okaar with its deep forests and shiny blue rivers to the stern brown rocks and angry boiling lava of Motazaar is refreshing no matter how many times you take it. Each region has a large settlement populated by Talans - aliens who look a lot like Alf from the popular TV series. The environments in those inhabited areas are so detailed and busy that simply observing their everyday life becomes a goal in itself. People would engage in a variety of activities, work, lie down, and react to whatever you do.

I rarely talk about music in my reviews because, being a musician myself, I appear to have different standards for judging a soundtrack than most other players. But the music of Outcast honestly belongs to the best of the best: magically sensuous and luxuriant, expertly composed and performed by a professional orchestra, it could easily serve as background for the most expensive Hollywood blockbuster. I can't stress enough how much this music contributes to the atmosphere of the game.

The shooting portions of Outcast are quite good. It can be played both as a third- and first-person shooter, with various degrees of zooming complementing the smooth controls. Laser rays are used for aiming, making third-person shooting much more dependent on your precision skills than on awkward manipulations or luck. The enemies display advanced AI routines, teaming up, alerting others, acting with coordination and mercilessly ganging up on you. The fights in Outcast can get quite challenging, and are always exciting thanks to the open battle arenas where you can use a wide variety of tactics to overcome the advantages of the enemy. Six weapon types, explosives, and nifty devices such as teleporters that allow strategic retreats when places cleverly add to the mix.

The Bad
There is one thing in Outcast that constantly undermines the game: lack of genre-bound gameplay substance. It doesn't have enough combat (by far) to be a shooter. It doesn't have any RPG elements despite the towns and the large world that just seem to beg for them. It doesn't have any puzzles that would help it qualify as a real adventure game. Essentially, Outcast is a lot of running around and not much more.

Outcast starts so strong: a fantastic intro that presents a bunch of interesting and promising characters; something happens, and you find yourself in a strange alien realm. You step out of Zokrym's house, and one of the most wonderful views ever to be seen in a game spreads in front of you. Soon you discover (following Jan's tests) that you will swim, shoot, jump, and sneak in this game. You rub your hands, saying: "What a game, what a game! I can't believe it's happening..." And with moist eyes, you enter the portal and prepare to engage yourself for the first Mon quest...

And here it begins. To find the Mon, you have to speak to a certain guy. But this guy won't talk to you unless you bring him something. This something can be obtained from a certain someone, who will talk to you only if you bring him something that you can obtain from someone who will talk to you only if you bring him something that you can obtain from, etc. The brave Cutter Slade (horrible name, by the way) is lost forever in a universe of insultingly inept creatures. The promised savior of Adelpha will be too busy retrieving various household items for priests and village chiefs, running from one Talan to another with his tongue outside. The cool special agent won't find a better occupation other than grilling every boring NPC for obscure information, which they won't share with him immediately, but only after he finds for them their favorite salami sandwich they have lost many years ago.

Outcast thus becomes a curious phenomenon: it is polished and entertaining in details and side activities, but dull and clueless during actual game progression. The constant stream of pointless tasks and long-winded, repetitive conversations emphasizing the Talan's incompetence in an irritatingly condescending way sap the life out of the game.

There are other "holes" in the game's glittering, opulent facade. The settlements and the wilderness look very attractive, but there are no actual indoor areas in the game. Now, I might be biased here since I have a soft spot for dungeon exploration; but isn't it strange that the game doesn't seem to have any real explorable indoor locations in that huge overworld? There's something oddly disjointed in the design of Outcast, in the way it combines its solid tactical shooting with an inane quest system that occupies a noticeably larger portion of the gameplay.

The Bottom Line
As you can see from some other reviews, Outcast took quite a lot of beating from hardcore players who can't be fooled by artificial lengthening of the game, which takes the place of coherent, fulfilling gameplay. I'm at odds with this game - its world is breathtaking and I want to visit it, but I just don't fancy going again through the same hugely annoying string of fetch quests in order to participate in bits of well-designed third-person shooter.

