Going on a killing spree in an RPG is nothing new, but there's often a limit to your reckless carnage. Typically in RPGs there are NPCs marked as Essential, and they're usually quest-givers. After all, if you deliberately or accidentally kill someone who can send you on a quest before they send you on that quest, you won't be able to complete it. For a side-quest, you'd be out of luck, but for a main quest, you'd be completely stuck.

Speaking to Polygon, Obsidian's senior designer Brian Heins confirmed that in The Outer Worlds, you'll be able to kill anyone you want. And to protect your ability to complete quests, there are back-up systems in place.

“Anyone you see, you can kill, [so] there’s got to be a way to get whatever they were going to give you, whether it’s a terminal entry or you can loot something off of their body or there’s a chest in their office that you would now lock-pick to get the information from," Heins told Polygon.

That often adds more complexity to the quest because it may need to be reflected in dialogue further down the questline. If you kill a quest giver and loot their body or pick a lock on their safe to acquire the quest item, for example, another NPC involved in the storyline can't talk about how you were freely given that item by the quest-giver. Because it didn't happen that way.

It's a lot of extra work for the designers and writers and even the QA department, who stumble across bugs as a result of the added wrinkles to the story. "So a conversation that they started out writing as very compact and concise now starts growing much bigger, because they have not had to handle a lot of other states,” Hines said.

Thanks, Polygon.

Part of the fun of RPGs is that they're dress-up games. You can put on clothes, hats, and armor, and change your looks, hair, and makeup. But while dressing up is fun it's often just about looks—usually, putting on a certain outfit doesn't mean NPCs are fooled into thinking you're someone else.

That's why I was interested when I learned that disguises were an option in The Outer Worlds—and I got to try one out during a play session earlier this month. You can see the footage of me using a disguise on a mission above (also here on YouTube), and you can also watch a full damn hour of The Outer Worlds gameplay right here. I've also got tons of written impressions of the The Outer Worlds you can read here.

While I was exploring the city of Fallbrook on the planet Monarch in The Outer Worlds, I got to talking with Catherine Malin, proprietor of Malin's House of Hospitality. She's extremely likable but... well, not exactly hospitable. In fact, she's a bit of a crime boss, and after charming my way into her good graces she offered me a dirty job. She asked me to eliminate the owner of a nearby factory, a guy named Clive. She wanted to run the business herself.

She didn't care if I killed Clive or just drove him out of business by sabotaging his factory with falsified financial records or by poisoning his alien pigs, so long as he was gone. Malin made a few suggestions about how I might go about getting inside the factory, though. I could shoot my way in, or try to sneak in through the sewers, or just walk right in the front gate—disguised as a worker. That last one sounded good to me, and I acquired a disguise from a local merchant (though I had to lie to him to get it).

I was surprised to discover the disguise wasn't a factory worker outfit, but an ID cartridge. The description of the item reads:

"The Holographic Shroud developed by Phineas Welles uses the biometric information stored on a corporate identity cartridge to construct a crude holographic disguise. You cannot appear as a specific individual, but will pass as a corporate employee - from a distance."

With the cartridge in my inventory, I headed down the road to Clive's factory. The corporate guard stopped me at the gate, asking for a keycard I didn't have, but a quick lie convinced her it was my first day on the job and she gave me one. With my disguise and an ill-gotten keycard, I was now free to enter and roam around the factory, looking like I belonged there.

For a while, at least. With the disguise in effect, a meter appeared in my HUD, along with three pips (we'll get to those pips in a minute) and the meter drained whenever I was moving, signifying the hologram was getting closer and closer to losing power. And it drains quickly.

If someone spots you when the meter is drained, they'll challenge you with a speech check. As my meter was expiring I was close to a sentry bot, so I ducked through a door, which turned out to be a closet, which was then blocked by the bot (who was in turn blocked by my companions) meaning I was basically stuck. I had no choice but to explain myself as my meter died. Luckily, I was able to persuade the bot with the old robot paradox trick ("Everything I say is false") and it left me alone.

When you pass a speech check, your disguise meter refills to the top. However, you use up one of the three speech pips. In other words, you can be caught and challenged only three times before the disguise runs out completely and you have to take a different approach to infiltration.

If you're spotted with an empty meter and you try to avoid the interrogation—by running away, for example—this will make the nearby NPCs even more suspicious. Eventually they'll give up trying to get close enough to talk and they'll just turn 100% hostile. This happened to me, too, though I was close enough to Clive's elevator to reach his office before I was killed.

