While I certainly agree for the most part, I really didn’t like it when blizzard pretty much hid a torrent client in their old installers and made you use your upload to cheap out on their own distribution costs. Use a proper torrent tracker but give a user the choice like Humble is doing here. If you want to use the tech in your own client then be upfront about it explain to people what’s going on and give the user a clear and easy option to opt out of seeding.
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Yeah, unfortunately this remake is very rough. Time for a history lesson you totally asked for…
Outcast is a cult classic from 1999, which had a sequel on PS2 that never got finished. It’s best described as an exploration game, since its shooting is flimsy at best and its platforming is a bit limited; it was all about its AI and environments, stealthing around, and exploring the world of the game.
It really bombed in sales. Its publisher (Infogrames… ugh) didn’t market the game at all in the US, the engine was no doubt expensive to make, and it brought computers at the time to a crawl since it was so CPU-intensive. Most of its current momentum comes from when GOG rereleased this game several years ago.
Originally they had a basic patch/hack on top of the original game meant to clean it up for Windows XP/Vista/7, but the developers got back the rights to the game under a new company and made a light remaster called Outcast 1.1. It’s a huge overhaul of the original game, kind of like a source port.
Then, Fresh3d went all-out. They got their old company name back (Appeal), started working on a full remake, and had a Kickstarter for it.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/outcast-reboot-hd/outcast-reboot-hd/posts/835262
So, if you take a look at that… yikes. New studio, failed Kickstarter… everything going wrong so far. Somehow, they still pushed through, which is commendable imo, but it does lead to most of the game’s problems.
Overall, this low budget is what kills the remake. It runs on Unity and visually, I have very few complaints other than some stilted animations here and there. The sound is where it goes to die, though; I don’t know about the other language dubs, but the English one is painful. Voice acting is good, but it’s compressed to a point where it’s headache inducing. If you’ve played the PC ports of either Saints Row 2 or the original Red Faction Guerrilla, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Oh, and every hit sound is a super recognizable stock asset. The original had that too, and it’s terrible.
It uses the same OPK files as the original, and I’m going to try to mod it with some audio cleaning tools to see what I can do. Is it possible? No clue, but I can try!
The real killer for me is the intro, though. The original was a very outdated low-res FMV, but it had so much charm to it! The new one just screams “cheap–” a storyboard animation with no mouth movement.
This video shows it pretty well…
So, yeah. Overall, very mixed feelings on the remake. I’ve always wanted to play Outcast but could never really get into it, and having one aspect improved but not the other sends the game into a total uncanny valley where you’re stuck between a fancy new game that keeps throwing you off by going back to being a 1999 tech demo.
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Thanks!
I downloaded qbittorrent, drag and dropped the .torrent file into it and it is downloading. Couldn’t ask for anything simpler.
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They really don’t want you to do a direct download…you get a message along the lines of “This is a REALLY BIG FILE and won’t download properly on FAT32 storage. PRETTY PLEASE WITH A CHERRY ON TOP USE BITTORRENT!”
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Yeah that FAT32 notice was kind of amusing because it’s not like that issue will be alleviated by downloading the same really big file through the torrent. And who among their audience do they think might be using FAT32 still and also knows what that means?
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I’ve actually been caught out by this issue in the past when downloading to a usb stick…at least they mention that in the alert, else I agree it’s not exactly that helpful as a warning. It should just read “DOWNLOAD TO C:… OR ELSE!”
They could have just broken their file into parts. If you’ve ever wondered why GOG standalone installers have a million 4GB bins… I used to think it was some kind of limitation with their installer, but it was them making sure it worked on FAT32 storage.
They just needed to have it in a format where you extract the ZIP and it pulls from zip1, zip2, etc.