The Outer Worlds Unique Dialog Combat System

It’s no surprise to most of you that The Outer Worlds is a culmination of Obsidian’s best writing talent, with its witty humor and impressive attention to detail.
In-game dialog tends to frequently surprise, and sometimes outsmart the players, encouraging them to use their characters’ dialog skills and specialized knowledge to discover creative and often rewarding ways to get out of any situation. The Outer Worlds proves again and again that in the exciting hunt for treasures a quick tongue can be as useful as a hardy lockpick.

But, even this impressive aspect aside, the game takes dialog skills to an entirely new level!
Who said that by investing a lot of points into Dialog skills you will make your character unsuitable for fighting? Not Obsidian!

While it’s true that the skill tree will help you avoid certain fights, if you wish to do so, the Persuade, Lie, and Intimidate skills pack a whole another feature that involves immobilizing your opponents! Each of the skills relates to a particular target: the Persuade skill forces human opponents to cower, the Lie skill makes Automechanicals attack each other, and Intimidate forces creatures around you to flee.

Would you guess that even further into the skill level you will end up inflicting merely a couple of seconds of the debuff? After all, these skills are still crucial to a player’s dialog experience and they significantly affect buying prices, which makes them very valuable as it is.

Well, you would be wrong! You can train your character to have a 30% chance to make a human opponent cower for 10 entire seconds, while lowering their armor by 50%. You can get a 25% of automechanicals attacking each other for 17 seconds, and you can make 30% of the creatures slowly run away for 10 seconds while getting a boost to your damage. Imagine the amount of damage your character and his or her party can inflict on a target that is immobilized for 10 seconds (you can get an idea by counting it to yourself right now)!
This unique mechanic allows for very deadly companion assaults, should you invest into the Leadership skills. Not bad, eh?

You know what would make for an interesting challenge? Investing every single point you can into dialog skills. Trust us, it is possible and it is playable!
And skill allocations of this kind can make a playthrough quite exciting (and very much unique), thanks to the creative minds of the Obsidian development team.