TOW 2 factions aren't as good as TOW 1

So I'm just about finished with TOW 2, haven't completed the final quest but that's all I have left to do. Though 2 retains many of the features that made 1 great, its writing falls short of the original. Honestly, it sorta seems like the writers lost their anti-capitalist balls (which, I guess I shouldn't be surprised since it came from a large corp, but still).

Compare the conflict between the Order and Auntie's with the conflict between Monarch and the Iconoclasts. The latter was interesting because they were both clearly trying to do good, but had competing ideas of what that looked like. I personally prefer the Iconoclasts to Sanjar's corporate reformism (in fact, the "reforms" mentioned are deliberately made weak/comparable to normal capitalism to highlight how fucked up Halcyon is), but I recognize that both have their pros and cons, and I could see the merits of both. This is not so in TOW 2. You have Auntie's, which is unequivocally bad (ignore Inez, she has Stockholm syndrome), and the Order, which is more humane but still bogged down by the more harmful elements of organized religion. It feels like there's no good choices. Some may prefer such a narrative, and there's nothing wrong with that, but in addition to personally wanting to have a positive impact on the world of the RPG, I feel that the original Outer Worlds very much catered to my playstyle. It could've gone a more "artistic" route and tried to convey a specific idea about capitalism, but instead it focused on player agency. Everything about TOW 1 points to the Stranger being an exceptional and heroic (or supervillanous, if you play evil) individual, from the dialogue to the mechanics (one of my favorite things in the game is, after Vicar Max's vision quest thing, you have the option to say something like "I already knew all that, I was just looking for a good time"). This is still the case in 2, but to a somewhat reduced degree.

I think that the flaws in the faction writing in 2 can be directly traced to the lack of Philosophism in Arcadia. The philosophism vs scientism debate is an interesting one on an abstract level, essentially hundreds of years of philosophy condensed down to an in-game choice. Based on the aforementioned Vicar Max's arc, I believe that someone on the writing team of 1 was definitely a philosophist; I understand the criticism that fixing everything with a drug trip is lazy writing, but honestly the things that were said in that scene actually stuck with me and may have improved my mental health as a result). TOW 2 feels like it's written by a scientician; the future-predicting mathematics of the Order remain epistemologically unchallenged by the game and even form several important plot points. When you question the validity of their methods by allowing the refugees to live in the exclusion zone, the Order is magically proven right and the refugees die. The only time Philosophism is encountered is when you complete the Oracle's fetch quest, and it only gets one slide devoted to it in the ending slides according to my research.

Overall, TOW 2 is a good game, but it falls short of the standard set by the original. It's pessimistic, it isn't punk, and it doesn't give you truly good options. Hopefully the DLCs will amend that. Also, I find it funny that in 1, there was an entire quest line devoted to an asexual lesbian couple, but in 2, the only queer representation is an easily-missable audio log (and possibly a pair of unremarkable NPCs at Matriarch's Mercy, though it's not explicitly stated). Tangentially related: if TOW 1 had Baldur's Gate levels of character romance/general freakiness, it would be the perfect game.