When The Outer Worlds 2 throws a moral curveball, it doesn’t hold back. One such example happens during the “On the Trail of the Traitor” main quest when you reach Alexandra Monastery and Seer Wiley forces you into a split-second judgment call: save a pair of innocent hostages or ignore their cries to chase Wiley before he ends up doing what he wants.
The choice seems simple — hero or pragmatist — but as with most things in Obsidian games, it’s never that simple. Saving them earns goodwill and reputation, while leaving them behind saves time and spares you tough fights later. Here’s what each choice means for your journey and whether you save the hostages or not in The Outer Worlds 2.
Where to Find the Hostages in The Outer Worlds
Halfway through On the Trail of the Traitor mission, you encounter the hostage choice after tracking Seer Landon Wiley and his Order acolytes in the Golden Ridge region.
Inside a side chamber in Alexandra Monastery, you’ll find two Order members restrained behind a purple-tinted containment screen — terrified, shouting for help. Above them looms a massive pneumatic press, primed to crush them the moment you move on. “Be a Hero” door on the right leads you into the orb puzzle, a mechanical contraption Wiley designed to waste your time while he transmits security codes to De Vries.
That’s where you need to decide: do you stop and solve the puzzle to free them, or ignore it and sprint after Seer Wiley?
What Happens If You Save the Hostages?
If you decide to save the captives, you’ll have to complete the orb puzzle. It’s a multi-step sequence that involves guiding a big, colorful orb through switches, levers, and barriers until it drops down through the ground hole and unlocks the Auto-Pneumatic Keypunch Card on the bottom floor. Plug that card into the main console, choose “Disable Keypunch Cycle”, and the press halts inches above the captives’ heads.
Saving them earns you +3 reputation with the Order of Ascension. You further hear a brief radio log that confirms Wiley transmitted his codes when you were busy saving the hostages, which affects the next main quest, Fiends in High Places. Because you spent time somewhere else, De Vries successfully received the codes and took control of the Automech defenses at Greater Tranquility Station. When you infiltrate it next, you’ll have a lot of Automechs to fight, which obviously makes things hard. Though they’re worth decent XP and loot, and you can completely neutralize them if you have Hack level 4 or a Bypass Shunt.
What Happens If You Ignore or Kill the Hostages?
If you ignore the hostages and head toward Wiley’s chamber, the game locks in your decision when you pass the observatory threshold — the hostages die off-screen, and the Alexandra Monastery fills with grim silence. You’ll lose -3 reputation points towards the Order faction, but will get to Seer Wiley on time. That means he will fail to send security codes to De Vries, and the Automech systems at Tranquility Station will remain partially offline.
So during Fiends in High Places, you won’t have many enemies to deal with. De Vries gets disappointed that Wiley failed to secure her control, and Niles (if present) or Valerie will note your “ruthless behavior.”
There’s also a third, darker route in which you can save the hostages by completing the puzzle and activating the keypunch cycle to kill them yourself. The result will be the same: you ignore the hostages (reputation loss, fewer enemies in the next mission), and companions like Valerie or Corbin will voice their disgust.
Should You Save or Leave the Hostages in The Outer Worlds 2?
From a gameplay perspective, neither decision largely affects the storyline other than the consequences for the next quest. If your build is charisma or faction-aligned, you should save the hostages. The extra fights are manageable with good weapons, and it’s easy to offset them with the Hack skill or smart loadouts. Further, the Order of Ascension’s rep bonus pays off later when new dialogue options unlock with different merchants and NPCs.
If you want to be a cold, pragmatic, or speedrun-type captain, you might think to let the captives die to shave minutes off the quest and reduce the next Fiends in High Places quest’s friction. You won’t miss out on major loot or content, and it reinforces a “whatever it takes” kind of roleplay.
We recommend saving hostages because you can kill Automechs no matter how many of them come at you, but killing innocents isn’t a sensible person’s choice. The Order’s gratitude, your crew’s reactions, and the later references to your compassion make it one of the small Obsidian moments that flesh out who your commander really is in the game.
Before you encounter Seer Wiley, we recommend you to complete Imprisoned by the Riddles of Reality side quest because you can earn either a good weapon or strong armor based on the choice you make during this mission.
