It’s been a little bit since The Outer Worlds 2 got that November patch aiming to take care of mysterious eyebrow disappearances. I wonder what the latest one, which is fairly beefy, does. Oh, it adds a number of handy features like the option to advance time by waiting, toggle walking via key press, and extra stealth kill animations.

Nice and boring. Oh, wait. “Gary will no longer attack the player from beyond the veil”. “Fixed cases where some NPCs could see the player while they were wearing the bucket hat”. “The pit outside of the entrance to Algid Menagerie will now always kill the player as intended”. “NPCs should no longer moonwalk, despite being in space”.

These are just some of the snigger-worthy bug fixes Obsidian have packed into patch 1.1.0.0 and subsequently scrawled in its notes. Tragically, despite that November patch’s best efforts, this one is also still dealing with misbehaving hair, delivering a fix for the player’s facial hair disappearing when wearing “certain helmets”.

Providing a bit more detail on the quality-of-life additions before I attempt to unpick why someone called Gary’s trying to murder us all, the new waiting mechanic works exactly how these things typically do in Obsidian and Bethesda RPGs. Pull up the pause menu, and you can advance up to 24 hours in time. The new stealth slaughter animations can trigger if you hit someone with a melee weapon like the impact hammer, plasma Cutter, stun baton, tossball blocker, and sentry blade. Pressing your Y key now toggles walking over running. Oh, and you can now rebind the buttons on a PS5 or Xbox controller if they’re your input device of choice.

Right, now for more weirdness. This Gary plays a major role in the patch notes. Not only has he been prevented from retreating “beyond the veil” to attack folks, wherever beyond the veil might be, he can also no longer be targeted by companion commands or get together with an unnamed friend to “interrogate the player for crimes”. I’ll be honest, having not played The Outer Worlds 2 since I sunk just over 40 hours into it for review last year, I couldn’t recall having encountered a Gary so famous to be referred to mononymously off the top of my head.

As it turns out, he’s a bit of unique sentient armour I must have missed picking up during my playthrough, with the ability to lash spiny tendrils out at enemies every so often. So, it’d seem the his beyond the veil attacks were just a case of spiny tendril friendly fire, and the rest’s due to the game mistaking him for an NPC. The more you know.

There’s one more note from this patch I want to mention again. “The pit outside of the entrance to Algid Menagerie will now always kill the player as intended”. Death pit now functions as a death pit. You love to see it.

Maybe I should try and fit in another Outer Worlds 2 run soon, especially since it sounds like it won’t be getting a follow-up any time soon.