In this article we will be looking at Character Creation, more specifically how to make a good character in The Outer Worlds. This Character Creation Guide tells you what the attributes and skills do, what they do, what it all means and how to put it all together to make an effective character.

The Outer Worlds Character Creation Guide

Attributes

Attributes are extremely important because they give you passive benefits that you can’t find anywhere else in some cases. Things that increase your attribute are few and far between. They also only show much more later in the game although you can lower these if you take flaws.

Strength

Strength is the first attribute we would be taking a look at here and it affects melee damage and carry capacity. I want to set aside carrying capacity here because it is not the greatest passive benefit. There are perks that give you carrying capacity. So if you need carry capacity, Strength is not the best reason to take it.

The biggest reason to take strength is for melee damage. There is no other way to gain increased percentage damage of melee in the other worlds so if you want to play a melee character this is a must have attribute. I would recommend maxing it out but it’s not really a must. At the end of the day if you are going to play a melee character you will have to put a substantial amount into Strength or you would suffer in the damage department later on the game.

Dexterity

Next up let’s take a look at Dexterity. This attribute is probably the weakest in the game because it affects Melee Weapon Attack Speed and Ranged Weapon Reload Speed. Neither is extremely valuable. Mostly because the values that they increase of dexterity is improved are fairly low. So you are not going to see the large increase in melee attack speed, or Ranged reload speed, and of this two the more important stat is the melee attack speed.

You will probably be playing a stealth build when you are trying to kill things in one hit, or you are really not gonna notice a whole lot of damage difference in attacking 20-30% attacking more than you do normally. Even though it can boost your DPS there are better attributes to spend it if you want to increase your overall melee damage.

Intelligence

Moving onto Intelligence. This is probably the best overall attribute in The Outer Worlds. This is because it affects the critical damage and there are only a few ways that do that in the game. This applies to both range and melee damage and it doesn’t matter what weapon type you are using. It is going to give you a flat increase to critical damage. The Outer worlds has a huge focus on critical hits. If you put points into range weapons, melee weapons or two-handed weapons they tend to increase your critical chance so you tend to want to have high critical damage so when you do crit you will do a lot of critical damage.

Additionally, there are a lot of perks that revolve around critical hits. So this is just an all around good thing you have if you plan on making a build around critical hits which is very likely going to do because that is passively what you gain if you put anything to say long guns or one-handed melee.

Perception

Perception is another good attribute but not quite as important as intelligence because you are going to gain extra damage if you hit the head of a human or a weak spot of any type of enemy. So that is only going to apply when you do that as to critical damage would apply to that no matter what you are doing.

If you are planning to do a finesse type of build, where you are aiming for that weak spot when you play like a sniper or even a melee player. Aiming for the head and or weakspots when you are swinging because of this also applies to melee attacks then this is going to be a very good attribute to you. It is not going to be as good as Strength if you are talking about melee damage but it is something to consider taking if you want to take some attributes on it.

Charm

Charm is very good if you are trying to play a build who wants to resolve things through dialogue and maybe has less combat. Doing as well to bypass some objectives because you can persuade people to do things. If you plan on persuading, lying, or intimidating or even resolving something with science and engineering, this attribute is going go a long way because what it does is it allows your reputation with that person’s faction, to further affect skill checks.

One of the interesting things with The Outer worlds is that an increase in your reputation with that person’s faction when resolving skill checks, will lower than its required amount. The opposite is also true if you have a lower Reputation for a person’s Faction it would increase the skill check requirement for that person. This attribute is gonna allow your positive reputation changes higher and lessen the impact of having negative reputation. So if you like to kill things or steal items it is not going to be that high of an impact and it is going to allow you to pass those skill checks easier.

Temperament

Temperament is not a very strong attribute in the game but It is a very tempting pick because it increases health generation. Which sounds amazing especially if you are playing a melee build. Running into gunfire, getting hit health regenerationg is a must have.

However if you are in a sticky situation and in a harder difficulty, health regeneration is not going to save you from getting killed. You are going to have to build your character in a way that you don’t take that much damage, or play in a way that doesn’t take that much damage. There are better passives out there but if you have no idea what sort of character you are going to play or you are new to the game then it is not a bad attribute to pick because to have your health restored out of combat that means you are not going to wait in between encounters or waste heals. Though healing is abundant in the game so it’s not that necessary.

The last thing to say about attributes is that when you select them don’t worry too much on what skills they affect because there are going to be a lot of skill points for this game and it is not the best pick for an attribute. As you level up there will be an abundance of skill points to go around so pick attributes as you go.

Skills

Melee

Moving on to skills we have 1 – Handed Melee and 2 – Handed Melee in the first section. This is going to go down to preference and what you would want to do. If you want to attack faster or if you want to attack slower but increase damage. The thing you will notice with 2 – Handed Melee Weapons as well is that there is a higher default critical chance so you are more likely to crit. So if you are building a build revolving around crits you should probably opt more for two-handed setup.