Windows · by Unicorn Lynx (181780) · 2018

The definitive 3rd person adventure

The Good
The story,graphics, cast and atmosphere.Its a living world with great environments, fantastic soundtrack and a cool hero. Outcast might look dated today...but only for ten minutes, then You just forget about pixel and vertex shaders and admire the viewing distance, landscape and environment. Only recently polygon based games achieved this level of quality.

The game is stable even on win2000 (not even the patch is needed !) and the voxel engine is beautiful. The quests and plot work flawlessly.

A true masterpiece both in design and execution.

The Bad
It spoiled it all for me.No other game comes close, so its pretty hard for me to decide which game to play next. Outcast is so full of it all and so perfect that You might not "need" any other game of that kind anymore. Except for a sequel.

The Bottom Line
A living, alien world, a Bruce Willis-like hero, a great plot with great characters, good speech, good handling, great graphics. The right game for any gamer, especially during christmas holidays.

Windows · by Emmanuel Henne (23) · 2002

How quickly love can turn to hate...

The Good
Sadly, this review is only going to echo the other negative reviews for this game. Outcast is, frustratingly, a game that offers so much, that made me fall in love with it, then it stuck a bad-tasting boogot in my mouth and sent rabid gamors to revert my essence (i.e. The game hurt me. Badly).

Well, let's start at the start seeing as this section is where I talk about what made me love this game, if only for about 8 hours.

Yes, you are presented with a beautiful world. You start off in a snowy region and soon travel to a lush region of green grass and rivers (with lovely reflection effects on the water). The voxel-based engine is unique and the world is presented very differently to any other 3rd. person adventure you may have played. If games are a kind of virtual holiday, then this starts out seeming like a perfect trip that you'll never forget.

The default controls (I used keyboard + mouse) are intuitive, and the 3rd. person camera works well. Controlling your avatar is a snap and I had a real feeling of control as I saw how easily I could leap, climb, crawl, swim, jump and fight. Your first tasks act as a basic tutorial on the game's controls, and I experienced a genuine burst of pride as I worked out how to complete the 'sneaking' task - This, I thought, was really exciting, involving gameplay!

Initial conversations with the game's characters seem good. Yes, you are presented with a lot of 'alien' words which are confusing at first. However, repeated conversations and the in-game lexicon (or in-manual dictionary) allow you to become familiar with things and tell a 'mon' from a 'daoka.' There is even an underlying sense of humour which made me laugh out loud a couple of times. Pity this changed as the game went on...

What else? The music! Fantastic. I was blown away by the fully orchestral score. It made my character's quest seem so much more 'epic' (Oh, the irony!)

The first time I sat down to play this game, I couldn't stop. I kept meaning to, but I just kept on. I think I played for about seven hours straight. I was up 'til 6am, and a game hasn't done that to me in years! Those seven hours were fantastic - Make no mistake. I explored the green land of Shamazaar; I completed tasks, picked up items, helped people out, bought and rode around on a 'Twon-Ha,' discovered the mystery of the idols and worked out that this game was an adventure, an RPG, and perhaps best of all, a tactical combat game!

Personally, I think the combat in this game is awesome. Enemies show a degree of intelligence and the optional (but highly recommended) on-screen map can be used to plan your moves and gain a tactical advantage. There are plenty of exciting sounding guns - The first weapon feels like a pea-shooter, but you can do certain things (I won't spoil it by telling you what) to weaken the enemy forces as a whole. Then the combat becomes somewhat easier. You have several cool gadgets at your disposal, including an invisibility device and a hologram generator (straight out of 'Total Recall'). You have explosives that can be dropped and remote-detonated, tripwires and perhaps coolest of all, personal teleporters. You are encouraged to make creative use of these devices, to get in and out of areas sneakily, to hurt the enemy in novel ways. I loved the combat in the first main area (Shamazaar), which culminated in an attack on an enemy stronghold. The level of difficulty felt just right - Challenging, yet not frustrating.

The Bad
It's quite shocking how quickly my feelings changed after that first heady seven hours of joy. I left the region of Shamazaar, and went to the huge desert city of Okriana. The more I played after that, the more everything grated on my nerves to the point where I eventually decided to stop playing this game because I couldn't take it any longer!

