It’s a ridiculous and anti-climactic ending that few players will stumble across in a typical playthrough of The Outer Worlds. Yet it’s one that holds true to the spirit of a tradition — one that spans more than 20 years and three studios — where various developers have been slipping a certain sort of secret into their games with little fanfare since the original Fallout was released in 1997.
Here’s how the Easter egg generally works: Typically, when a player sets their stats like strength, endurance, and whatnot at the beginning of an RPG, any relative strengths or weaknesses only influence gameplay, not the flow of the central plot (other than possibly locking players out of alternate routes if they can’t pass certain skill checks). But when you give yourself low intelligence in Fallout, for example, you act stupid. And I mean really stupid. Out of the game’s 10-point scale, setting your character’s intelligence to 3 or below (though that threshold varies in games that later continued this tradition) makes you so dumb that other NPCs notice and comment on it throughout your journey. Some of them quite meanly.
Activating “dumb” mode, as it’s called, adds a number of new dialogue options and NPC responses, and it drastically alters some side quests and completely locks you out of others — usually because you’re too much of an idiot to figure out what’s going on (and the inhabitants scrounging about a post-nuclear wasteland aren’t exactly keen to waste their time spelling it out for you).
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