Various Thoughts

Going with an Easily Distracted build ended up perfectly viable and the remainder of the game turned out much like the beginning. The skill check thresholds rise in sensible increments, so as long you do all the sidequests there shouldn’t be any fear of missing ones for the skills you’ve chosen to focus on apart from a handful of outliers which mostly have bypass methods:

• Market Station + 2nd Planet (Level 10-11)
  • Low 5, High 8, Hack/Engineering outlier at 11
• ACS Undisputed Claim + Praetor (Level 19)
  • Low 7, High 11, Medical outlier at 14, Guns/Science/Hack/Lockpick/Explosives outlier at 17
• Various Sidequests + Cloister (Level 25-26)
  • Low 7, High 11
• Various Sidequests + Archive (Level 30)
  • Low 9, High 14, various outliers at 20
• Horizon Point (Level 30)
  • Low 13, High 18

I plan to play through the game at least once more with the skills I didn’t take this time around (Guns, Speech, Lockpick, Leadership, & Medical), but first I think I’ll go back and try to complete Veilguard.

I’ve just completed Outer Worlds 2‘s first planet now with an ‘Easily Distracted’ build (Science, Engineering, Observation, Hacking, Explosives) and so far the game has been a perfectly decent open-world RPG.

Tonally and visually it’s quite similar to its predecessor while mechanically, at least as far as character-building goes, it seems a bit more limited. Without the Flaw mentioned above a character is essentially forced to focus on only two-three skills, which means there will be some content you can’t see on a single playthrough.

In my case there were quite a number of locked boxes and several doors that I simply could not open (no Lockpick) along with a few quests/tasks that could not be completed either in beneficial ways (no Speech skill) or at all (no Medicine or Leadership skill). However, there were many things that I could only access with Hack, Engineering, Explosives, or Observation while the highest check I saw was for 5 Explosives (not including the 11 Lockpick on your ship that can be bypassed) on a door that had a key for it lying around. Most checks on this planet were for 2-3 with a handful of 4’s.

I’m hoping the checks don’t exponentially ramp up next planet so I can stay ahead of them by over-leveling through excessive exploration (hit level 10 just before entering the Relay), or else I may have to restart with a conventional 3-skill build.

Positives so far:
– Very similar to the first game in tone and appearance.
– Multiple ways to approach most things.
– Lots of character building options.
– Ammunition is plentiful.
– Nice mix of tracked and untracked quests.
– Loot hidden everywhere.
– Ditched the equipment durability system.

Negatives so far:
– Very similar to the first game in tone and appearance.
– The map is bad at showing where you can explore.
– Restrictive skill choices and no respec option.
– Enemies seem to have an abnormally large amount of health.
– More than a few massive empty spaces.
– Ditched the ability to dodge.

A combination of New Vegas and Bioshock with a No Man’s Sky aesthetic, this game takes place in a hellish corporation-first reality quite similar to our own.

While shorter than it looks based on the navigation map (you’ll spend the vast majority of your time on Terra 2 and Monarch), there’s plenty of stuff to do (despite missing the entire Roseway section I still managed to hit max level at the start of the last area) and quests to complete. Quests which are good at giving choices (you can play as a savior, a money-hungry mercenary, a corporate bootlicker, or any combination thereof), with even combat-centric ones often being accomplishable through stealth.

There’s not much reason to skip the combat though. It’s pretty fluid with a more active iteration of the VATS system, only really stumbling when it comes to dodging… which is not implemented well at all. The companions are also pretty good at killing things while not suiciding themselves.

The loot situation is a definite low point however, bogged-down as it is with innumerable junk items/consumables and tied to an equipment degradation system. See, you have repair your equipment (fairly often) with parts acquired from breaking down equipment. This leads to finding a massive number of generic guns laying around which clog up your inventory until you take the time to manually break them down; they should’ve just increased the durability rather than flooding areas with dreck. The ‘unique’ items aren’t very exciting either.

All-in-all a perfectly fine RPG worth checking out if you’re a fan of Bioshock-like messaging or/and happen to see it on sale for $20 or so.