Ranged

In the Ranged section you have handguns, long guns and heavy weapons. And here it would just boil down to your style of play. Play close up with Handguns, long range with Long Guns or Heavy Weapons like Flamethrowers, Machine Guns or rocket launchers. The passives really boil down the same, with every increase in a skill, it increases critical chance, critical damage for the weapon and reduces sway.

Roughly the same effect for all weapons skill in this tree so comes down to personal preference. I personally like to play long guns because I personally think you can kill almost anything in stealth with long range, if you hit it in the head. But you can do whatever you want here because it is a matter of personal playstyle.

Defense

Having spent some time playing a melee character the defense abilities are sort of underwhelming if you are talking about what they can actually do for you with 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100 skill level unlocks. Dodging is just something you don’t really use much in the game.You are using Tactical Time Dilation if you are hanging back picking things off and if you are at melee range you are not really dodging but would be spending your time swinging weapons to kill things as quickly as you can to stop getting shot in the face.

That being said the last unlocks for dodge are really good for melee characters. Increasing your melee attack damage for a swing and also your armor penetration for the next swing, however it is one swing. How much time you want to spend dodging versus how much time you want to spend attacking. I don’t know if that is going to be more beneficial for a character however theoretically you dodge, stealth, and wack something for multiple bonus damage but this is an awful amount of work.

Frankly, I didn’t do a lot of blocking when I was playing melee. The strategy is to try to kill things quickly because you are outnumbered and you can’t just sit there and block. So trying to time a perfect block is frankly very hard to do very quickly. The reason to take a block is not really because of the skills that come with it but it’s the passive that increases armor rating when using a weapon. If you increase your armor rating high enough the amount of damage can be negligible thus this is a good skill to invest on that will keep you alive. If you have some extra points to dump or if you find yourself dying all the time in melee. Adding points to the block will increase armor rating that keeps you alive.

Dialog

Interestingly the skill unlocks passives do not help your Dialog or Dialog Skill Checks but are actually combat related. They aren’t super useful but if you look at all three of them, and if you each get to 20 for each one, you will have a really good chance of causing a negative status effect on certain situations. I highly recommend getting them to at least 20 but past that it doesn’t seem very worth it for me. You are talking about a chance of a thing happening and you shouldn’t bank on a chance compared to just increasing your chance of getting a critical hit.

At the end of the day the reason you are going to put skill points into this is to increase your chances with dealing Dialog Skill Checks. But outside of that if you don’t see yourself a lot of persuading or intimidating, make sure to at least put 20 in them for the small passives.

Stealth

Moving to the Stealth category you have Sneak, Hack and Lockpick. All these skills are very good. Sneak helps you a lot, from helping you kill enemies to helping you steal stuff or sneak by undetected. It is a very useful skill in this game and if you are trying to make an Assassin build, this skill is a must. If you look at the last few skills, unlocking 20% weak spot damage plus 50% sneak attack ignores armor, it provides so much damage with the skill maxed moment.

The Hack skill is good with at least to 20 because you would want to sell with vending machines to get rid of some items, which is a good way to free up space and make some money. If you want to buy restricted items and then put this up to 40. It also helps opening doors and terminals so it is an all around good skill to have. So consider putting up points here if you want to make life in general easier.

Lockpicking is something you use far more than hacking in the game and frankly if I need to recommend one skill that isn’t combat related that would be Lockpick. First the first skill you will have will reduce the cost of all containers to unlock by 1. If the cost of a lock is one it becomes zero and a free open. Therefore it frees a tremendous amount of cost for Magpicks and more often than not you will encounter free locks to open. Also if you get high enough, you will see what is inside containers before you pick them, therefore you can figure out if using your Magpick or not, for the items that are worth it. Finding pristine items is going to be helpful later on in the game. In general you can get a lot of loot from lockpicking so in general it’s an all around good skill.

Tech

Medical isn’t that good in my opinion. I don’t spend much time healing and not really necessary spending on normal. So maybe in harder difficulties it might be relevant. But the biggest passive damage which gives a bonus +20% damage against human enemies. You don’t really have to drop a hundred points for this just to get that passive considering you have better ways to spend damage. So I wouldn’t want to recommend medical because it’s just generally not great.

Science is an all around very very good skill for the game. First you need at least 20 in order to increase the usefulness of your weapons and armor with modding. You can increase their damage or armor rating very mildly with some bits. You would really want to do that so it should at least have 20. You can reduce the cost by skill level 40 and increase corrosive and N-Ray damage by 25% at 60 which is phenomenal because it is one of the few chances in this game that increases damage

Stay Tuned for more The Outer Worlds content and our Outer Worlds Guides, and be sure to check out our Outer Worlds Review to see what we think of the game!