DGC Ep 421: Outcast (part four)

Dev Game Club

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we complete our series on 1999's Outcast. We talk a bit about the end of the game, the challenge of plate-spinning, gadgets we missed out on for much of the game, and other topics. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary.

Sections played: Finished (Brett)... some more (Tim)

Podcast breakdown: 00:47 Discussion 54:07 Break 54:36 Takeaways/Mailbag

Issues covered: getting captured and losing your stuff, getting some ammo from your subquests, some of the other weapons, the silenced sniper tranquilizer, not fulfilling stealth, a difficult puzzle in the tree world, the deep sound puzzle of the forest world, getting one key from a complicated puzzle and then a physics puzzle, doing what you think is right for your goals, modest budgets vs today's indie and AAA, the lower development cost and the challenge of readability, making big hard decisions to collapse away a problem, market size, the delusion of ship when it's ready vs making what you can by the deadline, the podcast exposing us to some really great games, plate-spinning and tendrils spreading out, imagining the flowcharts, getting to the end of the Motazaar gauntlet, "your key is in another castle," the F-Link gadget and speeding play, the other gadgets, quest system being per-zone, story bits that cover the length of the game, "rules are meant to guide people, not contain them," narrative niceties, memorable and understandable NPCs, the two fishermen, NPC depth, greater empathy vs snark in Cutter Slade, describing the time shifty stuff, running through the story at the end of the game, a bold world structure, motivating and leveraging the connectivity, the voxel terrain, dynamic systems in play, the depth of the narrative space, legacies. Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Indiana Jones, Beyond Good and Evil, Anachronox, Unreal, Nintendo Switch, Breath of the Wild, Shadow of the Colossus, Assassin's Creed (series), Tomb Raider (series), Uncharted (series), Team Ico, Fbrccn, Infogrames, Appeal, Blizzard, Warcraft (series), Dwarf Fortress, The Last Express, The Crying Game, John Carter/A Princess of Mars, Delta Force, Anthony Gallegos, Rebel FM, mysterydip, Pong, Belmont, Mark Garcia, Jedi Starfighter, Republic Commando, Castlevania, Dark Souls 2, BioStats, CalamityNolan, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers.

Next time: TBA!

Links: The Ghost Racing Article

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