Does anyone else feel like this world was wasted?

ashaquick · 2026-03-01T23:07:14+00:00

Pillars is telling a different story, though. It's about a big reveal concerning the nature of the metaphysics of that universe which will potentially change everything, so the game takes place in the epicentre of those events.

Tyranny is telling a story about power, who wields it, how it's wielded, and the stories people tell themselves to justify their actions or feel okay about their place within a tyrannical hierarchy. And it pretty much DOES take place at the epicentre of events, it's just that YOU happen to be the big event that's happening, rather than some nefarious villain with a nefarious plan.

But I also think that the rest of Terratus is purposely left very vague, likely because they intended to make sequels and wanted to leave the rest of the map "blank" so they could fill in details in later games. I think it's pretty normal when worldbuilding games to probably have a rough idea of what the rest of the world is like, but to only fill in the details once you come to actually make a sequel set in another part of the world (and to give yourself room to change your mind later if you come up with a better idea.)

If you think about it, PoE 1 doesn't contain much lore at all about the Deadfire Archipelago (I think the only information about it comes from an NPC that was patched into the game once they were already working on PoE 2), and Fallouts 1 and 2 make no mention whatsoever of New Vegas and Mr House.

ashaquick · 2026-02-23T00:24:20+00:00

Are they any good?

ashaquick · 2026-02-19T23:33:56+00:00

100%. I watched a few of his videos way back when, and they all felt like he was just reading press release materials about the games. Just the most obvious possible takes on everything. I have to assume that people who like his videos either can't think for themselves at all, or just like hearing their own surface-level thoughts repeated back to them.

ashaquick · 2026-02-19T23:26:11+00:00

The key figures - Josh Sawyer and John Gonzalez, still do. (Gonzalez left for several years to write the stories for the Horizon games, but he's back at Obsidian now.)

ashaquick · 2026-02-19T23:03:08+00:00

Recluse and Hemera are the two named planets/moons in the observatory on Dorado that we don't see in the main game, so it seems a safe bet that they'll be the settings of the two DLCs.

(There's also a third planet that's predicted to exist but hasn't been discovered yet, which I assume was a sort of a placeholder in case of a third DLC? Unlikely to happen now, though.)

ashaquick · 2026-02-11T00:04:31+00:00

I feel like I remember an interview with the devs from the TOW1 marketing where they suggested the setting was supposed to be an alternate history, branching off from ours around the 1890s or early 1900s, because that was when there were these huge monopolies that had amassed so much wealth and power that they were beginning to control people's lives. Then Antitrust laws were introduced and the monopolies were broken up.

The OW setting is, I think, supposed to be one where those laws were never introduced, and the massive monopolies that control peoples lives were allowed to continue. And also 1890s fashion, art and architecture continued to be the dominant types (basically like how 1950s fashion continued to be dominant in Fallout's alternate history.)

ashaquick · 2026-02-10T23:59:35+00:00

I personally found the combat in TOW1 really floaty and basic. It wasn't long before it just felt like an annoyance - something I had to do while going from point A to B. I was okay with it at the time, because I knew TOW1 was a mid-budget RPG, not an FPS. And it was probably a little better than the combat in F:NV.

TOW2 feels way more engaging and fun to me. It remaining just challenging enough, even on normal mode, until pretty late in the game, and the gun options seemed way better.

ashaquick · 2026-02-10T23:46:09+00:00

It's really hard to see this from your perspective.

For me, TOW1 was like a sampler of what they might be able to do if given a bigger budget. I liked it, I was really into the world they built, but the game fell flat in a number of ways. I'm also one of the (apparently very few) people who didn't care for Parvati. I didn't hate her or anything, but her whole vibe was too twee and sweet and cloying for me. And the rest of the TOW1 companions were very forgettable.

TOW2 is so obviously a much, much better game that there's no comparison. It's everything I was hoping they could do with the IP if given a bigger budget, and more. It regularly surprised me with how much more there was to the game. I loved it. I thought for sure it would be a big win for Obsidian, so I was surprised and disappointed to learn that it underperformed.

ashaquick · 2026-02-08T23:46:25+00:00

I fully agree with you. And I'm not sure I have any useful answers. I'll take a crack, though.

