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toblix

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

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Great to hear that this version works. Don't remember for sure about gamepad support in the original, but I think it may have had it. Or maybe I used a gamepad's mouse/kb emulator.

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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.

I love things like that. Things that only stand out to you because you have such rigid expectations of how games behave, and that make you question design norms that you otherwise wouldn't.

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Another update just came out that apparently addresses a couple of possible quest issues, the team behind this version of the game has been patching quite aggressively.

When i had previously played the game, i don't think i got much past the first major area of the game, i'm into stuff i don't remember at all now. Apparently both times i've played this game, i've made the mistake of taking way too long to go visit the city behind the gate in the Shamazaar village. (The game even prods you to go explore other areas, so i don't think i can blame the game.) That city is absolutely enormous, the scope and simulation in what this game attempts to do is so much more ambitious than i had believed it was. Outcast is kind of wild for 1999, it feels like it was quite a few years ahead of the curve, and experiencing it makes me retroactively a little more wary of what they were wanting to do with their kickstarter. Trying to remake this game on 600k seems crazy, and perhaps things worked out for the best just having a really nice updated version of the original game.

 

Outcast is terrific though, i'm super enamored with it and i'm probably going to end up playing through to the end this time.

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Hooray, I just found the original game on disc! Wonder if it still runs...

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Good recommendation, Sno, perhaps the time has come I will finally finish Outcast. If they've solved that one bug that always stopped my progress dead.

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Good recommendation, Sno, perhaps the time has come I will finally finish Outcast. If they've solved that one bug that always stopped my progress dead.

 

Oh yeah? What was the bug, any way i can avoid it?

They've put out several more patches that all seem to be quest-related fixes, but reading their patch notes, it seems at least some of those bugs came about because of things they've changed with this newly recompiled version of the game.

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That's the hard part, there's apparently a way you have to visit worlds to not trigger it, but I always did it wrong. It's somewhere along the branching paths of Talanzaar, the desert. If you trigger it, you can still paly huge swaths of the game, but then get stuck in Okaar, the forest area, where a specific quest event won't happen. I always lost heart at starting over because the mistake was hours and hours earlier.

 

So I really hope they fixed that one.

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Well now i'm hesitant to keep playing.

Doesn't look like the patch notes reference anything to do with Okaar, and i can't find any specific information anywhere about game-breaking bugs in Outcast, other than people simply acknowledging that they exist and are caused by seeing certain plot events out of order.

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Since it's a very old bug, could be they already fixed it? I always considered it the biggest bug in the game, but then maybe I just have a weird playing style. I always trigger the 'Domino not speaking' bug in Grim too, apparently I just have a very unique way of playing games :getmecoat

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IT'S HERE! After the failed Kickstarter Appeal just worked away at it and BOOM, we have an HD update of Outcast, available NOW!

 

I have it.

 

It... doesn't really hold up. The graphics are actually pretty nice and modern, though it's obvious they had a few key areas that they couldn't easily facelift without putting in serious work, notably animation. That's not the problem though. The problem is that it plays horrendously. Was Outcast always this atrociously sluggish and unresponsive? Maybe. Maybe I never noticed before because it was 1999 and I was just super thrilled to be playing in such a massive world. But man, it's bad. Controlling Cutter feels like wading through a knee-deep swamp, you're always fighting to make anything happen. The slightest stone in his path will make him grind to a halt and you'll need to awkwardly turn around 90 degrees to circumvent the obstacle. I haven't yet mentioned the jumping, the sheer horror of trying to jump.

 

Did they think this would pass in 2017? I can't imagine it. This must be a budget restraint, but at the same time I feel they did make some adjustments to movement, just... not very good ones.

 

I dig being back on Adelpha and Lennie Moore's soundtrack remains one of the best ever made. But for anyone not on a nostalgia kick, I cannot recommend this. It's very nearly unplayable. Outcast's legacy was handed over to the likes of Assassin's Creed and Gears of War (in terms of control scheme), who ran with it and evolved it, and there's no going back, it seems. Maybe they'll patch in some better movement, but I'm not holding my breath.

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I've been playing through the original Outcast on and off for a while and although it's definitely super clunky, I don't think I would ever describe it as "the slightest stone in his path will make him grind to a halt and you'll need to awkwardly turn around 90 degrees to circumvent the obstacle," so either you're overstating things or the remake made things worse or I have a high tolerance for bullshit. I wouldn't say the original is unplayable, so if the remake is unplayable, something's up.

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The controls were always very imprecise, and I think there were some swampy areas where you could get stuck on some things.

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I tried to play the original (or the one on Steam) and show it to a friend, but I also noticed that it doesn't hold up. I think I still might get this version also, because I was such a huge fan of it back in the day.

