Outcast 2: Experience the world of Adelpha as it truely is

The Belgian development team Appeal has begun with the preparations on the sequel for Outcast: Outcast 2. Not much is known about the game, but we could picture the following facts out of the mouth of the artdirector in the team: Franck Sauer.

About Outcast 2's storyline the team is very quiet. Not without a reason, says Sauer: ‘We don’t want to reveal the storyline, it still has to be approved and the story is the most important aspect of Outcast 2. We could dissapoint the gamers if we were to reveal the story and add improvements later. Let’s just say, without getting into details, Outcast 2's story is plausable. Especially if you played Outcast from the beginning to the end. But the most important thing is that you don’t have to know Outcast to play the sequel. As Outcast 2 has a completely new storyline. Of course we do have planned suprises and aspects that the gamers will like. Outcast is a game that plays around the storyline and the characters, Outcast 2 will carry this further through.’

new lifeforms
Outcast will feature a group of new lifeforms. ‘It is certain that new lifeforms will appear in Outcast 2. About a new race I can’t say anything. An interesting aspect is that all known characters from the first episode will reappear, including Cutter Slade of course, but in a different context. You will recognize them because of the same personalities, but they will react, depending on the context, differently. You will be witnessing the interaction between the different characters and see their personalities grow. We have done enormous work on the characterdesign. In Outcast you had a number of characters as baseset and everybody looked like each other. You won’t find that in Outcast 2. Every character which has to do with Outcast 2's storyline will look different and unique, with an individual design and their own clothes etc. That means that many unique figures will inhabit the world of Outcast 2. There will also be more female characters in Outcast 2. We all found that Outcast was to inhabited with male characters.’

The action in Outcast 2 will take place in the world of Adelpha but, clears Sauer, all area’s are redesigned because the player will not visit it on the same way: ‘some area’s you couln’t visit in the first part but now... sorry here I have to stop.’

The team is thinking hard about the inclusion of multiplay capabilities. ‘Outcast 2 will certainly be released for the PlayStation 2. The question is: will the Internet be available when Outcast 2 will be released? It’s to early to give a good answer’, says Sauer.

farewell voxels
‘The team has built a completely new engine for Outcast 2.’ says Sauer. ‘Our research and development team has spent already 10 months of work on the Himalaya-engine and we have some promising prototypes running. For graphics we don’t use the voxel engine, but a polygon engine. There are two reasons for this. One, the pc industry has massively choosen for polygons and has lauched a big amount of hardware that accelerates polygons. Not that voxels are that bad, but to put up a fight against a complete industry is a hard jog and pc’s aren’t optimized to handle voxels efficiently. We think that voxels will return in the future, as the physics for every partical has to be calculated to give a virtual world shape. The second reason is that the PlayStation 2 is capable of displaying polygons with awesome speeds. Displaying of thousand of tiny polygons give the same amount of details as voxels, but this time with a regular beat of 60 frames per second. I’m hearing the voxel fans calling that Outcast 2 will look bad, but I can say that in Outcast 2 Adelpha will look as it should without technocal barriers, which we already conquered.’

The release of Outcast 2 is planned for the middle of next year.

This preview was taken from the PC Zone Benelux - Translated to english by Alastor - Edited by Benny