Character Creation Fail in The Outer Worlds

Started playing The Outer Worlds (by Obsidian) recently, and I like it, though not as much as I had hoped. This post, though, is about a relatively minor design problem I uncovered, regarding the character creation process. Might be relevant for some other games as well.

Right at the beginning you’re asked to make permanent decisions about your character, and mostly there’s no problem, but in regard to one thing in particular they leave out vital information that one requires to make an informed decision. Specifically, certain attributes have an impact on both combat and dialog (passing speech checks), but the dialog part is left out of the description completely. They don’t just leave out details (which would be fine), but omit the mention the link entirely. This is further obscured by the fact that there are options in the skills section that clearly are made for improving the character’s dialog ability.

I want my character to be good at passing speech checks, and not knowing the info outlined above, I created a character that was regularly locked out of interesting-looking dialog options. Found a station on the ship that allows for respecifying the character stats, but it only applies to skills and perks, not attributes. Attributes are forever, apparently.

Didn’t take long to realize that this state of affairs would continuously annoy me and impede my enjoyment of the game, so I figured it would be worth restarting the whole damn thing, despite losing hours of progress.

(Yes, consumables can temporarily raise attributes, but that’s not a good solution. It’s a real hassle as it will require you to either save and reload the game regularly, or to always keep at hand and eat consumables before every conversation just in case, because some speech checks won’t appear a second time. No thanks.)

In conclusion, I’m perfectly fine with having to make permanent character decisions early on, and fine with not knowing the all implications and the full impact of each decision (that’s part of the fun, making decisions with incomplete information), but I think it’s untenable to completely neglect to mention that a certain choice will impact dialog options. Unless they’re rare and insignificant, I suppose, but that didn’t seem to be the case here.