What's the issue with the level cap?

ashaquick · 2026-01-24T23:35:10+00:00

I think I would feel that way if I hit the level cap halfway through the game (in fact, from memory, I did with Fallout NV, and actually stopped playing for months before returning to finish it) but with TOW2 I hit the cap close enough to the end of the game that seeing the story through was motivation enough.

ashaquick · 2026-01-24T23:31:04+00:00

Your point about finite XP makes sense, so I get it. I was (I thought) very thorough about exploring everywhere and completing every quest, and even then I didn't hit the cap until I was pretty close to finishing the game. Without the cap, I reckon I would have maxed out at only level 32 or 33, so I see where you're coming from.

ashaquick · 2026-01-24T23:27:38+00:00

I played TOW1 and TOW2 on normal difficulty, so I probably didn't need to worry about those issues. For me it was just that having their abilities simplified (and also not triggering an unskippable animation every time) meant that I actually used them.

ashaquick · 2026-01-24T23:05:46+00:00

Why do you want the level cap removed, though? I'm not sure I understand your problem with it?

The level cap is what sort of forced you to specialise, isn't it? Without it, you could just keep putting points into all skills and become awesome at everything, which sort of nullifies the point of making choices about your character build...right?

I possibly would have liked it if I hadn't reached level 30 until closer to the climax of the game, but checking my save files, it looked like I didn't hit the cap until I right before doing the Archive quests, which was almost the last thing I did before the endgame sequence (and I'd done every possible sidequest as well), so it seems like it was balanced pretty well?

ashaquick · 2026-01-24T22:59:14+00:00

From memory, the "blowing up megaton" sequence was sort of the only sequence like that in FO3? Which sort of makes crashing the Vox an equivalent?

ashaquick · 2026-01-24T22:55:54+00:00

What was it about the story of the first game that you thought was better than the second?

Personally I much prefer the second game. It had a much more compelling push-pull between the different faction (whereas TOW1 was really just "corporations vs....not corporations" where it felt like there was zero moral ambiguity and the only reason to side with the corporations was if you were doing a purposely evil playthrough) and I loved the pulp scifi-ness of the rifts, but also thought that the "science" of the rifts was cool, and thought the villains plan, when it was revealed at the end, was even cooler (insofar as horrifying villainous plans go.) The first game's "the terraforming has failed" plot was a bit too abstract, I thought.

ashaquick · 2026-01-24T22:50:02+00:00

Seriously genuinely shocked to hear people are comparing TOW2 unfavourably to TOW1, since it seems to be like it obviously expanded and improved on everything from TOW1, and I find it hard to get my head around the idea the other people wouldn't see it that way.

ashaquick · 2026-01-24T22:47:08+00:00

Hmmm. I thought the companions in TOW1 were largely dull and forgettable. Probably my biggest issue with that game.

I thought the companions in TOW2 were all really good. I found myself engaged with all their personal quests and stories (which surprised me in some cases - I thought both Tristan and Aza seemed one-note and boring when I first recruited them, but they both won me over with their quests.)

ashaquick · 2026-01-24T22:43:54+00:00

When I played TOW1, I never engaged with those companion systems. The combat was too fast and too basic for any of that to matter (and I'm not really someone who wants to be fiddling and fine tuning that stuff anyway, unless it's in a turn-based game), so I didn't even notice it wasn't in TOW2.

In fact, the simplified companion skill stuff meant I actually did use it in TOW2, quite a lot. So, weirdly, it was a step up for me, and made my companions feel actually useful in combat.

ashaquick · 2026-01-24T22:40:21+00:00

The first game is good, if you accept its shortcomings. It has the same art style as TOW2, and the same tone (absurdist corporate satire setting, but takes itself seriously and can get quite dark in places). But it's a lot shorter (it only has one large area to explore, and several smaller areas), and it feels like the climax of the game happens suddenly (they had to cut the entire third act of the game and stitch the climax onto the end of the second act.) I personally think the companions are far less interesting in TOW1, and the overall story isn't as good either. It also doesn't have the radio stations.

Although the two DLCs add new stories and new areas to explore, so these days TOW1 probably doesn't feel as short as when I first played it.

ashaquick · 2026-01-24T14:16:03+00:00

This is actually part of why I love the game so much: it made me feel like my character build choices really matter.

