Our dreams became true! The original team has launched a Kickstarter campaign for this upcoming reboot.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/outcast-reboot-hd/outcast-reboot-hd

Sounds more like a reskin than a reboot ....

"Outcast was a PC-only game but you’re mentioning consoles in your stretch goals. I don’t want the PC version to be dumbed-down because of consoles.
We understand your concerns, and they may have been valid in the past few years. Now we are at a the start of a new generation of consoles that share the same set of features (not necessarily power) with the latest PCs. That means we will not have to compromise the PC version because of consoles."

Huh?!. Don't think thats the only reason why people call it dumbing down.....

Bah, that's just some "PC MASTER RACE" elitist crap in my opinion. Outcast is a game that could perfectly work on a console without issues or being "dumbed down".

Interesting, I might chip in.

I was certain I had seen Outcast on a PS2 once but Mobygames proves me wrong.

Consoles ~of the time~ most definitely. Outcast had huge open maps, 3D ray-casting engine, dynamic character shadows, depth of field, map bumping, reflections and heightmapping (self-occlusion, motion parallax and silhouettes). Hell even the water in Outcast was translucent and had real-time reflections. It also had particle effects for weather like snow and rain, as well as post-processing effects like bloom.

And this was in 1999! There was NOTHING even close to this in video games at the time. And it did all this without using a 3D graphics cards, it was all software rendering. The downside of that of course is that is put everything onto the CPU, there's no way the processors of the consoles of the time could have handled it, it was difficult to run it on PCs of the time.

I do sympathize with that statement of "dumbing down", because Outcast in 1999 was basically the last PC-exclusive game which showed what really could be done, especially with real-time graphical effects. Basically soon after Outcast though eventually came the multi-platform era, where all these technological advantages were just put on the backburner for years because the consoles couldn't handle these new lighting/particle/post-processing effects. Resulting in pretty much all big games starting to use pre-baked lighting (which looks like shit).

Dumbing down is not something that magically goes away because of the PS4/XB1.

Console memory and processing limitations have tremendous impact on level design in AAA games.

Controller input is also much more limited than KB&M input. This affects game mechanics, UI, etc.

Whoever this team is, they have not convinced me at all that they really get it.

Considering it's a 15 years old game with redone assets (and probably better AI), I'm pretty sure that current consoles can handle it.

And about the controls, that game felt more like a game made with a controller in mind. The mouse controls were always incredibly awkward, not to mention that the action button was context sensitive.

Consoles don't exactually limit things like level design (the large amount of Sandbox games are a good example). When developpers look to exploit the consoles capabilities (even if it means taking shortcuts), they can do wonders (best recent example: Dark Souls).

Lol begging for money to do a "remaster" of a game? I think people taking in this kickstarter thing all wrong. I call this one electronic begging...

600k for a remake?
Those amounts are getting bigger all the time.

I personally think this kickstarter is ridiculous.
Why have the trouble of making a "reboot/remake/repaint" of Outcast? Specially since GOG has made the game available for new PCs (I bought the game some years ago and I couldn't play it, due to incompatibility with new Windows systems).

The effort would be better applied in making Outcast 2. Specially since the PC gaming community has been waiting for the sequel for a long time.

What are they trying to achieve with this? Bring the attention of console folks into the Outcast franchise? Waste of time. Most people who play Xbox and PS4 are not really into this kind of "stranger in a strange alien setting" type of games anymore.

Speaking as an old gamer (from the times of ZX Spectrum) I'm really disappointed by this type of action.

Have you played Outcast? Remaking it in modern 3D graphics really would be a large project, because the game was so big.

The amount isn't that big when you consider that Wasteland 2 asked for 900k, and Torment: Tides of Numenera asked for 1.1 million if my memory is correct.

Maybe you should post to the other thread, which already has more pages than this one ?

The topic is here.

I had a look at the kickstarter and went away unimpressed with it. I know what they are trying to do but i think the move to consoles may cause a lot of time and money being retasked to doing this even though i know its a stretch goal but the costs could be a lot more to port across as well as the fees they have to pay to sony and ms (i maybe wrong about this).

Even the video did nothing to help there was more footage of them sitting at a table than the game itself.

Yep great news here.
This was a great game and still is.
A graphic lift is all iit's needed to have a great game.
Besides thay are remodelling all chars and animaiions :P

This whole thing is a huge, ugly train wreck.

They just lost $4K today. Whether product of fake pledges or displeased backers cancelling their support, it's irrelevant, the fact still stands that they lost four-freaking-thousand dollars. In one day.

Coincidentally, on the same day they made their 6th update (seriously?! 15 days in -- that's half the campaign, dear Outcast HD devs, in case you haven't noticed -- and they only made 6 updates?!), which consists on a WIP model of the Cutter Slade statuette and the tier-reward t-shirt. Now, that t-shirt is downright ugly, which doesn't surprise me at all, I never particularly liked the artistic direction of anything these guys made, but backers seem appalled by how bad it looks and are threatening to lower or cancel their pledges if the team doesn't change the shirt's back design.

In all of the projects I backed and followed on Kickstarter, never had I seen one so badly organized and structured. These guys won't even engage in conversation with the backers and fans because "they're too busy working on a gameplay video" (which they should have done before this started), let alone reach for video game media sites and forums/-a, like they should, to give the project exposure and visibility. Are those guys so delusional and detached from reality that they really still think this is going well and has any chance of succeeding?! No one knows about their game and no one cares, and they're not moving a finger to change that. This is the least passionate team over their own project I have ever had the displeasure to see; as an example, all you need to do to confirm this is to watch the update in which they showed a video of the WIP rice-field-region-with-some-name-sounding-just-like-every-other-region you first set foot in as soon as you leave the forced-tutorial snow village: that dev talking us through it was either really stoned, really sleepy or really not-giving-a-rat's-ass about the game they're supposedly passionately wanting to make.

This whole thing is, for lack of a better word, a colossal clusterfuck.

I have no confidence whatsoever in this team, by now, and after some heated discussions going on in the Outcast GOG subforum I can safely say I came to the conclusion I don't even like the original game.

I'm really sorry if I sounded rude or if I came across as someone attacking something you love, but I think this needs to be said. This inaptly named "reboot" (considering the awful English and overall terribly structured script of the original game, not knowing that "reboot" and "remake" are different things was to be expected from these guys) is never getting funded, it's looking worse every passing day, and we're in the middle of the campaign already.