The Outer Worlds: Every Little Detail We Learned From Playing

The Outer Worlds is one of the most hotly anticipated games of Fall 2019, and for good reason. It marks a return to form for Obsidian Entertainment, launching a brand new IP seemingly inspired by their work on games like Fallout New Vegas.

We recently had the chance to get some hands-on time with the upcoming sci-fi RPG, and we’re now eager to play more. With roughly two hours of playtime, we jotted down every little detail that we could glean, all for your perusing pleasure.

You can read our full impressions here, but if you’re just looking for some quick facts to look over in bullet point form, this is where you’ll want to be.

Continue down to see details about The Outer Worlds gameplay and story, and you can also check out our interview with the game’s Senior Designer, Brian Hines.

The Outer Worlds: Gameplay Details

• Three types of ammo; light, heavy, and energy
• I was able to use three different guns in my playthrough, a sniper rifle with a long-range scope, a laser Gatling gun, and a hefty pistol.
• By pressing RB you can instantly use your emergency Medicinal Inhaler, if you have items for it. This won’t instantly heal a chunk of health, but restores your health over a few seconds.
• There’s a “Botched” section in your quest guide for quests you’ve messed up.
• On the equipment screen, press down the left stick to compare weapons to your current one.
• Companions have their own inventory, and you can trade items between them and yourself, basically making them easy storage.
• You can command companions to use their abilities by hitting left or right on the D-Pad. These abilities will automatically be used on the nearest enemy.
• Each time you level up you gain another point that you can put into perks.
• You can switch weapons quickly by tapping Y, or hold down Y to bring up a weapon wheel.
• You can fast travel to any town or major location you’ve previously visited.
• Tactical Time Dilation, on the LB button, lets you slow down time significantly and aim. It’s kind of like VATS but with manual aiming. Recharges very quickly, especially if you invest in perks for it.
• You can steal practically anything in town, but be careful not to get caught.
• You can use the Charm stat to convince characters to trust you, in one case my Charm convinced the leader of Fallbrook, Catherine Malin, to give me a quest.
• Certain enemies will have obvious weak spots, like Mantisaur Soldiers have a glowing green node on their stomach.
• You get experience any time you use something like Charm, Lie, or Persuade in conversation.
• Like in the Fallout games, sometimes when you kill enemies they’ll explode into bloody messes with body parts flying off.
• In addition to shops, there are vending machines that you can use to buy new items, armor, ammo, and more.
• Many melee weapons have different effects on them, for example, I bought a Plasma Cutter in Fallbrook that can cause fire damage to enemies when you hit them.
• You can melee with ranged weapons, but it does almost no damage compared to using a melee weapon.
• Weapons and combat have really good sound design, making each one feel weighty, even for laser weapons.
• You can use Workbenches to apply mods to your weapons or Tinker with them, which will increase their damage output at the cost of bits.
• At the Workbench I applied a mod to my pistol that made it shoot acid rounds, which would slowly drain an enemy’s health when the rounds hit them.
• You can get experience for discovering new things, like discovering a vending machine netted me 300 XP.
• Lockpicking is done automatically, there’s no mini-game involved, but you’ll still need sufficient lockpicking skill.
• Some areas will have environmental hazards, like one area I ran through that had giant pools of bubbling acid that would damage any friend or foe that wandered into them.

The Outer Worlds: Story and World Details

• Monarch is just one planet you visit in the game; a planet where terraforming went wrong and it’s filled with strange rock formations and geology.
• Monarch appears to have four major towns; Cascadia, Fallbrook, Amber Heights, and Stellar Bay.
• The two cities I visited, Fallbrook and Stellar Bay, both had a rustic feel to them. They were definitely sci-fi, but still managed to have that kind of retro 50s feel as well.
• Fallbrook is a gambling “get away” city, at least according to Mortimer Bell at the city’s front gate.
• Companions will often comment on locations/objects, like talking about Fallbrook’s reputation when you enter the city
• Companions will interject in conversation if they know a character.
• There are multiple ways to approach quests; for example with the Slaughterhouse Clive quest I could just barge in guns blazing to kill Clive in his factory, I could sneak in using the sewers, or I could talk to a shop owner and get a fake employee ID.
• Using my fake employee ID I could waltz right into Clive’s Boarst factory, however, when inside there was a kind of “awareness” meter that would constantly drain. When the meter is completely drained enemies became suspicious of me. My disguise failed and I ended up in a massive shootout with the factory’s guards and robots.
• One option I had for the quest was to simply sabotage the Boarst factory, and one way I did the was by feeding their cystypigs 4000% extra.
• Killing Clive lowered my reputation with the C&P Boarst Factory faction and made them “Off-Put.” However, it did allow me to complete the quest and raise my reputation with Fallbrook.
• After killing Slaughterhouse Clive I was able to bribe Catherine Malin, the leader of Fallbrook, and buy access to a VIP suite for 2480 Bits. This gave me a location I could dump items into for storage, rest at, and based on the conversation, presumably murder people there without anyone batting an eye.
• Loading screens have a wealth of in-game lore, from pictures of the anatomy of alien creatures to posters for fictional in-universe movies.
• There are plenty of terminals to look at, providing little clues and context for locations and characters, similarly to the Fallout games.
• You can talk to your companions at any time, and sometimes this will open up a new quest specifically for them. For example, at one point I talked to Nyoka and received a quest where I had to track down the grave of an old ally of hers, to dig up a precious item. The quest let me learn a bit more about Nyoka, but ultimately I wasn’t able to finish it as the next step required me to go to a different planet, something I didn’t have time for.
• You can discover a lot of quests just by wandering around an talking to NPCs. There were three quests I didn’t have time for that I easily could have skipped right over if I hadn’t made a point to talk to everyone.

The Outer Worlds launches on Oct. 25 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, with a Nintendo Switch version coming later on.