On April 7th 2014, completely out of nowhere, a Kickstarter campaign was started by the original creators, now going under the name of Fresh3D.
Bringing new life in the franchise
They explained that in secret they bought back the rights for Outcast and they wanted to re-release the original game with updated HD graphics, new features, bug fixes, higher resolutions, release on current consoles and so much more. But that required a lot of money and since all of the creators finances went to obtaining the rights of Outcast, they needed to start a Kickstarter campaign. During the Kickstarter I came in contact with one of the developers and helped out getting the news about the Outcast Reboot HD in the world. I contacted a lot of Dutch and English gaming websites explaining what is about to happen with the revival of Outcast and the Kickstarter program and asked if they could dedicate an article to it. Next to that, I created various wallpapers and pictures devoted to the Outcast reboot to get the attention even further out in the world. On my own gaming page (quickssilvergaming website) and Twitter I posted a lot of articles, pictures and updates about the Kickstarter to spread the word on the game’s reboot.
The Kickstarter campaign did very well with 5,194 fans backing up the project with a pledge of $268,964 in total while the developers needed $600,000 to complete the project. In the end, unfortunately the Kickstarter for the Outcast Reboot HD failed and the funds needed weren’t met.
All is not lost
After the Kickstarter failed the developers needed to take a step back, rethink their strategy and come up with new ideas on what to do next. Luckily a good thing came out from the Kickstarter campaign: Outcast got enough support for the Greenlight program of Steam’s gamingplatform!
So the next step for the creators was pretty obvious: Further develop the original game with graphical upgrades, bugfixes, higher resolution, smoother gameplay, some additions like controller support and then release it on Steam and even on Good Old Games (gog.com)! During this period, one of the creators of Fresh3D approached me asking for advice on the above topics and even allowing me to test two builds of the game with me providing bug reports and feedback to them. This was an amazing opportunity and it really is an eye-opening experience to see the changes being done to the game with the release of every new build. When the final build was done, the developers released Outcast 1.1 on Steam and GoG.com and I, I was promoting the game everywhere I could online. It was in that time one of the biggest gaming website, Kotaku.com, created an article about the Outcast 1.1 version and quoting my post from my quickssilvergaming website where I explain the original creators intentions and the Kickstarter program. See this link for the original Kotaku post or see the three pictures below for the article :
So eventually, Outcast 1.1 was released on 18 Dec, 2014. It is the latest version of Outcast obtainable, created by the original developers of Outcast.
Article written by Roy van der Aalst