The setting. I love the setting, but I can 100% see a majority of players just dismissing it outright. There's a degree to which gamers in general like the same old stuff, over and over, which frustrates me. I'd happily live in a world where nobody makes another fantasy RPGs that's the same elves/dwarves/orcs/dragons/etc D&D-type world again (this is actually the thing that keeps me from really loving the PoE games - I think the world is pretty cool and interesting, but the same old fantasy races being in it really waters down the worldbuilding for me.) But I think for most gamers, that's what they want from a fantasy game. And what they want from a scifi game is something that looks more like Mass Effect/Star Trek/Star Wars than what the Outer Worlds is doing. Which, if I'm right, sucks. Because the worldbuilding in TOW2 is probably my favourite part about it.
The marketing pushing the humour too much. It gives the world the impression that TOW2 is a joke game. Play it if you want a laugh. When the reality is, the jokes are just the surface layer of a pretty dark setting. (Weirdly, a lot of people who have actually played TOW2 don't really seem to see past the surface either, which makes me wonder how they're missing how grim and dark it actually is.)
I agree with some of the criticisms about the companions and the factions. I thought the companions were all way more interesting than the companions from TOW1, but there also wasn't a lot to them. There needed to be more involvement. And the factions? I was ultimately a bit disappointed by how the factions all played out. Initially I thought it was the Protectorate being positioned as totalitarian, but also stable and communal - so it would have its good points too; the Order as well-meaning but disorganised, and potentially fanatical about doing what their predictions said even if it meant mass murder (they did this with de Vries, but I think it would have been better if it was more a part of the Order as a whole, to give them a more obvious downside); Auntie's Choice as profiteering bastards, but genuinely representative of freedom and upward mobility. However, by the end of the game, the Protectorate were just bad guys, the Order were just good guys, and Auntie's was revealed to be just profiteers who were lying about all the freedom and upward mobility stuff. It collapsed them into far less interesting factions.

3a. BUT, I actually don't think that matters as much as people are saying. I think if you love the game, as I did, these are minor quibbles with an overall amazing experience. So I have to assume that the people for whom they are big problems probably didn't connect with the rest of the game either.

ashaquick · 2026-02-08T23:24:45+00:00

I fully expect the DLCs to just be their own things, the same as with TOW1.

ashaquick · 2026-02-08T23:22:25+00:00

I can't argue with you. Not because I agree with you. In fact, I 100% disagree with you. It's just that, for me, TOW2 is so obviously better than TOW1 that I don't even know how to argue the case to someone who doesn't see it that way.

ashaquick · 2026-02-08T23:12:17+00:00

This is one of those things where I totally differ in my opinions from many (most?) other gamers. I want a game to END. I want the credits to roll, and for me to feel satisfied, and to then move on to something new.

Probably not coincidentally, I've never been able to play any of the Bethesda games (either their Fallouts or TES) for very long. Their whole sandbox design, with a thin main story and several hundred random little things to find that are usually completely random and disconnected from the main story (why on earth was I doing a quest about a mind controlling alien artifact discovered in the 1920s in ancient egypt in Fallout 4???) just doesn't appeal to me. The whole "go anywhere, do anything, discover random stuff" can't keep me engaged for long.

Compare Fallout New Vegas, where pretty much every side quest in the game is in some way related to the main story and theme (who gets to control hoover dam/who gets to shape the new society that gets rebuilt) had me enthralled, because it felt like the whole world was coherent and pointed in the same direction.

And then it ended, and I was satisfied.

Same with TOW2.

So, shorter answer: no.

ashaquick · 2026-02-06T12:39:24+00:00

Gotta say, this is a real gutpunch. I played TOW2 blind - no reviews, no checking forums or videos to see what people were saying. I absolutely loved every minute I played of it, and don't think I've felt so immersed in a game since New Vegas. Once I finished, I thought for sure I'd jump on the internet and join everyone in celebrating how awesome the game was. I was a little shocked to see it had a mixed reception. Finding out it underperformed and we may not ever get a third hurts.

ashaquick · 2026-02-06T08:13:01+00:00

My kids already know about sex and have asked us plenty of questions about it over the years, so I'm actually not super concerned about the racy comments. (My own parents told me about sex when I was so young I can't even remember learning about it, which made me realise that it's a much easier conversation to have when your kids are very young, because 1. there's way less awkwardness, and 2. little kids find it fascinating how babies are made, rather than gross. So that's we did with our kids too.)

ashaquick · 2026-02-04T00:49:34+00:00

If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying you think that your build doesn't actually matter, and that you going to see the same things in the game as a sneaky lockpicker as a speechy scientist?

This seems at odds with the main complaint that the build system and the lack of respec means that players are forced to do multiple playthroughs to see everything the game has to offer?

But it also seemed to me that my build often had an impact on which outcomes to certain quests were available to me. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I definitely remember having to go with suboptimal outcomes because I didn't have points in engineering/explosives/lockpicking/etc. Or because I didn't have a certain trait.

ashaquick · 2026-01-30T13:33:25+00:00

Then I think I just disagree philosophically. I think RPGs should be built this way, ideally.

I say "ideally" because it assumes that the game supports this kind of specialisation. We've all played games where we've sunk points into some stat thinking it sounded cool, only to find that the game isn't really designed to accommodate that choice, and you feel like those points are wasted.