What happened to Clive? Well, it's in the video. I'm not sure if he's got a strong head for the factory business, but he certainly has a strong head for point-blank sniper rounds. 

I'm a little disappointed the disguises in The Outer Worlds aren't, you know, disguises. There's something satisfying about putting on actual clothing or a set of armor and really fooling people into thinking you're someone else. But this hologram system is fun, and it adds a ticking clock plus the chance to flex your dialogue skills, so I'm still looking forward to being a master of disguise when The Outer Worlds arrives this October.

Phil and I recently got to spend some time playing The Outer Worlds, Obsidian Entertainment's upcoming FPS RPG. It was a long, healthy session of the unfinished game, where we were each given time to explore the planet of Monarch in pretty much any manner we wanted.

Above, you can see about an hour of edited footage—some of it is mine, and some it is Phil's (and don't worry, I don't talk over the entire damn video). We both began with the same level 11 character and two companions, standing close to the city of Fallbrook. I began with one of my companions' side-quests and then get into a bit of mischief at the behest of a local drug distributor. Phil, meanwhile, turned in the other direction and wound up in another city, Stellar Bay, where he took on quests to track down a missing person and investigate the grisly murder of gambler. And we both fought a number of outlaws and alien monsters, and spent lots of time chatting with the locals.

Keep in mind that we were playing an unfinished build, and be warned that if you watch, several side-quests will be spoiled, though I don't think any major plotlines are revealed. You can read my impressions of my time with The Outer Worlds right here. And if you like stealth, I also have an article and video about how disguises work in The Outer Worlds. 

A lot of games have extra-difficult ways to play: you can finish Deus Ex without killing anyone, sneak through Dishonored without ever once being detected, and play Thief with absolutely zero combat. Earlier this month Phil and I each played about 90 minutes of The Outer Worlds, Obsidian Entertainment's upcoming first-person RPG, and I can already predict the toughest way to complete it:

By making it through the entire game without ever telling a lie.

It's gotta be nearly impossible because in just this short session alone I lied constantly. I lied to a drug dealer who hired me to track down his missing stashes, telling him I couldn't find them so I could keep the drugs for myself. Phil lied to a weeping mom about the fate of her missing son and claimed to be a professional athlete so he could investigate a gambler's murder. I lied to an animal rescue worker, a corporate security guard, and a shop vendor so I could get my hands on an item I wanted. I even disguised myself as an employee of a factory so I could murder the owner, and when the disguise failed I lied my way out of trouble. Twice.

There are just so many opportunities to lie, and there's so much to be gained from dishonesty. Plus, being a huge liar is just fun. A squeaky clean, completely honest playthrough of The Outer Worlds—that's going to be the true nightmare mode.

Character study

Of course, the quality of a lie needs to be matched by the quality of the people you're lying to, and thankfully the small slice of The Outer Worlds I experienced was full of enjoyable and eccentric characters. The NPCs I spoke to were well-written and voiced, and I spent a good deal of my playtime just standing perfectly still, listening to everything they had to say and wishing I made more time to talk (and lie) to everyone else.

In the town of Fallbrook on the planet Monarch, I took a job from Nelson Mayson, a drug distributor with a bowler hat, a curled mustache, and a charming lack of subtlety. "Might I interest you in a surefire scheme?" he asked. "Wink, wink." Yes, he actually said "wink" instead of just winking.

His scheme was hiring me to find his drug shipment—he'd been using alien critters called sprats to move his product, and unsurprisingly the little buggers had all disappeared. I recovered the drugs, first from some sprat corpses, and then from digging through piles of sprat poop. Both times I reported back to Mayson that I hadn't found a thing. He was upset, naturally, but I walked away with a pocketful of drugs I assume can be put to some use.

I also chatted with a young and polite insurance agent who explained to me, at great length, the various insurance options available on Monarch, including a policy to protect the expressive eyebrows of character actors and "corporate executives with menacing stares." They cover dismemberment (the policy is half-off, ha ha) and disastrous marriages and salesmen who lie about the shoddy products they sell.

One of the only thing they don't cover is "dullness of mind," which, when pressed, she admits is another way of saying "stupidity."

I also met Catherine Malin, the enjoyably gruff proprietor of Malin's House of Hospitality. She's apparently a bit of a crime boss in Fallbrook, and our conversation quickly turned to the owner of a factory she wanted to claim for herself. When I said it sounded like the job would involve murder and mayhem, she replied: "Stars! I hope so!" Another character not burdened with subtlety.