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I love the original Outcast and it's unique graphics.

 

I have ever since the Kickstarter been very suspicious regarding this HD remake. I might check it out eventually after some sale, but really not that highly interested in it. I just don't feel the need for a HD remake for this since it will not have the same feel the original had.

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11 hours ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

I've been playing through the original Outcast on and off for a while and although it's definitely super clunky, I don't think I would ever describe it as "the slightest stone in his path will make him grind to a halt and you'll need to awkwardly turn around 90 degrees to circumvent the obstacle," so either you're overstating things or the remake made things worse or I have a high tolerance for bullshit. I wouldn't say the original is unplayable, so if the remake is unplayable, something's up.

 

I can't readily compare the remake to the original, haven't played the latter in a while. Maybe it is just the swampy area, like Erkki says. I've just finished Shamazaar. What will frequently happen [at least there] is that Cutter runs up against something (even small obstacles) at which point the 'forward' button becomes completely unresponsive. A dead stop. Maybe I'm spoiled by the likes of Breath of the Wild, which does away with non-climbable obstacles in its entirety.

 

The jumping is arguably worse. There's no real telling what the ultimate point is for Cutter to launch off a platform. I always feel I should be on the edge before jumping, but often he just slides off without jumping. If I want to make a serious attempt, I'll have to initiate the jump a good meter before the point my feeling tells me I should jump. This was already the case in the original by the way, I distinctly recall it. (Cutter also has a borderline useless upward jump, where most of the time you'll want his jump to cover at least a little horizontal distance.)

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What about the weird dodging rolls which often happens when you try to run...

 

Pro-tip: disable aim assist. Firing your gun suddenly doesn't feel like shit.

Pro-tip 2: disable v-sync and add "-window-mode exclusive" to launch options the game won't become a sluggish mess after a while

 

 

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@Roderick I started playing Second Contact and I know Outcast's controls feel very clunky now and I still feel it too. Especially the swimming feels so imprecise when you are trying to reach some underwater object. But I think I can tolerate the controls and the poor geometry interactions because I just loved that game to death.

 

I think it's worth to remember that at the time of it's launch, wasn't it actually the very first (or one of the first) 3rd person 3D action adventure game where you had isolation of upper and lower body movement - separation of looking, aiming, shooting from what the legs were doing? At least some memories are coming back to me that this felt revolutionary at the time. AFAIK, before Outcast, 3rd person action game characters had you running only in the direction you were looking.

 

I hope I'm not totally off with this, maybe I'm remembering only in terms of games that people in adventuregamers.com accepted as adventure games.

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Actually Tomb Raider came before Outcast, right, don't remember how that played.

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Oh man, this game. It has so many flaws, but I think at the time it came out it had so many new ideas. As I'm playing it for the 3rd 6th time I still needed to get the help of a walkthrough when it seemed I was stuck because I had forgotten a few things and because the names of the talan are so similar (e.g. Zeb vs. Zeo).

 

As I'm trying to ride the twon-ha again, I think this is where the main flaw of the game is with regarding getting stuck in terrain. It's such a faster mode of transport, but can't really get arround the same terrain that I can on foot and has to use stairs in Shamazaar :(

 

All the high-tech equipment seems kind of unnecessary in this game. Well, maybe for an alternative play style the PPS would be useful, but I'm just killing soldiers wherever I can now. The land mines don't seem to work at all and the CALPR-T is also something I haven't found a use for, yet I have like 70 of them. Same with proxy and UBIK stuff really.

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One of the things I was stuck with was the Daoka to Okaar. I thought I had to do something to get to it, but as I just found it, I realized I could have easily gone there in the beginning of the game. That's one of the cool things about Outcast, that it's really open world from the start. There was a boatman that kept yapping on about that Daoka, I think to give me more chance to find it, but I wasn't paying close attention to what he said. I think I had the same problem the first time I played Outcast.

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Finished it! It's kind of one of those things where your memory plays tricks and you think "isn't this how Outcast always looked?" But I did get occasional flashbacks to how it actually looked, mostly with the Hoti fruit that were neon-red in the original so that even my colorblind eyes could spot them much more easily, especially since the terrain was also much less detailed.

 

Got 95% side quests, not sure what I missed. I read about some smoke grenade gun or something that I never found, maybe because Oru died before I met Kyuran. So many details in this game, but it does play a lot worse compared to newer open world games. Not sure how I like that many items are placed along walls and other extremities so it keeps you running along walls.

 

And the twon-has ended up being so useless, even as I had 3 guis in the end :(

 

There were several places that looked like secret doors, e.g. in the temples of Shamazaar, I never found out if I could open them or they are not actual doors. Tried several essence idol combinations.

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