Obsidian Entertainment’s The Outer Worlds is an open-world RPG that takes place in the deep capitalist recesses of space. If you’re just getting into it, here are some things to know.

Character Creation

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There are two main things that you need to focus on during character creation: aptitude and attributes. Aptitude is your character’s job before they were cryogenically frozen. You can basically ignore this, or choose based on how you want to roleplay, because the aptitude only gives a small bonus (one point in a skill, a small buff to certain items, or a small damage resistance).

Attributes are a lot more important. They affect vital components of your build that you may not be able to modify elsewhere, such as carry weight, reload speed, or headshot damage. They also affect starting skills, but you’ll have plenty of skill points as you level up, so you should choose them for the unique bonuses they give. The attributes you choose will vary on how you want to build your character, but Intelligence, Charm, and Temperament are usually safe choices if you don’t know how you want to go.

Combat

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Pretty much immediately after you make your character, you are thrust into a new and very violent world. Luckily, you are prepared for whatever is thrown at you. You will gain a variety of weapons to fight with, which mostly fall into a few categories. There are melee weapons, which are divided into one-handed and two-handed (which you focus on is mostly up to personal preference – one-handed weapons swing faster, two-handed ones do more damage and have a higher crit chance). Ranged weapons are divided into pistols (close to medium range), long guns (medium to far range), and heavy weapons (things like flamethrowers and grenade launchers). There are also a variety of science weapons, which have unique effects.

Damage is affected by critical hits (bonus crit damage is given by Intelligence) and headshots or other weak point damage (controlled by Perception). If you are travelling with companions, your Inspiration skill will increase the damage they do to enemies.

Speaking of companions, your Determination skill will increase their health and yours, letting you more easily survive combat. Each companion also has unique abilities that you can have them use in combat. The cooldowns for these abilities are fairly long, but can be adjusted as you level up.

You also have an ability left over from your time in cryosleep called Tactical Time Dilation. This lets you slow down time, giving you the advantage in combat. It also lets you apply status effects to enemies when you hit them in different parts of their body, such as blinding them with a headshot. You have a meter that tracks how much you can use this ability; moving or shooting drains it faster than standing still.

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Skill Points

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Every time you level up, you get an allotment of skill points to assign to your various skills. Skills are divided into seven categories: melee, ranged, defense, dialogue, stealth, tech, and leadership. You can assign skill points to these categories, which adds a point to each skill in the category, up to 50 points. Once a category reaches 50 points, you can add points to the individual skills. For instance, if you specialize in one-handed melee weapons you can add points to the melee category and it will put a point into each melee skill under 50, but once your melee skill reaches 50 you can add points to one-handed directly.

Skills unlock certain abilities at intervals of 20 points. The abilities for melee and ranged are fairly simple: they make your skill with the appropriate weapon better in various ways. In the defense category, the dodge and block skills are not that useful, but the block skill passively increases armor when using a melee weapon, making it a useful skill for certain builds. The dialogue category abilities mostly let you apply minor status effects to different types of creatures, but the individual skills contain plenty of non-combat potential. The stealth category increases your ability to sneak, as well as hack computers and open locks, gaining you access to a lot of areas you wouldn’t have otherwise.

Tech is a bit of a catch all for skills; medicine makes your healing inhaler better and gives a 20% damage boost against humans at the maximum level, science improves the tinkering ability and boosts plasma and shock damage, and engineering mainly helps with armor and weapon repair and gives a damage bonus against automechanicals. Leadership makes your companions more effective in various ways.

Perks

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Every two levels you get a perk point, which lets you gain a unique ability. At first, you only have access to the first level of perks, but once you spend five perk points, the next level unlocks. You can also gain perks by completing certain quests or accepting flaws. Flaws are entirely optional disadvantages that you can take in exchange for a perk point. For example, if you cripple your legs too often by throwing yourself down flights of stairs (hypothetically) the game might offer you the choice to take a permanent penalty to running speed in exchange for a perk point. You can take it or, if you decide that speed is more essential to your character’s build than an extra perk, you can decline.

Your companions get perks when they level up too. The companion perk system is a little simpler than the player’s, with a few stat increases and a unique companion perk at each level.

That should be enough to get you started. Assign those points carefully, and you'll be raging against the machine like a pro.

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