During character creation, you have the option to pick an additional Positive Trait (instead of just the one) at the cost of inheriting a Negative Trait, like Abrasive (impacts reputation), Dumb (locks certain skills), or Sickly (poor base health and toxicity threshold). It’s a neat counterbalance from trying to min/max the “perfect” character in a typical role-playing game; now we’re being asked (if you choose) to intentionally create a flawed hero from the start.
On top of the Traits there are a wide number of Skills to pick from like Engineering, Hacking, Lockpick, and many others. The logical approach here with all of this is to create a complimentary character based on all the available Traits and Skills (e.g. create a Stealth build that’s good with hacking). But playing it safe isn’t how I like to come to Obsidian games. The character creator doesn’t explicitly spell it out for you, but it seems like all of this is designed so you could effectively create a “busted” character, if you wanted to, one with a mishmash of abilities and still be able to have a great time – as my playthrough demonstrated with my mix of speech and stealth skills, coupled with the Sickly Negative Trait.
Coming back to the mission at hand, once we arrived at Horizon Point Station our task had us finding a way through the security blockade, with a variety of options in how we wanted to go about completing this first objective ready for us from the start. I could loot a nearby guard’s body to get their identification card, impersonating them on the intercom to call off the alarms. Or sneak through an air vent to get past a bunch of security bots – but dang it, I left my thief tools back on the ship. Thankfully Niles, one of the Earth Directorate, was willing to lend me his tools if I wanted to pursue that route. Or… we just go in guns blazing. And all of this is just in the first five minutes of the mission, a mere fraction of what the larger adventure is going to be for The Outer Worlds 2. It’s tantalizing to think how many more of these open-ended approaches are in the final game.