After the Xbox Games Showcase 2025 live presentation, we got a deep-dive on some of the publisher’s biggest upcoming games, including Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds 2. One segment zeroed in on “Choice & Reactivity” in the expanded RPG, and we were treated to a few of the backgrounds available for our custom characters. One of them is the Roustabout, a wrongly glorified loser and my new favorite.
Instead of a “blank slate” stranger, explains game director Brandon Adler, The Outer Worlds 2 starts you as an Earth Directorate agent. “You can think of them as like space cowboys or space sky marshals,” he says. “They’re the good guys that go into places and kind of fix everything that’s wrong.”
What kind of agent you are is up to you. This is where backgrounds come in. Your background decides “who you were prior to joining the Earth Directorate,” so says the in-game menu, shaping your character’s history and influencing some interactions and conversations in the rest of your playthrough.
We saw a few backgrounds today. Ex-Convict, Gambler, Lawbringer, Professor, Renegade, and Roustabout.
Lawbringer is about what it sounds like: you survived a tough upbringing and want to bring order to the colonies as a champion of the people. The Professor has a background in archaeology and is no stranger to “the more unsavory elements of artifact trafficking.” As a Renegade, you’re a bit of a nomadic outlaw, kinda-sorta on the run from old employers and hiding out under the Earth Directorate umbrella.
And then we have the Roustabout. “You’re not quite sure what happened,” its background description begins. “You simply wanted to find a job that used your particular set of skills. Which would be ‘none.’ Yet, one accidental death of a well-known villain later, you’re now known as a gunslinging Earth Directorate agent not to be trifled with. You often find yourself wondering if this ‘Earth Directorate’ has any good cashier openings.”
This, folks, is one of my favorite tropes. The over-hyped hero who’s inwardly an anxious, average-at-best, probably panicking dude unsure why these expectations have been heaped upon him and even less sure how to live up to them. The Outer Worlds 2 strikes me as a deeply funny game so far, I trust Obsidian to guide that tone well, and the Roustabout sounds like a perfect match for the game’s universe. I’m dreaming of an agent stumbling and bumbling his way to victory through inordinately high Luck and virtually nothing else, slowly developing actual skills that may one day turn him into the hero he’s thought to be, and it sounds like a great time.
