Every choice we made when developing Outcast – A New Beginning had, at its core, one motivation: freedom. It was important to us not to limit where players could go at any point; instead, we gave them the tools to navigate the detailed open world we’ve spent the last few years crafting.
We’re incredibly proud of Outcast’s world and want players to share its richness with us. As players set out across Adelpha, we want to reward them for their curiosity and sense of adventure.
Whether it’s blitzing through an invader base and unlocking a new weapon module, zipping through gliding challenges to earn jetpack upgrades, or simply taking in the sights, we’ve strived to make every second spent on the planet of Adelpha feel meaningful to players.
Traveling in style
Knowing that players would be spending a lot of time in Cutter Slade’s boots, it was important to us that it felt fun to maneuver him through the world. Open-world games often ask players to cross great distances, and it’s our job as developers to ensure that you always feel invigorated by navigating the wilds of Adelpha.
When designing how Cutter moved through the world, we didn’t want to gatekeep fun traversal abilities for later in the game. From early in Outcast – A New Beginning, you can take advantage of Adelpha’s teetering precipices and deep valleys with your gliding suit, swooping across the alien landscape.
As you progress, you’ll unlock abilities that make exploration on the ground feel fluid, too – Cutter’s jet sprint lets you skim across land and water. The jetpack’s boost ability can help you dodge enemy attacks, leap over tricky terrain, and rain down fiery justice on the invading forces.
Meaningful questlines
By offering players the choice to go anywhere at any time, we knew that we had to make Adelpha feel like a cohesive ecosystem, which extended to how our quests work. The sense of deep exploration we’ve aimed for with Cutter’s movement extends to how we designed our quests, with each of the game’s seven villages possessing a story at their core, waiting to be unraveled.
We didn’t want to restrict players to a single path – naturally, helping Adelpha’s native Talans can take several routes. The coastal village of Sappa, the story you can experience in our currently live PS5 demo, gives a great example of how Outcast’s quest system works.
From talking to the fishertalans of Sappa, you’ll find out that the local ventilope tamer has gone missing. As a village who rely on the winged ventilopes for travel and fishing, they’ve fallen into crisis. You can choose how to start helping Sappa – provide a temporary solution by skimming over the water with your jetpack to rustle up fish or make a beeline to the nearest invader base to rescue the tamer.
Once you’ve rescued Sappa’s resident ventilope expert, you’ll find yourself sent down a path that takes you to the far-flung reaches of other villages in a quest to harness an airborne squadron of ventilope bombers that you can call on in combat.
Rewarding exploration
This kind of meaningful progression is at the heart of Outcast- A New Beginning – a tangible reason for players to seek out Adelpha’s further reaches.
As you beat back the off-world invaders and navigate across the verdant – but sometimes hostile – world of Adelpha, you’ll come to trust your arsenal above all else. Rather than give players a fixed selection of weapons, we opted for a nigh-endless selection of modules to fit their playstyle. You can swap out your modules on the fly to suit the situation, customizing your weaponry for each encounter with over 100,000 possible combinations.
It isn’t just conventional weaponry that Cutter has at his disposal – with each village you liberate, you’ll gain access to a new ancient power to help you in your quest to liberate the Talan people.
Honoring patient fans
We’ve been fortunate enough to have an incredibly dedicated fanbase since 1999. Though our game may be called A New Beginning, we wear our history on our sleeve. Many of us at Appeal have been here since the original Outcast broke new ground, and it’s been one of the greatest adventures of our careers to bring Cutter Slade’s journey to current-generation hardware in a way that pays homage to our past with references and easter eggs for the most diehard Outcast fans out there.
Making Outcast accessible to a new generation of players has been equally important to honoring the series’ legacy. With each step of the design process, we questioned how newcomer-friendly our world was while ensuring we celebrated the history we were building on by bringing Outcast back in 2024.
Outcast – A New Beginning releases on March 15, and you can play the game today with a free demo. We hope we’ll see you in Adelpha!
Source: Playstation Blog
—