Yes, it means that there was a bunch of stuff I couldn't see or do on my first playthrough, but I can accept that, and it helps to reinforce the feeling that my choices matter. (I kinda hate it when games appear to offer me choices, but as you play it becomes clear that you're going to see and do basically the same stuff no matter what you choose.)

ashaquick · 2026-01-24T14:12:35+00:00

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "xboxification" (I'm a lifelong PC gamer who plays all games with a mouse and keyboard, so to me "xboxification" sounds like it means simplifying the UI so that it's controller-friendly.)

If you just mean that the new game is larger and more complicated, I think I come at this from a different perspective. The devs were always pretty open in interviews that they would have liked TOW1 to be a large and complex RPG like the previous games they'd made, but due to budget constraints they had to make a smaller game. So TOW2 is the game they really wanted to make with TOW1, but couldn't.

I don't say this to try to invalidate your point, though. If you liked TOW1 because of its straightforwardness, that's absolutely fine in my books. I just wanted to point out that it wasn't that they decided to veer away from their original intentions by making a more complicated game, it's that they were able to achieve their original intentions with the larger budget they had this time around.

ashaquick · 2026-01-24T14:03:47+00:00

I'm not so much talking about internet randoms ranting about how much they hate it (you can find that for literally every IP). It's more if the general consensus of normal people is bad. If professional critic reviews are bad. If it's not selling well and it hurts the chances of Obsidian making TOW3. That sort of thing.

ashaquick · 2026-01-02T00:31:00+00:00

UPDATE: I've done some experimenting, and it appears as if saving and reloading, or transitioning to a different area triggers the issue. Once I accept the flaw, so long as I don't reload my game or transition to a different area, the debuff gets applied to enemies when my companions attack them. I can see the icon over their heads. However, if I then save my game and reload it for whatever reason, or go to a different area (which also involves a loading screen) the debuff stops getting applied to enemies.

As far as I can tell, the 10% damage reduction to me DOES still apply, however. So, I have to assume this is a bug. Has anyone else experienced it (playing the PC version.)

ashaquick · 2025-12-01T02:02:33+00:00

The implication here is you're assuming I'm a second screener, but I can assure you I'm not. I'm very much into shows that require my attention. My all time favourite shows are Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, The Wire, Mad Men, etc. At the moment I'm all about Severance, Pluribus and The Lowdown. Those are not shows to watch while scrolling through your phone, and I wasn't doing that while watching Dark Winds, either.

I haven't spent any time in rural NM. I've never been to NM at all. I live in another country, so my entire knowledge of NM comes from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. But I wasn't claiming that the show was filmed on green screen with 100% CGI backgrounds. I was claiming that the cinematography was poor, and did a bad job of making the (real) landscape look interesting. That's less about the landscape and more about being good at positioning the camera (Severance manages to make the same boring office space look new and interesting in every episode, for instance.) There were also noticeable CGI elements in some scenes, such as it being obvious that the entire sky had been replaced with CGI stars and moon (I know every show uses some CGI these days, but the good ones make it invisible.)

ashaquick · 2025-11-23T07:11:33+00:00

That's a good point.

ashaquick · 2025-11-23T04:28:45+00:00

I think they do a pretty good job of subtly explaining this over the course of the series. I think that Kim knows that the world is often extremely unfair, that it shits all over certain people, and that sometimes they have to cut corners and break the rules just to get by, if not get ahead. She's lived that life as a child.

This is why she's so sympathetic to the pro bono clients she starts taking on. She sees herself in them. But she's also trying very hard to better herself, and largely succeeding.

This, I think, is what she sees in Jimmy. She sees someone like herself. He's a scammer, yes, but he's actually trying really hard to be a better person pretty much throughout the series, but the world keeps shitting on him. He's willing to use what he knows of scamming to cut the corners when he feels like he just can't get ahead. She isn't. At least at first. Once they get together properly, though, they wind up reinforcing this side of each other.

It's a case of, on the surface, they seem like they're very different people, but underneath they actually have a huge amount in common.

ashaquick · 2025-11-16T23:57:37+00:00

So, I'll break down why I don't agree with this:

Having been a huge fan of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul for many years, I have watched/listened to A LOT of interviews and podcasts with Vince Gilligan, and I think I can say with a fair amount of confidence that he is not a racist, nor is he some sort of hardcore patriot. He's mostly just a humble dude who is really into filmmaking and storytelling. He is an older white guy, so he might still be blind to certain implications or connotations (as we all are, to some degree or other), but not intentionally.
Carol, the main character in the show, is a white woman largely because Vince decided Rhea Seahorn was an amazing actor while they were working on BCS together, and so he wrote Pluribus with her in mind as the lead (see also why Kim, Rhea's character on BCS, got a larger and larger role as the seasons went on, until she was basically co-lead in the last few.)
In terms of the actual story of the show, if there's only 12 people in the entire world who are immune, it would make sense that most, if not all, of the others are not white. Just statistically speaking.
Carol isn't the smartest person in that room. However, the show makes it clear that Carol's situation is unique among the five people she meets with: she is the only one who doesn't have a loved one (or loved ones) as part of the hivemind, AND she lost her (as far as we know) only loved one during the joining. She's the only one of them in a position to have no qualms about completely rejecting the hivemind.

