The hardest choice in any RPG - including The Outer Worlds - is deciding your starting stats during character creation. Without knowing anything about what you’re in for, you’re supposed to make massive choices about Attributes, Skills, and Aptitudes that will affect your gameplay for an entire run.

Fortunately for you, we're here to give you a push in the right direction.

If you’ve had any experience with Bethesda RPGs like Fallout 4 and New Vegas, or even The Elder Scrolls series, you’ll quickly get the gist when it comes to picking Attributes and Skills.

In The Outer Worlds, you have various stats that govern your abilities in-game, as well as the interactions you have with other characters.

The Outer Worlds Attributes

Attributes are the basic characteristics of your player-character. They give small starting boosts to a variety of skills, and cannot be increased or decreased by levelling up. Your starting Attributes also determine whether you can unlock certain dialogue options in-game.

There are some items which interact with Attributes, and you can also choose to accept “flaws” during the game to gain a perk point in exchange for a nerf to your Attributes.

Reducing your Attributes below average comes with severe penalties however, so is not recommended for a first play-through.

During character creation, you have 6 points that you can assign into Attributes. Adding points into Attributes not only increases the base value of the “Affected Skills” but also gives you a one-off bonus.

For example, Very High Strength increases how much equipment you can carry, as well as melee damage.

Your Attributes have no cosmetic effect on the look of your character, however, they are important for role play. If you want to play a cunning character who always says the right thing in conversations, you need Intelligence and Perception to pass the Attribute checks.

Charm can also get you more rewards for quests or butter people up, but this is more often achieved with the Persuade skill.

Obsidian has also speculated that there are particularly stupid dialogue options open to characters with "below average" intelligence if you fancy a laugh.

The Outer Worlds Skills

During this character creation stage, you also get two points which will boost a family of three skills by 10 points.

Skills are what you’ll be using most of the time, and high skills unlock different dialogue options in conversations. Every 20 skill points unlock a special bonus, some of which can be very useful.

In terms of weaponry, it can be tempting to play the Han Solo-esque gunslinger and pick handguns, especially because you tend to be given pistols early in games. However, you gain access to a wide variety of weaponry very quickly. Long Guns are probably the best weapons in The Outer Worlds but aren’t the most fun for role play.

For silver-tongued and light-fingered players your Dialogue and Stealth skills are used absolutely constantly. Whatever kind of character you want to play, I’d recommend Hacking and Lockpicking otherwise you’ll be walking past a lot of lore, XP, and loot.

The tech skills also open up a lot of interesting dialogue choices but try not to spread yourself too thinly, or you’ll struggle in the late game.

The Outer Worlds Aptitudes

This list can be intimidating, but don’t worry too much about what you pick. Many are just a bonus of a single point in some stats, which isn’t worth writing home about.

Personally, I chose one of the percentage buffs because you can’t get them by levelling up during the main game.

And that's it! Now that you've created the perfect character, check out our guides for the Edgewater side quests, where to find the best Science weapons and where to store your items.

You can also check out our guides on how to recruit companions and complete the And Then Power questline.

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