There were lesser characters, too, who still proved enjoyable in small doses, like a robotic sentry who caught me sneaking around the factory. I disabled the bot by feeding him a paradox: "This statement is false." There were intimidating yet easily bamboozled corporate sentinels, a snooty fellow not named just Chet but "The Chet," and a nerdy animal rescue worker who called me a "domicile-intruder" when I walked into his house.

Nearly everywhere I turned in Fallbrook, there was someone to talk to or listen to, and even the conversations that didn't result in new missions always provided amusement or a bit of interesting information that helped fill in a picture of the off-kilter world I was lying my way through.

Call to arms

To fill the gap between conversations, I did plenty of shooting in The Outer Worlds, too. Monarch has roads that seem mostly safe apart from the occasional band of marauders and their vicious pets, but wander off the beaten path and things very quickly get much more dangerous. I decided to tackle the personal quest of one of the two companions following me, a woman named Nyoka, which involved finding the grave of a former friend located in the swampy region outside Fallbrook.

I was playing a character who was level 11, armed with an assault rifle with a modded 'Exact-O-Sight' scope for sniper shots, a pistol, a sword that did toxic damage, and a heavy machine gun. I'd later replace my sword with a Tossball Blocker—Tossball being a sci-fi sport in The Outer Worlds, and the blocker being the implement you use to play it, sort of like a tennis racket only with a crackling energy field instead of strings. (I don't yet know the rules of Tossball, but the scoop is very handy for beating alien lizards to death, so I'm sure hoping I'll get to see a Tossball match played at some point.)

I'm happy the dialogue has so many appealing options because if there's a part of The Outer Worlds I'm skeptical of, it's definitely the combat. Most of the enemies I faced—typically medium and large sized dinosaur-types—don't seem especially dynamic or interesting to fight. They roar, they lumber after you, they spit goo or fire, and the big ones take a ton of damage before they drop.

There's a stiffness to the gunplay that harkens back to Fallout 3, more RPG than shooter. The animations are nicely done but the heavy machine gun barely has any recoil, which makes it feel tame even as it chews through rampaging aliens. The melee feels weightless—slicing or bludgeoning a foe should make an impact but it just feels like swinging through air, even when you connect. The combat isn't terrible by any stretch—it just felt insubstantial, and even in the short play session I got a bit tired of mowing down the same pack of angry dinos again and again. The full game will need far more interesting weapons and enemy types to keep combat engaging.

I do appreciate the power to slow down time in short bursts, which helps with landing headshots on strafing marauders or with pinpointing Mantipillars, the one enemy I did enjoy fighting. They're large caterpillar-types who spit plasma, then quickly curl up in a ball and roll away, then pop back up for more spitting. Companions can be put to good use—tap a hotkey to unleash their special attacks which do big bursts of damage, and give you a quick break from the combat as you watch their attack animations play.

Role call

As for the outer worlds themselves, we only got to see Monarch, and between Phil and I we only visited two main towns and some of the surrounding areas—the map and signposts point to several others. While The Outer Worlds isn't a completely open world experience, even the small areas we got to travel through still felt pretty big, and with all the NPCs hanging around and not enough time to meet them all, there was a lot that got left undone.

And I know I've been hyping all the lying we did, but there are other skill-based conversational options—persuasion, charm, and intimidation—that I put to use to open up new avenues and possibilities in the chats I had. And even without skill checks, most conversations give you a choice of attitudes from a polite do-gooder to, you know, kind of a dick.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to explore the character-building aspects of The Outer Worlds: the character I was given was already built. But I did see that your companions have perks, and some of their skills can buff your own—I was very happy to see I could unlock a skill for Nyoka called Bonus Support Lie, which would increase my own lying skill when she was with me. That's definitely a first pick for me.

See? More lies. I'm telling you, an honest playthrough of The Outer Worlds is going to be a near-impossibility.

Obsidian creative director Leonard Boyarsky said in a recent interview with VGC that the studio is not trying to make its upcoming RPG The Outer Worlds into "a really hard, politically-charged game," and that it is being very careful not to "lecture" players about its themes. But his description of those themes, which include "power and how power is used against people who don't have it," has an awfully political ring to it.

The Outer Worlds is about a deep-space colonist whose ship gets knocked off course, and so ends up being awakened from cryosleep decades later than intended, into a galaxy dominated by mega-corporations and rampant capitalism. Despite that obvious setup for a heavy-handed takedown of consumer culture, Boyarsky said he's not against capitalism and he's pretty happy with the state of society overall, although "there are a lot of ways in which it could be improved."

