Outcast

About Outcast

Outcast (1999) is Belgian studio Appeal's open-world action-adventure on the alien world of Adelpha, drawn by a software "voxel" landscape engine and scored by an orchestra, two years before Grand Theft Auto III.

Outcast in Depth

Former Navy SEAL Cutter Slade explores Adelpha in third or first person, using only two mouse buttons: one aims his weapon and the other is context-sensitive, starting a conversation in front of a character or making him jump when running. He can climb onto almost any ledge he can reach. After the tutorial, travel gates called daokas let him go to any region, teleport beacons speed movement within one, and a twon-ha, a beast of burden, can be bought or earned to ride. Much of the game is talking to the Talan natives, who respond according to a reputation system: help them and they become eager allies, harm them and they turn him away.

Weapons fire slow projectiles, so fights mean dodging and leading shots, though Cutter can also sneak past soldiers, who sound horns to alert each other and try to flank him. Completing tasks for each region's leader shuts down the food, mining and other production that supplies the soldiers, weakening them. Saving uses an in-world object, the Gaamsaav, which glows and makes a noise when squeezed that can draw enemies. The story sends Cutter to repair a damaged probe whose energy backlash has opened a black hole threatening Earth, and the natives hail him as their messiah, the Ulukai.

Making Outcast

Appeal combined its landscape engine with polygon, water and shadow engines for effects such as depth of field, bump mapping, translucent rippling water, bloom and lens flares, at the cost of very high CPU demands. Infogrames released it for Windows in 1999. It sold only 12,571 copies in the US by the end of the year, but did better in Germany, where it passed 50,000 by December, and reached 400,000 worldwide by 2002.

GameSpot and Computer Gaming World named it the best adventure game of 1999, and Next Generation urged players "tired of FPS madness" with "some serious horsepower" to try it. A sequel, Outcast II: The Lost Paradise, was abandoned when Appeal went bankrupt. Its founders reacquired the rights in 2013, released the remastered Outcast 1.1 in 2014, and followed it with the remake Second Contact in 2017 and Outcast: A New Beginning in 2024. In 2009 GamesRadar called it "revolutionary" for offering open-world 3D exploration two years before Grand Theft Auto III.