Welcome to The Outer Worlds, a corporate-controlled star system of Arcadia, a colony on the brink of collapse. The fraying authority of the so-called benevolent Protectorate is being torn apart from within by a rebellion of its own religious order and assaulted from without by a ruthless corporate invasion. As destructive, reality-bending rifts tear across the colony, this factional war intensifies, with each power group seeking to control these anomalies for their own ends.
In this fractured world, factions—from powerful corporations to rebellious militias—are the key players, each with agendas you can choose to champion, undermine, or ignore. Your every action resonates through the star system, creating tangible consequences like exclusive quests, vendor discounts, and new dialogue paths. You won’t navigate these treacherous political waters alone; your companions have their own strong opinions and histories with these factions, and their loyalty will be directly shaped by your choices.
In this guide, we’ll go through The Outer Worlds 2‘s reputation system as well as a breakdown of the warring factions of Arcadia.
The Reputation System
In The Outer Worlds 2, your actions echo throughout the Arcadia star system, and the Reputation system is the measure of that impact. It tracks your standing with every major faction, directly shaping how the world perceives and reacts to you. Your reputation with a specific faction can affect everything from vendor prices to your companions’ loyalty, and ultimately, the fate of Arcadia itself.
Your standing with any given faction can be either Positive or Negative, and your overall status is a balance of the two, leading to titles like “Friendly,” “Hated,” or “Revering.” This balance dictates:
- Faction Hostility: A sufficiently negative reputation will cause faction members to attack you on sight, while a positive one can grant you safe passage through their territories.
- Vendor Economics: Faction-affiliated vendors will offer significant discounts for high reputation and inflate prices if you are in their bad books.
- Quest Rewards: The monetary and experience point (XP) rewards for completing missions can be boosted by a positive standing with the quest-giver’s faction.
- Skill Check Difficulty: Your reputation can make certain speech and skill checks easier or harder to pass when interacting with faction members.
- Narrative Endings: Your cumulative reputation across all factions is a primary factor in locking in the game’s various endings and major story outcomes.
- Companions: Gaining a positive reputation with a companion’s faction will earn their approval, while harming it may lead to conflict or even them leaving your party.
How to Increase (and Decrease) Reputation
To Increase Positive Reputation:
- Complete Faction-Aligned Quests: The most effective way to gain favour is by undertaking missions for a faction and completing them in a way that serves their interests.
- Help Faction Members: Assisting non-player characters (NPCs) who belong to a faction, even in small side activities, will contribute to your positive standing.
- Commit Favoured Actions: Making choices in the world that a faction approves of, even outside of a structured quest, can grant reputation points.
To Gain a Negative Reputation:
- Harm Faction Interests: Completing quests in a way that sabotages or undermines the faction will fill your negative reputation bar.
- Commit Crimes Against Them: Attacking or killing faction members, stealing their property, or otherwise acting against them in the open world will quickly sour your relationship.
- Pro Tip: Get the Face Reader perk to highlight dialogue options that reduce reputation with a faction and avoid them.
The Factions
Earth Directorate
| Location | The Incognito |
| Companions | Niles Abara, VALERIE |
The Earth Directorate (ED) is the nominal governing body of humanity, formed on Earth after the Great War. Its role is to regulate trade, resolve disputes, and license star systems to corporations—it was the ED that sold the Halcyon system to Halcyon Holdings. Despite presenting itself as a benevolent protector in its propaganda, the Directorate is a distant and slow-moving bureaucracy; a request for help from a colony can take a decade to be answered.
In The Outer Worlds 2, you are a Commander for the Earth Directorate, making the ED your starting faction. Your mission is to investigate the reality-bending rifts in the Arcadia colony. However, this mission is built on past failure: your first attempt ended in catastrophe due to the betrayal of Agent Augustine De Vries, resulting in a massive rift and you being lost in space for a decade.
Found adrift a decade later, you return to an Arcadia cut off from Earth. As the Commander, you are now a symbol of a fading authority, tasked with uncovering the truth behind the rifts and the betrayal that stranded you, determining the final legacy of the Earth Directorate in the colony.
