From the very first moments of The Outer Worlds 2, you are introduced to Augustine de Vries, Earth Directorate Agent and planner of the Horizon Point mission. And as soon as you finish that mission, you learn that Augustine’s prickly exterior is a means of hiding her double-crossing, leaving you, Niles, and all the others for dead.
And now, you’ve finally caught up with her at the Greater Tranquility Station. And de Vries hasn’t given up on The Plan, with her own plan to assassinate the delegates of Auntie’s Choice and The Order from ever achieving an alliance. Of course, you don’t need to care about all that. You’re heading there to finally mete out some justice to Augustine.
Preparing For The Fiends In High Places Quest
Before we get started on this main story quest, we need to do some groundwork. First off, you will not be able to return to the Greater Tranquility Station after completing this mission, so be thorough while you’re there, and be confident in the companions you bring too, since you can’t change them after landing.
Building on that, you cannot leave the Greater Tranquility Station after starting this mission, so finish up everything you need to do before then. While you won’t lose access to most quests after finishing this one, it can be helpful to be prepared. So if you have any lingering companion quests, get those done first.
Depending on how you handled Seer Wiley in On The Trail Of A Traitor, the enemies you face during this mission will change. If you chose to save the Order members from his trap, he will have the time to send on station codes to de Vries, allowing her to control the automechs in the station. However, if you have enough points in the Hack Skill, this is basically a non-issue.
Finally, as you might expect, Niles has quite a long history with De Vries of his own, so bringing him will dramatically change the final confrontation with her. As such, you may want to be careful in bringing him if you plan on being sympathetic to Augustine. We’ll go into more detail on what we mean below, but just bear in mind that Niles has no intent on forgiving her, much less agreeing with her.
Exploring The Greater Tranquility Station
You begin in the landing zone of the Greater Tranquility Station, with another conspicuous ship right across from yours. This is Augustine’s and, if you have the Scrapper Perk, you can interact with the Earth Directorate satellite in her ship. That’s all there is to interact with here though, so head on down after this.
If you didn’t acquire the P.A.L.E boots to give you a double jump, you can still lower the barriers around her ship by interacting with the various panels and terminals around the areas, provided you have enough Engineering or Hack Skill points.
As you make your way inside, you’ll come face-to-face with one of de Vries soldiers, who you can chat to for a bit first. However, if you can’t pass any of the Skill checks, you’ll just have to fight them before they can give up any information. If you head, you’ll find a terminal that allows you to download the Greater Tranquility Station Targeting Protocol, which will be helpful soon.
There’s not much more to this beginning section. Pick up the Greater Tranquility Station Fuse and pop it into the nearby console to activate the moving platform, bringing you over to the first large section of the station.
First Section
After arriving in this first section, you will see a large room ahead of you with a helpful window you can look through. With lots of enemies and automechs. This is where the Greater Tranquility Station Targeting Protocol comes in handy. With this, you can make the automechs target everyone. So yes, they will still try to kill you, but they might also get destroyed by de Vries soldiers first.
You can also choose to disable them entirely if you have enough Hack Skill, which will allow you to still destroy them for experience and resources but without them ever aggroing. Regardless of your choice (or lack thereof), head into the room. One of the Order Traitors in here will have the Greater Tranquility Maintenance Access keycard, so make sure to pick this up to widen the areas you can explore.
Bear in mind that if you disable the automechs and then reload, they may reactivate and attack you. So maybe try destroy them first.
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On the east side of this area on the lower section, if you have a high enough Observation Skill (or by chance, if you brought Tristan along), there is a hidden door you can find. Opening this, you can find a small room with a great assortment of items. These include the Greater Tranquility Staff Log, the Erica Wang Pitchball Card, and a Verachnid Mine Charge. Head back to the main room after this.
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From here, we can proceed forward two different ways, either by the lower section with the maintenance card we got earlier, or above it, which may be a faster route if you’ve already taken down all the enemies. Both ultimately lead to the same location, which is the next console that requires a fuse. If you hacked the previous console, you can use the first fuse you found here. Or just hack it again.
If you need another fuse, then there will be a moving fan nearby. Use your Tactical Time Dilation to slow it down and walk through it, eventually bringing you towards another station fuse to use. Just make your way back up and slot it into the console before proceeding across the platform into the second major section of the station.
Second Section
After you cross the platform, you’ll get more updates on how the peace talks are going on the big screen. Thankfully, this section is completely devoid of enemies, so take your time looking around. There should be some lockers you can rummage through here, with one of them holding the Ryan Powell Pitchball Card.
We also have a wonderfully friendly Vendor Mech here, which seems oddly redundant on a decommissioned space station, but is wonderfully helpful for us! He has some great items in stock, including an Advanced Decryption Key and the Black Hat, which allows you to Hack automechs from a distance.
Now, you could buy these if you wanted. But, if you have the Lockpick Skill to open his door, you can just walk in and take them. He’ll throw some verbal insults your way and will be very rude when you try to buy from him again, but you won’t actually suffer any consequences. Who is your money even going to when you buy from him anyway?
After you’ve thoroughly flushed his stock out, you can head forward to the next room, which has our platform that is used to carry us forward. This time however, you really do need to use up a Station Fuse. Interestingly, there are no new ones to find here, Instead, there is a room that is already open, powered by a fuse that you can remove. If you already have excess fuses though, you don’t have to worry about this and can put pop a spare fuse into the platform console further ahead.