"It can be insidious; the way which people control the stories you tell about the world. If you let other people control that narrative, then they can control you to a certain degree," he said. "That can be any form of government: if it wasn’t capitalism it could be something else."

That sounds awfully political—"Control the narrative, control the people" is something you might read in a dystopian sci-fi novel—but he said that the goal is to avoid staking out a position on obviously political matters, and instead let players draw their own conclusions. 

“There are people in this game who have philosophies that I don’t agree with and I take pains to make those people very likeable, very sensible and very believable. Then there are people in the game who say things I agree with, who are perhaps not very nice to hang out with," Boyarsky said. "So we don’t want to set up strawman or anything and say, 'Look how horrible this is!' It’s really about looking at all aspects of issues. The last thing we want to do is make a game that people feel is lecturing them."

Boyarsky compared Obsidian's approach to the handling of "racial issues" in the 2001 RPG Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, which he headed up for Troika. "The story always comes down to balance of power, how people get power and how they use it," he said. "We’ve been very careful, I’ve been very careful."

The Outer Worlds comes out on October 25.

Spoilers ahead for the multiple endings of The Outer Worlds.

Obsidian is back with a new RPG headed up by Fallout creators Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky. Naturally, the game has multiple endings, and a variety of consequences particular to the player depending on what choices you made as you strived to save your frozen friends on The Hope. In this guide we’re going to run through the endings we’ve achieved so far, and show you what occurs in the final moments of the game. 

Boyarsky previously revealed that there are two main endings to The Outer Worlds, depending on whether you side with Phineas or The Board. Beyond that there is a cute narrated slideshow which goes into detail about what happened to the people you interacted with in your playthrough. The factions you entertained will appear here, but they don’t seem to have much effect on the final conclusion.

Siding with Phineas

If you choose to side with Phineas Welles, the man who wakes you up from cryosleep at the start of the game, you will eventually arrive back at his ship to talk to him about what you’ve learned throughout the game. The big reveal is that The Board wants to expunge all of the talented, uncorrupted colonists from The Hope to make room in their hibernation chambers, turning the ship into a prison. Due to food shortages and other chaos they think Halcyon is beyond repair and impossible to save. Phineas the optimist wants to instead save the colonists by waking them up with a chemical mix, like he did with you, hoping that they will lead Halcyon to a brighter future. We later find out that he unintentionally murdered a number of them already when he was trying to wake them up, but failed due to accelerated cell decomposition turning them into sludge.

If you have a Science build you can suggest skipping The Hope to Phineas’ lab, routing power from The Unreliable and using ADA. Whilst you’re out doing that, Phineas is kidnapped by the board and held on Tartarus, a maximum security prison. From there the game presents you with a Mass Effect 2 Suicide Mission of sorts, where you have to break in and break him out. Your companions give you a farewell speech and you head off to Tartarus with your chosen two. After some fighting you’ll reach Chairman Rockwell in front of his green screen setup.

Brave New World negotiation checks

Here you can convince Rockwell with your Speech skills to side with you, and balance out the plan.

[Lie 80] I’ve already rallied Byzantium against you. It’s only a matter of time.

[Intimidate 80] I’m going to get your administration’s cooperation one way or another.

[Persuade 80] With your resources and some of the folks on the Hope, we could do a lot.

If you succeed he’ll agree that if you make it out alive with Phineas he’ll sell the plan to The Board. Later you’ll make it to the final chamber, where Sophia Akande has Phineas in an electric chair of sorts. This final parley will decide a lot of what happens next. Here are your options, including the path I personally took during my playthrough.

[Persuade 100] You don’t want to die on Tartarus. I’m giving you a chance to walk away.

[Charm] I don’t want to fight you, Sophia. You’re one of the only rational people left.

[Intimidate 80] [Heavy Weapons 50] [2-Handed Melee 50] No, I’m giving you a chance to walk away before I turn you into a bloody mess.

I used Persuade to convince her, then affirmed that I had destroyed the experiments in the Ministry, so her plan to stop me was a bust. There was also an option here:

[Persuade 80] [Science 80] Dr. Welles and I are both scientists. We believe Halcyon can still be saved.

Akande called my bluff, saying that her scientists can recover the data. From here you have three stat checks:

[Science 50] Your scientists are lying to you. Their research is critically flawed

[Hack 50] Your scientists are lying. I wrecked that data beyond repair.

