We Played The Outer Worlds 2: Hands-On Preview

No two playthroughs will be the same; this is a philosophy many great RPGs and games follow. And one of the best publishers to push this philosophy forward has always been Obsidian Entertainment. Their long-awaited sequel, The Outer Worlds 2, looks to be no exception to this kind of gameplay, featuring many of the same great RPG aspects you can expect from an Obsidian game. There is a lot to look forward to with The Outer Worlds 2, as it retains the sharp wit, good storytelling, and funny dialogue of The Outer Worlds while tightening up several gameplay aspects.

Thanks to the lovely people at Obsidian and Microsoft, I had the privilege to play a small demo of The Outer Worlds 2. The demo wasn’t very long, but it was enough to see a lot of what we can expect in the full game. The best thing is that after playing it three times to familiarize myself with all of The Outer Worlds 2’s systems, I can safely say that your experience will not be the same experience someone else will have.

The Outer Worlds 2: Video Hands-On

Character Creation

The first major change from its predecessor is that Obsidian overhauled the character creator for The Outer Worlds 2. In terms of aesthetics for your character, all the classic character options are here for you to customize a character in any way you wish. The changes start with choosing your character’s background. The choices are Ex-Convict, Gambler, Lawbringer, Professor, Renegade, and Roustabout. Your choice heavily influences the dialogue you’ll hear throughout the game, as well as some of the things you can do both in the world and in your dialogue choices. I tried out a few of them, and almost immediately saw differences in how the NPCs interact with you, which is always a nice little touch.

Next up are traits, which have a more meaningful impact on your gameplay. There are ten to choose from, with each giving a small buff to your character. Interestingly, you can select up to two traits, but if you do, you must choose a negative trait to compensate for the power creep. The traits are as follows:

• Brawny – Lets you perform feats of strength and knock over enemies in combat by sliding and sprinting into them.
• Brilliant – Gives you intelligence to solve problems and easily pick up new skills. Also lets you pick one additional skill in skill selection. Plus, all specialized skills start with two points. 
• Heroic – Gives -20% companion Ability Charge Time.
• Innovative – Get twice the amount of items when crafting.
• Lucky – 5% Critical chance.
• Nimble – 25% Crouch Speed and Combat Sprint Speed.
• Resilient – Prevents death for three seconds the first time you would die in each combat sequence.
• Suave – Gives a 10% discount at all vendors. If you get a bounty placed on your head, it must be two times higher than usual for you to be considered an Outlaw.
• Witty – Your reputation with any faction can’t go below Neutral. Also prevents penalties that you would incur for having a negative reputation.

The three negative traits are:

• Abrasive – Your reputation with any faction cannot increase above Neutral, and prevents bonuses you would otherwise gain from having a positive reputation.
• Dumb – In skill selection, you are locked out of 5 of the 12 skills, and you can never have points added to those skills.
• Sickly – Negative 15% Base Health and Toxicity Crash Threshold.

Next up is skill selection! You can choose up to two of these skills, or three if you choose Brilliant as your trait:

• Engineering – Can fix mechanical systems at or below your skill level and 1% damage resistance.
• Explosives – 10% explosive damage and 1% resistance to explosives.
• Guns – 10% ranged damage and 1% armor penetration.
• Hack – Hack devices at your skill level and +10% damage to Automechanicals.
• Leadership – 10% Companion Damage and Health.
• Lockpicking – Pick locks at your skill level and 1% evasion chance.
• Melee – 10% Melee Damage and 2.5% damage reduction while blocking. 
• Medical – +7 toxicity crash threshold and 10% damage to creatures.
• Observation – You can find hidden objects at your skill level, and 15% increase in weak spot damage.
• Science – +7 gadget energy meter max and 10% more stacks of non-Physical Damage types.
• Sneak – +35% sneak attack damage and -2.5% NPC awareness detection rate.
• Speech – You can select speech checks with difficulty at or below your skill level; adds +10% damage to humans.

When all of this is selected, give your character a name and off you go on your first mission as an Earth Directorate Commander!

The Outer Worlds 2: First Mission

While there are a few things I saw in my time with The Outer Worlds 2 that I cannot talk about, I can briefly explain what the first mission is about without revealing any spoilers. After meeting your team on your spaceship and getting briefed on the mission, you are sent off to the planet to take care of a mega-corporation that seems to have amassed a power that hasn’t come naturally. Dropping down on the planet, it seems unnaturally quiet except for the audio of a recording playing in the area. You can choose several ways to progress forward when the security finally activates. Of course, you can fight your way through with your pistol, or sneak around in some ducts to get past the main gate, or even convince one of the guards over the intercom to lower the defenses. Right off the bat, you already have a lot of gameplay choices.

A bit further, the game gives you an even bigger choice to make when it asks you to go down one of two paths while your companions Pascal and Niles go down the other path. One path leans more into stealth gameplay while the other is more run-and-gun, but you can choose either path, regardless of your current traits and skills. The paths vary in their approaches and lead to different scenes playing out. For instance, on the sneak path, there is a console to shut down the robot enemies. If you specced into hacking and engineering, you can instead choose to change the targets of the robots to the enemies. This persists throughout the level, and even if the game is not terribly hard, it helps in the last few rooms of the mission where the turrets and robots fight beside you. On the other hand, the run-and-gun section will eventually give you grenades, which do large amounts of damage to groups of enemies. So a boon either way.

As you go through the level — which lasts about an hour — you will also be introduced to a few gameplay additions such as a time dilation gadget which slows down time and gives you bullet time to help fend off enemies, a health regeneration device (which you can’t spam due to toxicity levels), and a few other things like melee weapons and other guns.

I enjoyed my time with this slice of The Outer Worlds 2, as it sets up an interesting sequel. Unfortunately, beyond experimenting with the abilities and passives, I couldn’t earn enough experience points in the build I played to level up skills. Still, it most certainly has piqued my interest in the game. One of my biggest issues with the first game was that it was pretty short overall, so more Outer Worlds is always a good thing in my book.

The Outer Worlds 2 releases on October 29th for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.