Inside the already open room, you’ll deal with quite a few Verachnid Mines, so take them out quickly before they self-destruct. There’s not too much else of interest in here, other than some notes from Mechanist De Soto on why exactly the Verachnid Mines exist. Just make sure to use the Gas-Energy Deflection Apparatus to avoid taking any zyranium poisoning.
After that, proceed over to the platform to advance to the final major section.
Final Section
After crossing over, you’ll be in a wonderfully, ominously red room with some great big machines you can’t get anywhere near. This is an entirely linear corridor, but make sure to get the Siri Xie Pitchball Card from the container on the caddy, and examine the notepad if you have the Skills to do so. Make your way into the main room.
This is a fun section, but one you mostly have to play by the game’s own rules. Once you ascend the stairs here, you’ll be immediately detected and put into a ranged battle. Any long-range weapons you have, such as Sniper Rifles and Marksman Rifles will be a massive help here. You don’t have to defeat these enemies right now, though it will make your remaining tasks a whole lot easier.
However, before you actually climb those steps, focus on the consoles behind them. You will see assembly lines of automechs being worked on in the back. These can be hacked to stop any automechs being deployed during your encounter with the snipers. With just three points in the Hack Skill, you’ll be able to disable a few of the bays, limiting the number of automechs that can spawn. With eight points in Hack, you can disable them all, removing the ability for them to appear at all.
Alright, with all this sorted, we need to activate the bridge. If you managed to read the notepad in the previous room, you should already know what to do. There are fuses on each end of the raised walkway, and both must be removed to open the lower rooms where they must be placed. After being removed, use Tactical Time Dilation to walk through the fans and place the fuses in the consoles below.
After each of the fuses is placed, the bridge will connect both sides, allowing you to advance but also for any remaining enemies to close the gap. After you’re dealt with them all, proceed through the next room and into the elevator to get to the final floor.
Confronting De Vries
After you come through the elevator, you’ll hear the final debate between the Auntie’s Choice and Order delegates. This next section is entirely linear, so loot the corpses along the way for some extra ammo and bits, but otherwise proceed right ahead until you reach the room de Vries is in.
We’d recommend making a save before this. Even though there are ultimately only two ways this can end, your choices in conversation very much determine how the conversation flows.
As you enter, Augustine immediately turns her attention towards you and away from the delegates. After the first few prompts, you are free to kill her whenever you want. She’s not a hard fight by any means. She is just one person, after all. But you might want to take the time to hear her out and understand why she did what she did. You’ve been waiting ten years for the answer.
She explains the rifts, how they are destroying the entire Arcadia star system, and that the rift modulator is needed to control them before they destroy everything. And in her eyes, only the Order can be trusted with them. But not the order as it stands now. It is misguided, and aligning itself with Auntie’s Choice would only lead to a delayed, mutually-ensured destruction. Only by removing the chance of a peace deal now can real peace be achieved. In her eyes.
If Niles is in the party, the conversation will take a dramatic turn here. He will urge you to stop listening to her. She betrayed you all once, and she’ll do it again. If you’ve earned Niles’ trust and spoken to him about his feelings on Augustine, you’ll get him to calm down here. He won’t be happy with it, but he’ll let you ask some more questions.
You can also ask Niles to recall the advice you gave him at the beginning of the game here, where he will directly reference exactly what you said to him.
From here, you can allow de Vries to plead her case, and it’s up to you to decide whether or not you agree. This is a pretty major decision as you can imagine, so think long-and-hard about it. If you do choose to support de Vries, Niles will be none too happy about it. And if you can’t talk him down further with enough Speech, he will turn on you, making you kill him then and there.
Following this, de Vries will kill both delegates, and give you over all the information she has before saying she’s going to disappear herself, leaving her dream in your hands. With the delegates dead, this also all but guarantees that Auntie’s Choice and the Order will neither find peace nor align themselves with each other in future.
On the flip side, should you choose to still oppose de Vries, you’ll have to kill her, though this prevents the assassination of the delegates. This in turn allows you to later set-up an alliance with Auntie’s Choice and the Order if you help both organisations enough. It’s not a full peace deal, but it at least works to extend the ceasefire and lay the groundwork for something more concrete down the line.
Escaping The Greater Tranquility Station
Regardless of the decision you make, the rift suddenly expands, causing the station to slowly begin to be consumed by it. As you can expect, that’s not a good thing. And even Aza, who’s a pretty big fan of all things rift-related, urges you to maybe not witness its splendour right now. Make sure to pick up any loot dropped by de Vries, including her unique Sniper Rifle, before making your escape.
De Vries’ rifle, The Simplifier, is obscene. It has an effective range of 25,000 metres, no damage fall-off, near-perfect accuracy, and has a multi-level zoom scope. It is a beast of a weapon.
Thankfully, the escape from the station is much faster than your way there. New routes open as the station begins its collapse, letting you shoot a direct course right towards your ship. Hop aboard quickly and watch as the Greater Tranquility Station gets absorbed by the expanding rift.
If you look into the sky on any planet now, you can visibly see the expanded rift. Neat!
With everything with de Vries finally settled, you’ll now have two new planets you can travel to as part of the story. And if he’s still alive, make sure to chat to Niles. Depending on how you handled the mission, he’ll have some feelings he’ll want to unpack.
