Outcast: A New Beginning releases in March 2024

Publisher THQ Nordic has announced Outcast: A New Beginning will release on 15th March, 2024.

The sci-fi action-adventure sequel sees original protagonist Cutter Slade return to the alien planet Adelpha in a bid to help the local Talans fend off invading humanoid robots and discover why he was sent back there.

The game was announced back in 2021 as Outcast 2: A New Beginning, but developer Appeal Studios dropped the 2 to make the game more approachable.

"We really want to make this approachable and accessible for everybody," producer Andreas Schmiedecker told me at a digital preview event last week. "We want to emphasise that you don't have to have played the first one, you don't need to know the story [of the original game]."

Executive producer Michael Paeck said the expected playtime is 30 to 35 hours to get through the story, but there's plenty of side-missions in the open-world to spend time on. At the beginning of the game, Slade gets a jetpack which he uses to traverse Adelpha, and I was assured by Paeck that everywhere on the map, bar some invading spaceships high up in the sky, can be reached on-foot.

The world of Adelpha is saturated in colour and combat is purposefully over-the-top and souped up. "We really want to keep it light in the sense that you don't have to optimise your build, or think about numbers, or grind for resources and whatnot," Schmiedecker told me. "We don't want to artifically pad runtime, we want you to get to the fun easily."

The game's original tone was less light-hearted, however. The over-the-top combat didn't match with the game's initial visual aesthetic or story, so the decision was made to make it brighter. "Suddenly, by being able to experience it, we actually saw how much these colours really changed the mood that you see and how much more fun it was," Paeck said. The changes happened around the time COVID lockdowns were in effect, and people were struggling with isolation.

"First the story had a bit more drama in the sense it had cruel things in there and then we said, 'hey do we really need all this stuff?' We have so much [going on] around us anyway. Let's make it a more positive experience."

I've been able to dabble a little with a preview build of the game and I have to heartily agree - dialling back the seriousness and giving the player the tools to make combat chaotic made the experience a lot of fun. Schmiedecker namedropped Bruce Willis and Indiana Jones as the type of dry-witted 90s protagonists Slade embodies, and The Fifth Element strikes me as a good movie equivalent for Outcast: A New Beginning. Flamboyant and here to have some fun.

Outcast: A New Beginning will be out on 15th March, 2024. The game has an RRP of £49.99/€59.99/$59.99 on PC, and £59.99/€69.99/$69.99 on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.