Come Get Your Sacred Objects! It's the Outcast HD Remake Kickstarter!

[toblix]

Here, check this out: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/outcast-reboot-hd/outcast-reboot-hd. If you haven't played Outcast, you probably shouldn't, unless you're the kind of person who handles horribly aged games uncommonly well. It was a fantastic late-Nineties action adventure that had a bunch of incredible stuff in it, some of which I had never experienced in a game before when I played it back in 1999/2000. First of all, it had a sweet voxel-based graphics engine that made it necessary to run the game in a super-low resolution, so the software renderer could render wonderfully anti-aliased reflections and shadows and vast landscapes and cities. It had a fantastic orchestral score. It had tons and tons of content and was totally open world, before that became a thing non-RPGs did (as far as I know). This Kickstarter looks pretty bad.

[Roderick]

I think this forum has a well-established love for Outcast. It's one of the best games I ever played, with a soundtrack that to this day brings me to tears. I'd love to support this Kickstarter if they supported PayPal or any reasonable alternative besides credit cards!

 

Really excited about the stretch goal of an entire new area, as I'd like to see what they'd come up with. I also hope they'll fix the game-breaking bug in Okaar while they're at it. For all my love of it, I never finished the game since I always got stuck in Okaar!

[Sno]

VOXELS.

I will be sad if their fancy new HD-ified engine lacks crazy voxel terrain.

Outcast though, it's a great game that never really seemed to get its due, it's definitely deserving of another spot under the light.

[ihavefivehat]

VOXELS!

 

Can there just be a kickstarter for voxels in general? I want to play more things like Voxelstein!

 

(Oh yeah and Outcast was an awesome game.)

[kaputt]

I'm totally backing this, even though I never played the original. I always wanted to, but as a kid I remember seeing those beautiful screens on a PC magazine just to realize that the thing would never run on my super old PC. Can't wait for this.

[Ben X]

Why do you say the Kickstarter looks pretty bad, Toblix? 

[brkl]

They have nothing at all to show.

[Bjorn]

It's a really poorly written/edited pitch as well.  If you're asking for $600,000, then your pitch shouldn't have things like this:

 

  Quote

 It was one of the first 3d game to offer non-linear gameplay, free-roaming environments, combats against clever reactive AI,

 

We need your help to achieve our goal of producing a highly polished product on par with today's highest quality standards.

 

I have been developping and trying to push the limits of the hardware on the various platforms I had the chance to work on Amiga, PC, PS2, PSP, PSVita, PS3, X360, XB1, PS4. (also a run-on sentence)

 

Like many, I like playing them,

 

I worked for studios in Belgium (Appeal, AMA Studios/Daoka), US (Liquid Development), Australia (Krome Studios), and UK (Microsoft), on IPs like Starwars, Outcast, Hellboy, Dungeon and Dragons, Guildwars, to name a few.

 

Other releases will follow (if stretch goals are reach) depending on digital stores policies. We will do our best to ship as fast as possible on all platforms and will announce updated release schedule during development.

 

Clearly some of this is from a non-Native speaker writing or helping to write this pitch.  But given the amount of money and the size of the team, the pitch feels lazy and rushed to have so many errors or poorly worded sentences in it.  I didn't even highlight any of the bad sentences that jumped out at me. 

 

This stuff was all super distracting to me as I was trying to read it yesterday.

[elmuerte]

Backed it. I never played the original even though I do own a copy of it. It aged really bad, so I would love to play a higher detail remake.

[Justin Leego]

  On 4/8/2014 at 4:02 PM, Bjorn said:

It's a really poorly written/edited pitch as well.  If you're asking for $600,000, then your pitch shouldn't have things like this:

 

 

Clearly some of this is from a non-Native speaker writing or helping to write this pitch.  But given the amount of money and the size of the team, the pitch feels lazy and rushed to have so many errors or poorly worded sentences in it.  I didn't even highlight any of the bad sentences that jumped out at me. 

 

This stuff was all super distracting to me as I was trying to read it yesterday.

 

Oh totally, those sorts of translation errors are easily filtered out during speech but can become an obstacle when written.

 

I found it kind of endearing but for a company that has a US office of some sort it's not unreasonable to expect those to have been ironed out. It wouldn't have cost that much to put it past a freelance translator or the Idle Forums' resident Belgian

[Anym]

Maybe I am the kind of person who handles aged games uncommonly well, but I wouldn't say it has aged horribly at all. I only played it for the first time last year and would recommend you do, too, if you haven't already. I wouldn't call it a great game, but I found it to be a unique experience and full of interesting little ideas that you don't see much elsewhere. It has its share of flaws, but I enjoyed it enough to play it all the way through. That said, I can't really get excited about a remake. I would very much prefer a sequel (or a spiritual sequel), but can understand why that isn't an option for them and wish them well. Labta Ulukai afar!

 

  On 4/7/2014 at 8:04 PM, Rodi said:

Really excited about the stretch goal of an entire new area, as I'd like to see what they'd come up with. I also hope they'll fix the game-breaking bug in Okaar while they're at it. For all my love of it, I never finished the game since I always got stuck in Okaar!

