Earth Control Commander Ash was sent to resolve a workers' strike on behalf of Auntie's Choice in order to gain favor with the corporate conglomerate. I was a bit of an outlaw and someone who excelled at shooting, picking locks, and talking, and I felt like my character was set up to get a worker-friendly outcome without too much trouble.
I managed to infiltrate the closed establishment and even blackmail the manager in charge before confronting her directly about the workers' strike. I conveyed the workers' demands and hoped that I could convince her to see things my way – after all, I had put a fair amount of points into the speech.
It quickly became clear that no amount of talking could resolve this dispute. In the manager's opinion, any concessions she might make would prevent the factory from meeting its target. Someone with engineering or hacking skills might be able to solve this problem by fixing the equipment in the factory, but my character is not cut out for that. My character was good at three things and I had already exhausted the hacking and talking options.
So Commander Ash solved the problem the only way she knew how: by shooting the manager in the face and ordering the striking workers to stop. What could easily have felt like a failure of the game—not offering me a more diplomatic solution using the skills I had invested in—instead felt right, given the story I had built for myself.
In previous games in a similar style The Outer Worlds 2including the modern Fallout games, Cyberpunk 2077, and the original The Outer Worlds, I've always had a hard time getting into the story. I would neglect the RPG portion of an RPG not because of a refusal to accept the story itself, but because of how I like to play games. I have a tendency to want to do everything and see everything without having to play through the game multiple times.
Often I ended up with a mishmash of skills: a few points to improve my combat skills, a few points to increase my carry weight to cope with the need to pick up everything I find, and a few skills to get into restricted areas. This always resulted in me having a character who was good at a lot of things, but useless for high level skill checks. If I had the option to change my specialization, I would cheat, and if I didn't, I would earn extra skill points. Sure, I had to see everything in the game, but that often reduced the likelihood of anything unusual or weird happening.
There is no option to change the spec in Outer Worlds 2, except for one option right after the intro. On top of that, leveling isn't particularly fast, and you're only given two skill points to put into a huge list of skills. My particular playstyle would have ruined my adventure here, robbing me of the skills for interesting interactions and causing me to suffer the consequences.
So, during character creation, I made a game plan. I told my commander about my criminal past and focused on weapons, speech and lockpicking. I built her as a soft-spoken space cowboy, someone who could get into the right place by talking or picking locks, and when the time came, shoot her out. I even managed to save two medicine points, although even that slight deviation meant I wasn't high enough level to hack the main quest area, which I was definitely too high level for.
While my verbal skills could get me out of a predicament, neither could they. After all, some people are simply impossible to reason with. While I've walked through many doors without issue, I regularly encountered a door that required lockpicking or some other skill I didn't have. But I could always achieve my goals one way or another, I just had to use the skills I decided to invest in.
The result of this was The Outer Worlds 2 experience, where I felt immersed in an RPG. With no way to escape my decisions or correct them on the level up screen, I had to work with it. I had successful experience convincing low-level lackeys that their bosses didn't care about them, which caused them to run rather than fight me. When the villain started lecturing me about the state of the galaxy, it seemed right to choose the “Attack Now” option. I had heard enough and was confident in the fight.
It seems a little silly to point out the benefits of RPGs in a genre that has RPGs in its name, but respect for some similar games has become a mainstay. While playing Avowed earlier this year, although I felt like I knew who my character was in terms of personality, I regularly readjusted my combat abilities and other skills, sometimes in order to use a new weapon or handle a situation differently.
In The Outer Worlds 2, I was often faced with an outcome I didn't expect because I had to play with the skills I chose. disadvantage system Added to this is my penchant for constantly reloading – something I could lean on even more by getting a damage boost until I empty my magazine.
These deliberate decisions also resonated with my comrades, as Niles went from a once dedicated and budding Earth Control agent to his own criminal. I taught him that big organizations will never support you and that sometimes the only solution to a problem is a bullet, something he now believes too.
So while shooting a factory manager in the face may seem like an easy or unsatisfying solution in an RPG like The Outer Worlds 2, it was exactly what my character would have done in that moment anyway. Instead of trying to avoid the consequences of my choices while undermining my own story, I was forced to do exactly what my character was created to do, making something simple feel impressive.
