Outcast: A New Beginning wants to be a caring open world shooter
Previously known as Outcast 2: A New Beginning
THQ Nordic and Appeal Studios have semi-re-announced Outcast 2: A New Beginning as plain old Outcast: A New Beginning, having sensibly decided that positioning it as a sequel to a 24-year-old game might turn younger audiences away. In a pre-reveal showcase attended by RPS, producer Andreas Schmiedecker walked us through a few sections of this atypically green-fingered open world shooter.
In Outcast: ANB you play a growly-gruff ex-Navy SEAL, the sleekly named Cutter Slade, who roves a planet called Adelpha using a fancy jetpack. You're here to help the indigenous Talans - who definitely hail from the Ewoky end of the ethnic representation scale - fight off an army of robot invaders. The jetpack is the initial star attraction: it lets you boost, glide and dash through colourful landscapes inspired by 80s and 90s movies and comics. The associated animations seem a bit wooden to me: I often felt like I was watching somebody steer a man-shaped cursor, rather than a body in flight. But I certainly can't argue with the verticality and agility on display.
Slade gets a fancy transforming gun with modules including sniper scopes, shotgun muzzles and rapid-fire functionality. But his greatest weapons could be those afforded him by Adelpha itself: care for its creatures and plantlife by, say, locating an appropriate food source for some squelchy-looking dragon, and you'll both rejuvenate the Talan villages you come across and gain access to special powers, such as summoning a flock of exploding kamikaze birds. You can also ride larger creatures into battle, including flying leviathans. There's an ecosystem screen with branching nodes to illustrate the relationships between Adelpha's flora and fauna.
All of which reflects a desire to cultivate some empathy between player and open world, rather than the usual imperial process of extraction and conquest. As with Ubisoft's Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora, I'm not wholly convinced by all this: I think the open world genre is unavoidably conquest-driven, more so than can be addressed by stirring in a touch of gardening sim, and in any case, Slade's paternalistic caretaker stance towards the natives seems very "white saviour complex" to me (Schmiedecker described the game's world-building as "a mixture of Indiana Jones and Stargate"). But there are some interesting wrinkles.
Amongst other things, Slade starts off with no knowledge of the Talan language - the more time you spend tending to the world, the more conversant you'll become with the locals, and the more lore you'll get access to. Other, less consequential distractions include lost altars that harbour power-ups, accessed by completing simple platforming challenges such as following an orb of light.
The game will be singleplayer only, clocks in at around 35 hours long, and is close to beta, though we don't have a release date yet. Come now, see for yourself.
