The Outer Worlds skills & attributes guide – character creation overview

For many – okay, fine, all – the best part of starting a new RPG is always the character creation process. And The Outer Worlds fails to disappoint in this regard, with its finely crafted array of attributes and skills that you can use to start carving out the path of your character before you even set foot on Halcyon. Our The Outer Worlds skills & attributes guide will help you make the choices you truly want to make right off the bat, with detailed explanations of how each skill is used in-game, and how levelling up your skills actually works in The Outer Worlds.

The Outer Worlds skills & character creation guide

• The Outer Worlds character creation: attributes and skills explained
• Melee skills (1-Handed Melee, 2-Handed Melee)
• Ranged skills (Handguns, Long Guns, Heavy Weapons)
• Defence skills (Dodge, Block)
• Dialog skills (Persuade, Lie, Intimidate)
• Stealth skills (Sneak, Hack, Lockpick)
• Tech skills (Medical, Engineering, Science)
• Leadership skills (Inspiration, Determination)

The very first decision to make when starting a new game and creating a new The Outer Worlds character is to set the leaning of your attributes and your skills. Both these mechanics are interconnected, and it’s fairly important (especially with attributes) that you get it right first time. Here’s what you need to know about skills and attributes in The Outer Worlds:

• There are six attributes in The Outer Worlds, split across three categories: Body (Strength and Dexterity), Mind (Intelligence and Perception), and Personality (Charm and Temperament).
• Each of the six attributes begin on “Average“, and can either be pushed down to “Below Average“, gaining you a skill point to use elsewhere, or pushed upwards to “Good“, “High“, and “Very High“.
• You only have a total of six skill points to spend across the attributes, and each one affects the base starting values of various skills (which you can see when you hover over each attribute). They also give you an extra negative or positive effect if altered from “Average”. For example, increasing Temperament will increase your HP Regen, but setting it to “Below Average” will disable natural HP Regen and force you to rest or use consumables to heal.
• After modifying your attribute values, you must choose two out of your seven skill types to level up, providing a +10 bonus for each of the skills in those types. We’ll go over each skill type and skill below.
• Each skill has certain threshold bonuses which activate every 20 points. At 20 Dodge, for example, you’ll gain the ability to Leap. At 40 Dodge, your dodge recovery speed is doubled. And so on. Many things can affect your base skill values in The Outer Worlds, such as travelling with a certain companion or using a particular consumable – but only the base value is taken into account when unlocking these threshold bonuses, and once unlocked you’ll always have access to them even if you drop below that threshold afterwards.
• You earn 10 skill points each time you level up, and you can invest them in any of the seven skill types to increase the values of each skill of that type – but once a skill hits 50, you can only level it further by investing directly into that one skill, rather than the skill type.

The main thing is to read everything very carefully. Hovering over each attribute and each skill will give you a good idea of what each one actually does. Invest some points into a skill as a test, and see what changes before undoing it. Experimentation is key.

But! If you’re a min/maxer at heart, then we’ve got a special tip for you, thanks very much to RPS commenter “ScottFrazer” who let us in on the secret: when applying your initial points to your six attributes, it’s best to choose two attributes in particular and apply three points each to those, leaving the rest at Average. This gives you 252 points total into skills, whereas if you were to set every attribute to “Good”, then you’ll only receive a net of 216 points. So building tall on a couple of attributes give you more than building wide by spreading your points across all six.

Now, enough dilly-dallying! Let’s go over each of The Outer Worlds’ skills in more detail.

Melee combat is a very viable path for your character to specialise in if you like getting up close and personal with enemies – bearing in mind that many of them will be armed themselves, so you’ll want to make good use of your TTD (Tactical Time Dilation) ability to avoid their attacks and close the distance quickly. There are two types of melee weapon in The Outer Worlds: one-handed, and two-handed. Melee skills are therefore similarly easy to wrap your head around.

Ranged skills again are very easy to understand, as each of the three skills in this category help you to specialise in a specific weapon type, providing you not only with increased crit chance and decreased weapon sway but also some very nice threshold unlock benefits.

Defence skills comprise both dodging and blocking. Blocking is only relevant for melee fighters (but is near-essential for those specialising in melee), while dodging is useful for everyone. Take a look at the skills and threshold bonuses below to see how they useful they can be if levelled up.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll invest heavily in the Dialog skills before any other skill type. This is the skillset that unlocks most of the more interesting dialog options throughout the game, giving you the ability to charm or intimidate your way into and out of certain situations. But they also each have a noted use in combat thanks to their threshold bonuses.

If the Dialog skills are ideal for extracting everything you want from the game’s conversations and NPCs, then the Stealth skills are ideal for doing the same to the game world. Sneaking, Hacking, and Lockpicking each come up very often throughout your journey across The Outer Worlds, so to avoid frustration and missed opportunities it might be a good idea to invest in this type from the outset.

In my opinion it is extremely important to get to at least 20 in your Tech skills, because of the unlocks that follow. After that, deciding whether to upgrade them further is less of a necessity and more about how you want to build your character, but that first unlock repays itself a hundred-fold.

Finally, we have the Leadership skills of Inspiration and Determination, which affect the usefulness of the companion(s) you can choose to accompany you. Specifically in combat. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it: making good use of your companions in The Outer Worlds can be instrumental in keeping yourself alive, particularly at the higher difficulties.

And there you have it! We’ve now covered each of the skills in The Outer Worlds in hopefully enough detail to give you an idea of how you might want to play your first character. But if you’re still unsure, don’t worry! I changed my mind about the focus of my first character half a dozen times throughout the game before settling on a single idea. This is a game that rewards experimentation and tactics, and cares less about min-maxing than about you having a great time.