Outcast: Second Contact

The player controls the protagonist Cutter Slade around the alien world of Adelpha in a third-person or first-person view. Only two mouse buttons are used. The right mouse button aims the player's weapon, and the other is context-sensitive (for example, standing in front of a non-player character makes the mouse button initiate conversation, while running around has the mouse button make Cutter jump). The player can walk, run, jump, crawl, and climb onto virtually any ledge Cutter can reach with a jump.

Aside from the tutorial area, the player is free to move to any region of Adelpha as they please through the travel gates known as daokas. The player can drop teleport beacons from the F-LINK gadget to instantly move between areas inside a region, but these beacons do not work between regions. The player can acquire a twon-ha, a beast of burden that can be ridden, which makes traversing the vast regions much quicker, either by buying one or doing certain quests that reward the player with one.

S. government sends a probe to Adelpha, an alien world in a parallel universe. The probe starts transmitting video images of the world back to Earth. Minutes into the mission, an alien life form discovers the probe and damages it, causing an unforeseen backlash of energy that creates a black hole, threatening Earth.

S. Navy SEAL Cutter Slade is given the job of escorting three scientists (William Kauffmann, Anthony Xue and Marion Wolfe) on a mission to this alien world to repair the probe and close the black hole. Arriving in Adelpha, Cutter is separated from the three scientists and, to his surprise, is hailed by the natives as their messiah, the Ulukai.

Outcast's graphics engine is mainly a combination of a ray casting (heightmap) engine, used to render the landscape, and a texture mapping polygon engine used to render objects. The "Engine Programming" section of the credits in the manual has several subsections related to graphics, among them: "Landscape Engine", "Polygon Engine", "Water & Shadows Engine" and "Special effects Engine". Although Outcast is often cited as a forerunner of voxel technology, this is somewhat misleading. The game does not actually model three-dimensional volumes of voxels.

Instead, it models the ground as a surface, which may be seen as being made up of voxels. The ground is decorated with objects that are modeled using texture-mapped polygons. When Outcast was developed, the term "voxel engine", when applied to video games, commonly referred to a ray casting engine (for example the Voxel Space engine). On the engine technology page of the game's website, the landscape engine is also referred to as the "Voxels engine".

Review aggregation website GameRankings assessed an 81% average score.

Writing in 2009, GamesRadar+ praised the game as "revolutionary", noting that its freedom to explore a three-dimensional open world preceded Grand Theft Auto III by two years.

In 1999, a sequel, called Outcast II: The Lost Paradise, was being developed by Appeal for the PlayStation 2, PC, and GameCube. During development, Appeal went bankrupt and development ceased. Appeal had been requesting funds from their publisher to help finish the game for release but this was not granted.

Since around 2003 the fan-group Eternal Outcasts had developed a free sequel called Open Outcast. The project initially used the Gothic and later the Crystal Space 3D engines but has made the step to the CryEngine 2. 1) which can be played together with the Crysis Wars demo version. In 2013 the project was moved to CryEngine 3 to be developed as a standalone game rather than a mod.