Kickstarter begins for HD reboot of Outcast

This is the work-in-progress of the reboot…

Like beautiful, wonderful, non-linear, open-world action-adventures? Then you should pay attention to this. A Kickstarter has opened for a remake of 1999’s Outcast – imaginatively titled Outcast Reboot HD – and 1999’s Outcast was all of those things.

Outcast (out)casts you as a man named Cutter Slade, who wears an orange jumper and has a very silly visor. Yes, look, it was the late 90s. Stop laughing. Slade wound up going through a Stargate-like portal and found himself in a mysterious alien world, where… well, let’s just say that not everything went happily. There were plenty of non-hostile areas, but there was also a lot of combat and action-ing in a vast open world full of quests that you could take in pretty much whatever order you wanted. You know all those open-world games that everyone raves about, like Grand Theft Auto 3? This came earlier.

The initial goal is $600,000 USD, which will see the game ported into 1080p at 60FPS. All characters, environments, objects, and textures will be remade from scratch (which isn’t a surprise, because the original game was voxel based) and the game itself will see a number of improvements, from story bug fixes through to reworked controls and a vastly improved interface for the inventory, notepad, dialogue, etc.

Further stretch goals add sidequests that were never implemented into the original, reworked animations, DX11 effects, VR support, rideable flying creatures, and – at $1.7 million – an entirely new region to explore, replete with new quests and lore.

So what about rewards? Welp, $25 will net you a digital release of the game. $50 seems like the “digital deluxe version” with a unique weapon (with your name engraved on it), access to a Backer’s House with the backer names engraved on the walls, beta access, and the like. $60 offers a physical version of the game in addition to all the previous tiers. From there, they go all the way up to $10,000, which offers a ridiculous amount of stuff including having a district named after you and a statue of you added to that district, your own two-minute theme in the game, dinner with the team, an invitation to the launch party, a pyro-engraved leather map, a Cutters’s headset VR interface, a redeem code for Outcast 2 (whenever it happens)… etc.

Oh yeah, and lots of the people working on this also worked on the original. This is presumably what happened after Atari sold the IP back to them.

Outcast Reboot HD is currently at $124,000 of its $600,000 funding goal, with 28 days to go. The game itself is expected to launch around October 2015, and you can read more on it – or back it for yourself – over here.

…and this is the original.