There are two main problems that kill this game: The conversations and the tasks. Talking to people seems fine at first, but after I'd talked to about 50 different characters, it started getting really annoying. There are only a few different voices that are used; Everyone is male, adult, generally obsequious, and they all talk about the same things; Rambling on about the evil Fae Rhan, heaping praises on you, the great saviour, the 'one,' the 'Ulukai,' then sending you off on some trivial task to some far-off destination to talk to another character with exactly the same personality. You are meant to be the god-like saviour of this world (cliched, archaic storyline but there ya go), yet you are reduced to running around doing menial errands that these people are too useless to do themselves. For instance, you meet some guy who makes beer. But he's going to go out of business, because he's had to put his prices up, because the guy who supplies his water has put his prices up. So you have to go find the water guy. But there's a problem with his well. So you have to fix that. And then you find out you have to talk to three other merchants in three other parts of the HUGE city, and convince them to drop their prices (which in turn involves more menial running about) and... Oh god... This is NOT fun, and is complicated by the huge size of the map, the sheer number of characters around, the stack of names that are thrown at you... Grr!

After running around Okriana for several hours, any humour in the conversations was now long gone, for me, particularly as the humour is actually rather limited (e.g. This character is stupid! -or- This character tells incredibly long and boring stories just so your character can make a feeble wisecrack about how long and boring they are!). And there are no likeable characters. Greedy merchants! Beggars who are sickening in how much they whine about their lack of money and how much they love and revere you! Really dumb people (usually signified by them constantly referring to themselves in the third person... Ugh)! Really boring people! And everyone is incapable of achieving the most basic of tasks! WHY!?

You see how upset I am? No, I don't mind performing tasks in RPGs, but they have to have some level of interest and variety. Also, it helps if you like the characters or care about them in some way. It still amazes me, in a game like Chrono Trigger, that even the minor characters with one or two lines of dialogue seem able to convey some element of intrigue, personality or humour through what they say. Here though, the design team seems to believe that 'More = Better.' Not always! Everyone you speak to is so long-winded and what they say is repetitive that it drove me to distraction.

There's also a lack of imagination when it comes to the design of these people, their clothes and their environments. Hmm... These guys work in the fields, which resemble rice paddies. Aha! They should wear Chinese hats! And the whole desert city of Okriana... Well, it's in the desert, right? Okay, so everyone is wearing turbans and the place is full of Arabian-style bazaars! Great! No, actually it's lazy, bordering on stereotypical and stupid. This is meant to be an alien world!

Another problem: The items you can pick up... Now don't get me wrong here. I like amassing items as much as the next virtual kleptomaniac. I like to finish a game with spare clips of ammo and some unused life crystals because I explored every corner of every map. But the problem here is that items are everywhere. And you are constantly informed of this by a female voice saying things like 'Stable energy source -- detected.' Then an indicator box will appear around the item. At first, this seemed like a good idea. But seriously! Items are everywhere. And while it's nice to get ammo and rare gadgets, about 70% of the items you find are an assortment of odd crystals, shells and plants. The only use for these things that I have so far found is to take them to a guy called a 'recreator,' who can use say, a couple of shells and a bit of fruit to make more ammo for your weapons. But this is totally pointless, as ammo is freely available, scattered everywhere! After playing this game for a couple of days, I am so sick of constantly being told to pick up useless lumps of metal and sticks of crystal. I'm even sick of finding useful stuff like ammo.

I'm sick of talking to the same basic character again and again. I'm sick of hearing about the tyranny of Fae Rhan and the imagined greatness of me, big powerful human man Ulukai! And I am sick of this game.

The Bottom Line
What a shame. If only Outcast's adventure aspects could match up to its beautiful environments and great action.

I ignored the advice of a friend who warned me about this game. I didn't listen. And three days later, Outcast has been uninstalled and is sitting in my 'sell on eBay' box.

So don't make my mistake! This game lets itself into your heart and promises great things, only to reveal its true nature: It is repetitive and DEEPLY irritating.

I've seen the screenshots. I want to fight giant beasts in water and woodland regions! But I can't take it any longer!

Windows · by xroox (3895) · 2008

[ 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.