Colonists, Halcyon needs you!
If you’re planning a trip to the capitalist dystopia of Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds, then you’ll want to know how to kickstart your career as a minimum-wage nobody. Luckily, we’re here to help with our guide to getting started in The Outer Worlds.
Character Creation
The Outer Worlds’ character creation is nothing new, though it has one or two unique features.
Your Attributes are the basic strengths of your character. As this is an Obsidian game with lots of skill-based interactions, we recommend focusing on the Mind and Personality attributes, which will open up your conversation options and give you advanced lockpicking and hacking skills for maximum loot.
Next, your Skills are tiered in groups of 20 points, so keep that in mind as you select them to maximise your returns. You’ll choose 2 skill categories at this stage and they’re functionally similar to Fallout’s tag skills.
Finally, Aptitudes provide a couple of final tweaks to your character. You can use these to double-down on specific areas of your character for utility or flavour.
Welcome to Halcyon
After you land, you’ll be set loose on the wilds. Follow the linear path and pay attention to gameplay tips as they appear. Loot as you go—you’ll want to get into the habit and it’s a key way of finding weapons and armour in The Outer Worlds.
You’ll soon encounter your first NPC. Head up to him and start a conversation. This game is conversation-heavy in the classic RPG style, so you’ll see how your stats affect the conversation as you progress through it. Choosing skill-based options will often reward you with XP, too, but your skills will need to be high enough to unlock said options.
After your chat, head outside to encounter some hostiles. This is a great chance to use both your stealth and your TTD, which is a hybrid of bullet-time and the VATS system of Fallout. Using TTD will help you target Weakspots (like human heads) and will show you an analysis of your foe.
You can dodge by double-tapping the jump button in a lateral direction.
This section will also throw you a few locked items, so you can test your lock-picking and hacking skills. There are no mini-games here: all you need is the appropriate skill level and either Mag-Picks and Bypass Shunts, respectively.
Securing a Promotion
When you get to your objective, you should receive a prompt to level up. You’ll be able to upgrade your skills and you’ll receive a new Perk Point to assign every other level.
Open your character screen to choose which Skills to level up. Remember that new bonuses come with every 20 points in a Skill. If you’re wondering what to upgrade in The Outer Worlds, then refer to some of the advice we gave during character creation. Select your Perk much like you did your Aptitudes.
You can receive Flaws through general gameplay, though you’ll always have the option to accept or reject them. Accepting a Flaw gives you a new Perk Point to spend. After gaining 5 Perks, you’ll open up new Perks to choose from.The game will start to open up as you reach Edgewater. By then, you should be equipped to handle The Outer Worlds. If you’re wondering how to fast travel in The Outer Worlds, just open up your Map to get started. Use it often so you’re not traipsing through cleared areas.
So what kind of character will you build in The Outer Worlds? Comment below and head over to the Green Man Gaming Community Site to see what our other gamers had to say.
