Noclip have uploaded the final episode of their documentary about The Outer Worlds. Despite the fancy title, what this episode is really about is character builds and combat. It offers a certain insight into how the game evolved over the course of its development. When The Outer Worlds was announced, Tim Cain spoke about how in addition to the classic trio of combat, dialogue and stealth, the game would support a fourth "leadership" playstyle. It turns out that as development progressed, Tim realized that leadership didn't really work as its own independent playstyle and instead was more like a variant of the other three. It seems he became interested in other playstyle hybrids and so the holographic shroud disguise mechanic was implemented to support stealth-dialogue characters.

As for combat, it turns out that the special companion abilities were originally intended to have been performed by the player character. They were transferred to the companions after the Tactical Time Dilation mechanic was implemented. TTD itself was closer to a VATS clone at one point, locking on to an enemy and prompting the player to select a location to fire at. Obsidian also experimented with allowing players to knock enemies unconscious, but it was too much work to implement properly. Besides all that, the episode also discusses topics such as encounter design and the game's unique science weapons.


So that's the end of that. The documentary was at its most interesting when it delved into cut content and the history of the game's development. There's probably a lot more we could learn about that. Noclip plan to release a sixth video with bonus material, but it's for Patreon backers only.