Name That Game 29!
And now back to our regularly scheduled Name That Game. That’s right, I’m not cheating with this one, nor am I trying to make some sort of weird point about game development! It’s just “guess the game” time! Yipee!
This is another one of those games that about ten people played, but all ten of them loved. It came out in 1999 and failed not only because it was a third-person action-adventure game when everyone was going nutso over first-person shooters, but also because it used a unique rendering technique that caused certain parts of the game to appear quite pretty while other parts…did not. And it didn’t get marketed for crap either, which also didn’t help.
Name and developer, please. Your reward? I won’t throw you into my torture chamber!
PS: Warren, I think you’ve been retired long enough. Feel free to resume guessing.
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IIRC, it was called Outcast.
Memorable attributes: Mature plotline, voxel landscapes, wonky control scheme.
Forgot to mention the developer: Appeal. The publisher: Infogrames (now Atari).
Correct! You are spared the torture chamber. For now. And the voxel engine was the “unique rendering technique” I mentioned earlier.
Ahh, sweet voxels!
We long for that distant day when you return, like King Arthur, to rescue your people from tyranny. Return, we pray, and save us from those cruel and inelegant polygons who everywhere hold sway.
Yeah, we really got feature-locked, didn’t we? Yet another of Quake’s legacies. Learning DirectX has really driven this home for me; the rules of hardware acceleration are basically THOU SHALT CREATE ARRAYS OF POLYGONS and THOU SHALT NOT CHANGE SAID ARRAYS OF POLYGONS, INSTEAD THOU SHALT MOVE THEM USING MATRIX MATH and THOU SHALT MULTITEXTURE THEM, with the implicit extra commandment of THOU SHALT NOT DO ANYTHING ELSE BECAUSE IT ISN’T SUPPORTED.
I am actually seriously thinking about taking a stab at a voxel engine for 3D RPG That Really Needs A Name. The problem is and always shall be that voxels look really, really blocky unless you make them very small and then you’ve got far more data to keep track of per object than if it were polygonal.
On the other hand, such an engine would easily support you blowing a hole in a dungeon wall (or floor!) to reach an otherwise inaccessible area. Which would be very cool and give lots of verisimilitude.
Didn’t you do outcast before?
Outcast 2 was supposed (iirc) to be polygonal, and for ps2 only.. again, iirc the publisher killed off the project and the studio before they got it out though.
No, I haven’t used Outcast before. Though I am having to scan my previous list now to make sure I’m not duplicating.
Funny, I remember some talk about how cool the water looked etc. Oh well, probably some other site =)