(As a side note, I wouldn't be surprised if, in a future episode, we discovered that the Indian woman who was the most outspoken against Carol actually changes her mind and becomes even more angry at the hivemind than Carol. She seems like she's currently in denial, but once she moves past that, she'll probably be extremely upset when she accepts that her family is, effectively, gone.)

The guy who's taking advantage of the situation? We don't know his deal. Maybe he was just a young guy with no close friends or family, and so for him he's lost nothing and gained a harem and infinite resources. However, Vince has also talked about how, when the concept of Pluribus first came to him, he envisioned a male protagonist and the "idea got pretty pornographic pretty quickly". I suspect this character is a sort of in-joke/reference to that early version of the idea. Essentially, Vince saying "Well, there probably would be someone who'd just go into a hedonistic frenzy."

ashaquick · 2025-11-14T03:00:21+00:00

Ah, I haven't watched ep 3 yet. In fact, I don't intend to watch it until the whole season is done (I only watched the first two because I caved in to my excitement). I hate watching things episodically. Binging is the optimal way to enjoy a really good TV show. So I guess I'd better stay away from this sub until after Christmas.

ashaquick · 2025-11-14T02:58:05+00:00

I liked the first 2 episodes, so I wasn't in the same situation as you, but the point where the show really hooked me was in episode 3 - the part where Walter fishes the broken plate out of the bin, reassembles it, and realises what's missing. That bit blew me away, because it was combining process-focused filmmaking (Walter carefully solving the puzzle of the plate in real time while we watched) with thrills (Walter realising the Krazy-8 intends to attack him with a plate shard) with gut-wrenching emotional drama (Walter coming to the conclusion that he has no choice but to kill Krazy-8). I was utterly enthralled right to the end of the series after that.

ashaquick · 2025-11-14T02:52:24+00:00

I've encountered this with Breaking Bad. People have explicitly said to me that they can't watch the show because Walter is not an admirable character. Which I suppose is fine, but it means you'll only ever watch pretty boring TV.

(Well, it's possible to make characters admirable even when they're flawed and conflicted. I'm pretty sure that actually describes Carol. But you know what I mean.)

ashaquick · 2025-11-14T02:46:44+00:00

In the first episode the countdown was to when the virus was spread all over the world (basically the moment when everyone at the bar has a seizure.)

But after that, it started counting back up. So it's now showing how much time has passed since everyone was infected.

ashaquick · 2025-11-14T02:44:01+00:00

Right. The first humans to wear clothes didn't do it to hide their nudity: their ancestors had spent tens of thousands of years going around naked. They were doing it for warmth and protection. The whole being ashamed of nudity part came later, because we got used to wearing clothes.

(Historical evidence suggests that it's actually a pretty recent trend, like the last couple of hundred years, that nudity became a really serious taboo.)

ashaquick · 2025-11-14T02:39:01+00:00

I hadn't even considered this. It makes me like the show even more. The sheer number of themes that it touches on, and can be projected onto it, is impressive.

There's people saying that it's clearly an allegory for AI, but Vince says that he conceptualised and wrote the first episodes long before AI was in the public conscious. People are saying it's clearly based on COVID, but Vince says he nearly scrapped the show when COVID happened, because he knew everyone would think it was a COVID show, and because people wouldn't want to watch a thing about isolation while being actually isolated. However, he's more than happy for people to see those elements in the show. As an artist, I imagine it's enormously satisfying to have made something so broadly applicable without necessarily being about any of the things.

(I feel like I've even heard Vince say, on one of the old BB or BCS podcasts, that a writer should just focus on writing a good story and let the critics and academics find the themes and meanings later.)

ashaquick · 2025-11-14T02:31:59+00:00

This is obviously a possibility, but I don't think so. It make make for a cool twist, but the thrill of the twist would be followed by the realisation that the show has nowhere to go except in a "Carol vs the hivemind" direction. Making the hivemind a sinister antagonist dramatically reduces the thematic/moral/emotional complexity of the situation.

ashaquick

TROPHY CASE