Fans of the incredibly ambitious 1999 action adventure Outcast had their hearts broken earlier this year, when a Kickstarter campaign for an HD remake of the game failed to meet its goal.
But all is not lost! An enhanced version of the original titled Outcast 1.1 has popped up on Steam today out of nowhere. It’s not quite the total remaster that the Kickstarter was set up for, but it does add a few new bells and whistles, and configures the game to run smoothly on modern PCs.
Outcast 1.1 adds a bunch of graphical options, including “a multithreaded voxel renderer for better performance, software bilinear filtering on polygonal meshes, part of the HUD redesigned to match higher resolutions, new high-resolution sky paintings, new launcher, native support of xbox gamepad, user-friendly controller configuration, a lot of bugs fixed and improved stability.”
That’s at least some comfort to those still dreaming of a total remaster. The original Outcast, developed by extinct studio Appeal, was a cult hit that pioneered the open world action genre, letting the player loose in huge alien environments. A sequel was planned, but financial troubles meant that game never surfaced.
There’s no pricing listed for the game yet, as it doesn’t launch for another few hours. Keep an eye on the Steam page in the meantime. If you own the game on GOG, don’t feel you have to buy the Steam version; according to a Facebook post from the developers the GOG version should be updated to 1.1 for free at some point soon.