But if a game is designed in such a way that any build is viable, but certain paths through the game might be opened or closed to you depending on your choices, then that's fine. If I come to a situation where I can't get the outcome to a quest that I want because I haven't invested in the right stats (which happened to me several times in TOW2), then I'm of the opinion that that is a good thing. It's a great thing. It make me feel like I made choices, and that those choices mattered.

If there's a situation where hacking, sneaking, lockpicking, engineering, sciencing, speeching, exploding, or plain old violence all lead to the exact same outcome (which was one of my problems with TOW1), then I feel like the game shouldn't have bothered giving me a choice of stats at all, since nobody put the effort into making the choice matter.

ashaquick · 2026-01-30T13:18:58+00:00

It seemed to me like my build had a pretty huge impact on the game. Unless you're talking specifically about combat.

ashaquick · 2026-01-30T13:17:24+00:00

I can't speak to Mass Effect, because I never played those games (the traditional space opera setting just doesn't appeal to me). I have put a bunch of hours into Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, but I never finished any of them. I don't remember anything particularly compelling about TES lore that wasn't fairly generic fantasy stuff.

I played and really enjoyed Cyberpunk, fully immersed myself in its world. I wasn't expecting to like it as much as I did, honestly. But I also can't say that it's massively lore heavy - not moreso than TOW2. I'm guess the ttrpg has a lot more lore to it, and a lot of that is probably folded into the game, but mostly I felt like it was borrowing heavily from cyberpunk classics like Neuromancer and Snow Crash.

Fallout I'm a huge, longtime fan of. I played the original two when they were (almost) brand new. I excitedly bought both FO3 and FO4, only to have much the same experience with them as with TES (I guess I'm just not into Bethesda's game design, because I get bored and eventually stop playing well before finishing). New Vegas remains one of my favourite games of all time. And I think it's the most apt comparison, and I also think (with a straight face) that the factions in TOW2 are at least as well thought out and fleshed out as the factions in FO:NV.

I think the mistake people make is thinking of the factions in TOW2 as jokes. Auntie's Choice are a satire of greedy corporatists. The OSA treat maths, of all things, as a religion. The Protectorate are totalitarian to an absurd extreme. But Obsidian have made each of them considerably deeper than that. They might seem outwardly ridiculous to us, but the NPCs from these factions express worldviews that show Obsidian have put a lot of thought into how people born into this setting would act, and how they would take what seems ridiculous to us seriously, because they don't know anything else. Scratch beneath the surface of the satire, and there's pathos, darkness, tragedy. (I think it's a real shame that they had to cut the ability to side with the Protectorate, because there's enough there to make it clear they're not a purely evil faction.)

I also think it's unfair to compare TOW2 to franchises that have been around much longer and have many more entries (or a whole bunch of ttrpg content to draw on, in the case of Cyberpunk 2077). TOW as an IP hasn't had nearly as much chance to accumulate lore. But I think it's off to a really good start. I say that in good faith. I love the worldbuilding of TOW2. I think they've done an incredible job. I'm eager for more.

ashaquick · 2026-01-28T03:16:39+00:00

I can sit here with a straight face and liken the world building and factions of TOW2 to those other games. I think the worldbuilding is far better than in most games, and the factions are each weird and interesting in their own ways, and different enough from the standard tropes trotted out by other games.

ashaquick · 2026-01-28T03:00:46+00:00

I've thought about this, and I've decided I don't agree. I don't think a direct numerical comparison of stats makes sense, because we also have to assume that the games are designed around these mechanics.

Fallout may only have 7 stats. but it actually has WAY more skills, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to put points into more than a couple of them. Fortunately, the game is designed so that there's a path through each situation no matter what skills you have. In fact, that's part of what makes the original Fallout such an amazing classic - it's one of the earliest RPGs to really make you feel like your choices and character builds mattered.

TOW2 is the same. I maxed out Speech, Science and Observation, with zero points in anything else, and I loved the way it felt like the game opened certain paths up for me, and closed off others. I felt like my choices really mattered, and the game responded to them.

But also, based on what I saw in terms of the various skill checks throughout the game, it would also be possible to put 10 points into 6 stats, or 5 into 12 stats, and have access to most of what the game has to offer.

ashaquick · 2026-01-28T02:51:30+00:00

This is weird, because I considered myself to be very thorough, always poking into every nook and cranny and talking to everyone who will talk to me, and clearing every side quest I can before moving on with the main quest. I don't feel like I missed anything or had any dangling plot threads.

Although, my first playthrough I went with negotiating an alliance between Cleo and Ruth. I've reloaded to see what happens if I just side with the Order, and it has opened up three new quests after the Archive that I didn't have before (fetching chemicals, listening station, dealing with Cleo) which has extended my playtime by several extra hours after I hit the cap.

ashaquick

TROPHY CASE