[Engineering 50] That experiment was badly engineered. Any data you’re collecting is wrong.

I chose the hack option, and she believed me, but decided still to sick the security on me. This is because I couldn’t meet either of the two options in the third question:

[Intimidate 100] I’ve left a lot of corpses behind me, Sophia. You sure you want to be next?

[Lie 80] [Hack 80] Sorry, could you repeat that? I was too busy taking over your security system.

After that, if you can’t convince Akande you must fight a big robot called R.A.M, and then head through to where she’s holding Phineas captive. Akande will immediately turn hostile, and after you dispatch her you can unlock Phineas’ cell.

Phineas tells the player that Earth has “gone dark” and that Halcyon is the only home they have left, so they must urgently revive The Hope’s colonists and rebuild. At this point Phineas asks if you want to be the leader of the colony going forward, and you can say yes or mention that you’ve got Chairman Rockwell on side to help. The game then ends and you’re taken to the slideshow. Game over!

The Slideshow

My personal slideshow revealed that the events on Tartarus “brought about an end to the board’s authority.” Phineas began reviving the colonists who arrived in Halcyon at the brink of collapse, and were therefore forced to come together and rebuild it.

Colonies and settlements banded together for survival. Halcyon was responsible for its own destiny. In my game world, the war on Monarch wiped out most of MSI and the Iconoclasts, with the stragglers joining Sublight or heading to Terra 2. Only the beasts remained.

Sublight’s Lilya Hagen kept on protecting her family, the company's legitimacy left unchecked. I decided to route power to the Botanical Lab in Emerald Vale, so Edgewater’s inhabitants came to join Adelaide’s camp, but she only accepted a few in, the rest starving to death in the wilderness. She refused to co-operate in reviving halcyon, but one inhabitant ended up stealing her research and giving it to The Hope’s colonists. She died later that winter.

Junlei from the Groundbreaker educated a generation of Engineers, and it kept far away from corporate influence. The Board’s crumbling authority and the death of the Lifetime Employment Plan forced the people of Byzantium to come to terms with Halcyon’s doom, and they had to get jobs. 

Ellie lived life to the fullest and never kept in touch. Felix’s revolution never came, so he became an essential labourer in the reconstruction effort. Vicar Max renounced his faith and joined the effort to rebuild the colony. Parvati was comfortable on The Unreliable, and spent her remaining time with ADA, acting as the ship’s chief engineer. Nyoka couldn’t drink away her memories, so she returned to Monarch to drink and hunt. SAM spread awareness about his sanitation capabilities across the colony, which led to an increase in sales of the robot unit.

Minister Clarke helped to manage the crisis after being released from house arrest, and Chairman Rockwell helped pull strings to enable the colony to rebuild after he was spared. Phineas Welles revived over half of The Hope’s scientists and engineers using the chemicals stolen from the Ministry, but died a few years later, his work continued by the people he arrived. In the end, my character instituted Chairman Rockwell as the leader of Halcyon and used him like a puppet. Halcyon survived the turbulent years that followed, but no-one knows what happened to Earth or what the future may hold. Roll credits!

Siding with The Board

*we will update this later once we’ve seen this ending*

Instead of the above, you can choose to meet with The Adjutant in Byzantium in order to side with her and keep The Board’s influence strong over Halcyon, which will result in a very different conclusion.

The Adjutant will message you asking you to meet with her and to plant a tracking code in Phineas’ lab so they can arrive and arrest him, thwarting the plan. You can also talk to Phineas and choose to plant a failed code on the ship in order to betray The Adjutant, but obviously this won’t help your standing with The Board.

*to be continued*

I saw The Outer Worlds behind closed doors at E3 last week, and I was going to write about it and tell you how cool it looked, despite the gameplay demo being a fairly slight 20-or-so minute showing compared to Cyberpunk 2077's near hour-long presentation. Now I don't have to, because pretty much everything I saw has been put on the internet anyway! It kicks off at the 4.30 mark: 

You'll see one of the game's towns in action, how you can switch allegiances, and how to manipulate characters in conversation by intimidating or charming them. It's got the kind of weird, dark sense of humour that older Fallout fans will appreciate—and generally speaking, it looks like it's tailor-made for Fallout: New Vegas fans. 

It's a nice demo, but I feel like it would've made a bigger splash at E3 had it been longer, or if it was playable so we could get a sense of how the game reacts to our choices. 

The Outer Worlds is out on 25 October.