 

What but was that?

[Roderick]

Let me think, it was a while. I think there was a weird bug where if you did some of the quests in a certain order the game wouldn't trigger some items in Okaar that you needed to progress. It was pretty bad, since you basically screwed up dozens of hours before that point without ever knowing it.

 

OH WELL, LET'S BACK UP WITH THE GAAMSAVV!

[Ninja Dodo]

The original Outcast remains one of my favourite games and I think it's actually aged quite well aside from issues with compatibility. Some of the tech and design ideas they had (like NPC AI and their awareness of the world) are still ahead of how open world games are typically handled today. "You want that Talan over there, Ulukai."

 

That said I agree the campaign could be better. Their decision to wait with a paypal option till after the kickstarter is mystifying...seems like a good idea if you've never followed a kickstarter campaign before. By the time the hype stops slacker backer numbers are going to be negligible and mostly people go for paypal because they can't use kickstarter's payment system, so not much overlap. I'm also not completely sold on how they've re-interpreted the art style . It doesn't feel stylized enough to be truly "painterly" nor detailed enough to stand side by side with more realistic games.

 

Still cautiously optimistic.

[Roderick]

For chronicling purposes: the kickstarter failed (to be fair it was horrible handled). Will we ever see an improved Outcast?

[itsamoose]

Granted it hasn't aged all too well, but this game looks awesome! I saw something about this game on Giant Bomb a while back but could never remember the name.

[Roderick]

Yes, do play it, it's great!

[Erkki]

Man, I forgot to back this I would have done it just because it was run by the original creators of Outcast, arguably the 57th best game of all time.

[Sno]

Well this Kickstarter may have failed, but a more modestly updated version of Outcast, dubbed Outcast 1.1, just showed up on Steam priced at around six bucks.

Their Plan B, perhaps.

 

Edit: Sounds like this version of the game is quite problematic right now.

[Erkki]

I didn't read your edit and bought it. But whatever, it's like, Outcast, and the best game soundtrack ever.

[Roderick]

That's a pity. They do clearly imply that it's a work in progress (further updates to come, 1.1 etc), but that doesn't excuse tons of bugs, if I read it correctly. If they update and fix this, for 5 euro coins, this is a steal.

[Ben X]

It's great that you folk are giving them the benefit of the doubt, but aren't you being a bit trusting? They say Outcast, you pay up?

[Sno]

I mean, Outcast is a great game that deserves another shot at the spotlight, but this updated version does sound real weird. Apparently it launches Windows Media Player to show the intro or something? Super weird.

[Roderick]

Haha, seriously? Guess they really needed that 300.000 Coins to get it right.

 

But basically, yeah, they say Outcast we say hold on lemme get my wallet.

[Salacious Snake]

I'm excited for this version. I already owned the original via GoG (and a disc somewhere), so it's all gravy if they improve things. (The GoG version is being updated for free.)

 

On paper, this is all I really wanted out of the remake, anyway. Better resolution support and configurable controls; gamepad seems like it'll be a fine way to play.

 

CUTTER SLADE

[Sno]

It was sounding like the biggest issues with the new version were fixed very quickly, so i decided it was probably worth supporting this version of the game and... I can't say i have any complaints, it's functional, it does what you'd want it to do. It is a totally playable version of that game. The game didn't really seem to like being run at 1920x1080 though, it was very framey and some visual oddities with the voxel engine seemed to be exaggerated at that resolution, but i knocked it down a notch or two from that and it runs perfectly fine now. It's something my memory had glossed over, but apparently the resolution cap in the original version was very low? In which case, anything here is a gain.

Things get a little weird here though, because back when it was new, it was a game i liked, but never got deep into and never went back to. Consequently, I was left with some fairly vague memories of the game, so i'm finding that there is way more to this game than i remember there being, it's quite a pleasant surprise. It's kinda great going back to a game you think you remember relatively well and liked for what you remember, and then finding it's actually way bigger and way cooler than you thought.

There's lots of fun nuance being displayed with the NPC's, for one. I asked a generic NPC what he thought of a named NPC, and he wouldn't tell me because he was in earshot of the named NPC. I followed the generic NPC out a ways on his routine and then he let me hear his piece. That stuck out to me, because it's an example of something that never happens in other games. The enemy AI also surprised the hell out of me, the enemies act quite intelligently.

Game has a slow start though, lots of exposition. It's just dumping names and places on you before you've been shown any reason why you should care about any of it.

The control scheme is very strange, another thing my memory had completely glossed over. It's actually a tremendously good fit for a gamepad, but... Gamepad support is new to this version?

I will never not be fascinated with real voxel engines.

 

Outcast is awesome. I'm happy to have a vague set of fond memories affirmed. Right now, it's kind of reminding me of the first two Gothic games, which i also have very fond and somewhat foggy memories of.

 

Edit: Also, that soundtrack is crazy good.