A few weeks ago, Nightdive Studios and Atari revealed during the Opening Night Live showcase for Gamescom that it was working on a remaster of LucasArts' 1997 first-person shooter Outlaws, as well as its expansion Handful of Missions.
Featuring a Wild West setting, satisfying gunplay, and spectacular cutscene animations, the shooter is arguably one of the more underrated titles in the iconic developer's back catalogue, but understandably struggled at the time of release to find a mainstream audience, due to launching within a year of more advanced 3D shooters like Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II and Quake II.
As a result, it makes total sense to us why Nightdive Studios would want to give it the remaster treatment now, with this new version being an opportunity to give it another chance in the sun, while bringing it up to today's standards with 4K 120FPS visuals, modern gamepad support, and achievements.
Of course, though, like with every remaster like this, we couldn't help but wonder what the original developers thought of the game they worked on being brought back in this way, so we immediately decided to reach out to Stephen Shaw, one of the lead designers on the 1997 title. Luckily for us, he was more than happy to offer his thoughts and answer any other lingering questions we may have had about the original title.
According to Shaw, he "wasn't aware of [an Outlaws' remaster] actually being in development", meaning that he is unfortunately not involved in the brand new version. Nevertheless, he doesn't seem all that upset at being left out of the project, but seems to be genuinely happy to see the game get a fresh lick of paint.
"I'm glad to see it get remastered," he told Time Extension. "Especially given the big following it has on the Facebook Outlaws Group where they play multiplayer a lot. I'm not certain about all the updates they made. The graphic resolutions are great, but like some of the Monkey Island remasters, I hope they have an option to switch back to the original sprites."
Obviously, having grabbed Shaw's attention, we couldn't just leave the questioning there, so we also asked him for a bit of trivia about the making of the original PC game. In particular, we wanted to know more about whether it was a challenge to pitch a Western FPS at the time, and how the game ended up becoming one of only two titles to use the Jedi Engine, alongside Dark Forces.
Shaw responded, "It was certainly a challenge. There were concerns about the popularity level of Westerns at the time. Daron Stinett, the other lead designer, had proposed the project originally as a blending of Dark Forces tech and SCUMM adventure themes with the Western genre, and I had just finished Full Throttle and he connected with me.
"I had always been a fan of Spaghetti Westerns, and did the story, character, and theme work based on the movies I grew up on. No one other than Daron from the Dark Forces team was involved in the project. The rest of the Dark Forces team went on to working on Jedi Knight with Justin Chin and Ray Gresko."
Interestingly, as Shaw told us, though the game did use the Jedi Engine as a base, it doesn't exactly share the exact same codebase as Dark Forces, but was instead almost fully rewritten, to suit the purposes of the project.
"The Outlaws engine is really a full rewrite since it was the first networking game," said Shaw. "We kept the tools and basic file formats and the ray casting rendering tech, but Steve Ash rewrote a lot of the rendering and added support for new tech such as double adjoins, the sniper scope, etc.
"All the gameplay logic was also rewritten in object-oriented style and used memory management and dead-reckoning network architecture to synchronize with the objects across clients. The codebase generally looked completely different than the Dark Forces codebase. Dark Forces tech was written in more of a console game style with a load into large contiguous memory approach with purge and repeat. Outlaws used more dynamic memory allocation as the game ran."
With all this incredible work behind the scenes, you may be wondering why this updated engine was never use again in any other projects, and to answer that question, we have to look back again at the time the game was released.
During this period, most PC shooters were already making the jump to full 3D, with the market for games like Outlaws being thought to be on the decline. As a result, Shaw states there wasn't any plans to do anything else with the engine after Outlaws, with the expectation being that its would be LucasArts' last "2.5D" title before everything moved to 3D.
For those interested in trying out Nightdive Studios' remaster of the '90s FPS, Outlaws + Handful of Missions: Remaster will apparently launch in Q4 2025 across Windows PC (Steam, GOG, Humble Bundle, and the Epic Game Store), PlayStation 4|5, Xbox One and Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch.