Obsidian Entertainment’s The Outer Worlds 2 aims to be even bigger and better than its predecessor, diversifying builds with an overhaul to Skills and offering positive and negative Traits. One of the other major changes is the lack of level scaling for enemies. This means enemies will remain at the same power level when encountered throughout the story.
However, as senior combat designer Rob Donovan revealed to IGN First, this has led to other notable changes. “Not doing level scaling seems like a simple change, but it has enormous ripple effects over how we create the game.” Enemies now have different tiers with separate stats, damage values, health, and damage reduction through armor.
“Those are static throughout the game,” said Donovan, “So early on, some of our higher tier enemies will be more difficult just from a math perspective. They’re going to hit you harder. They’re going to take less damage, and when they take damage, they might have a higher health pool.”
The benefit of remaining static is that you can re-challenge them after growing stronger. “Hopefully by this point, you have levelled up, got enough gear, cool armor, gadgets, skills, perks, and maybe Flaws to be able to come back and really romp on those enemies that maybe were giving you difficulty before.” On top of encouraging players to revisit locations, these enemies could drop loot or items that may be more useful in the mid to late game.
The Outer Worlds 2 is out later this year for Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC. Obsidian will host a Direct after the Xbox Games Showcase on June 8th to dive deeper into the game and maybe even reveal a release date. Stay tuned for more details until then.