The Protectorate
| Location | Arbiter Training Facility, Euphoria Coast Automech Repair Centre, Ministry of Accuracy, Skycutter A102, The Bridge of the Reverent, Vox Relay |
| Companions | Tristan Rao |
The Protectorate of Arcadia is the authoritarian ruling faction of the Arcadia colony. Its immense wealth and power are derived directly from its founder, who was the original inventor of the “Skip Drive”—the faster-than-light engine that enabled interstellar colonisation. This technological monopoly has made the Protectorate the dominant force in the region.
Officially, the Protectorate is governed by the law of Sovereign Henry Varick, but in practice, true control is wielded by Consul Emory Thoreau. This regime not only controls several colonies but also bears the direct responsibility for resolving the catastrophic crisis it inadvertently caused: the reality-bending rifts tearing through the colony, which were a direct result of its own Skip Drive technology. The Protectorate’s actions are now focused on containing this threat to maintain its grip on power and preserve its legacy.
Auntie’s Choice
| Location | Fairfield, Fort Endurance, Outpost Opportunity, Paradise Island, Sovereign’s Sweet Spire Grove |
| Companions | Inez Silang |
Auntie’s Choice is the result of a brutal corporate merger between two infamous corporations from the original game: the unethical pharmaceutical giant Auntie Cleo and the cut-rate manufacturer Spacer’s Choice. After a failed hostile takeover attempt by Spacer’s Choice backfired, Auntie Cleo absorbed its rival entirely, forming a new, powerful corporate entity – Auntie’s Choice.
This new capitalistic venture drove them to invade the Arcadia colony under the guise of “liberating” its rich resources, aiming to strip the system for profit.
The Order of the Ascendant
| Location | Excogitation Chapel, Matriarch’s Mercy, N-Ray Range, Zyranium Manufactory VII |
| Companions | Marisol Delgado |
The Order of the Ascendant is a science-based faction with a quasi-religious mission to solve the “universal equation” for the benefit of all mankind. They are born from a doctrinal schism within the Order of Scientific Inquiry (OSI), the science-based religion that served The Protectorate.
The OSI’s core belief is that a “Grand Architect” set a perfect universal system in motion, a design they call the Grand Plan. They teach that everything, including a person’s social role, is predestined, and that contentment comes from accepting one’s assigned place. Their ultimate goal is to decode this Grand Plan by solving the universal equation that governs all reality.
The Order of the Ascendant eventually broke away from The Protectorate, believing that the pursuit of knowledge should be used for universal enlightenment rather than as a tool to control the populace. While the original OSI uses its beliefs to enforce social order and control the masses, the Ascendants pursue the universal equation for more ambitious and idealistic reasons. This schism defines them as a faction of idealistic, if dogmatic, scientists pursuing their own grand vision for humanity’s future.
Glorious Dawn
| Location | Decommissioned Autonomous Extractorium, N-Ray Range |
| Companions | Aza |
A cult that worships the rifts.
Sub Rosa
| Location | Free Market Station, Matriarch’s Mercy |
| Companions | – |
Sub Rosa is the premier black market faction operating covertly across the colonies of Arcadia. Far more than simple smugglers, they are a sophisticated network of merchants, information brokers, and commodity traders who deal exclusively outside the confines of legal systems. Their members specialise in acquiring and moving anything that is forbidden, rare, or too dangerous for public trade, making them the essential faction for players who operate in the shadows.
Players will first encounter this clandestine group through Emeline Galloway at Fairfield on Paradise Island, who offers the Commander an opportunity to earn extra bits and the “friendship” of Sub Rosa across the system. Building a positive reputation with them is a wise investment for both short-term gains and long-term prospects, as they can provide unique goods, crucial information, and solutions that are impossible to acquire through legal means. As Emeline Galloway aptly states, “Sub Rosa feeds that appetite to not just survive – but to thrive.”
