Saturday Morning Gaming: The Steam Thanksgiving Sale!!!
Writing this in a 1955 kitchen table in Iceland, I’m stuck with an Icelandic Steam page that is English, sure… but talking about Icelandic prices for the games and I have no idea whether a game that is 15% off here will be 15% off back in the states. Maybe it’s 25% off back there! Maybe it’s not on sale at all!
Please bear with me.
First off, we should look at the Game Awards GOTY games on Steam:
Balatro is 15% off.
Black Myth Wukong appears to be full price.
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is not only DLC that isn’t apparently on sale, Elden Ring itself isn’t apparently on sale (however, I can confidently say that this is one of the best games I’ve ever played and is easily worth full price… though, if you could get it on sale, shouldn’t you?)
Metaphor: Refantazio is 25% off (fans of the Persona series are likely thrilled).
Of all of those, I’ve played Black Myth and Elden Ring and I recommend, wholeheartedly, both of them.
But if you think “Well, I should only get *ONE*…”, get Elden Ring.
But there are some other pretty good sales going on.
Hitman: World of Assassination is 60% off. That’s the greatest hits of Hitman 1, 2, and 3! (Or just get Part 1 for 90% off.)
Jedi: Fallen Order is a corker of a Star Wars game for 90% off and it gives you all of the stuff you’re looking for: customize your lightsaber, go up Jedi levels, megafauna, cute robot pals, and your own, sigh, B-Wing fighter. But that’s okay, you can upgrade the B-Wing too.
Inscryption is a game from the guy who made Pony Island. I reviewed Pony Island here but I can just say that it looks like it’s more than 90% off so you should just grab it. No spoilers, no nothin’. Grab it. You’ll *LOVE* it.
As for Inscryption, I’m playing it (well, back in Colorado, anyway) and should have a review next week or the week after. On first glance, it’s a Magic: The Gathering tribute. But since it’s the guy who made Pony Island, it’s not about playing the Magic: The Gathering clone, it’s about figuring out how to *STOP* playing it. But I’ll get into this in the review.
Dave the Diver was a real treat of a game. It’s part diving sim where you hunt for fish for the part of the game where it’s a sushi restaurant management sim. It sounds a little bit daffy but once you get into the gameplay loop, you’ll thrill at going out and upgrading your stuff and planting rice and preparing for special events (Tuna week! Shark week!) and hoping that someone who knows how to serve drinks applies for the waitstaff job.
All in all, I’d say that even though the numbers are lackluster compared to some years in the past, there’s still a bunch of gems to be found and you can get that little game you’ve forgotten about on your wishlist.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is “pillow”. Photo taken by Maribou.)
Some other goodies from the sales:
Darkest Dungeon- $1.99
Red Dead Redemption 2 – $19.79
Baldur’s Gate 2 – $47.99 (20% off)
Europa Universalis IV – $4.99 ($11.99 with all the dlc)
Assassins Creed Odyssey- $5.99
Still jealous you are iceland! We were there in June and want to go back!Report
I just finished The Rise of the Golden Idol. If you liked The Case of the Golden Idol, you’ll probably like the sequel. It’s more of the same. People messing with power beyond their understanding and you trying to piece together what happened.Report
I’ve gotten into Fallout 76 with some friends over the past month. It’s actually a workable and real game now, unlike when it launched, and the community is a good deal less sucky than a lot of those types of games…it helps that the game is deliberately set up where there’s no incentive to screwing other players over, and PvP is basically non-functional so no one does it.
It has recently gotten a lot of newbies thanks to the TV series (I guess I am technically one of them, I had a urge to play some Fallout and some friends started talking about Fallout 76 and I figured, why not. Although with two thousand hours in Fallout 4 alone, I’m hardly a newcomers to the series), so it’s apparently a little weird right now.
So if you like Fallout, but heard bad things about 76 at launch (Which were all true, but the game has been fleshed out) or disliked the idea of online play because you worried about how other players act (Which I also did, but the community is actually really nice), give it another shot. There’s a new ‘season’ starting Dec 2.Report
I talked about 76 here (and the music here).
My take on 76 was that the seasoning for New Vegas and Fallout 4 had become the meal.
Have they addressed that at all? I enjoyed my time with the game, it’s just that I didn’t want to keep paying for Fallout 1st in perpetuity to be playing it somewhere close to the level of annoyance I’d find acceptable.Report
‘Pay to not be annoyed’ is basically the only other model besides ‘pay to win’ for games like this, they’re not fixing that, they’d make no money from it. If the game wasn’t more enjoyable after you subscribed, why on earth would you subscribe?
(I do find it funny you mention you can buy random in-card perk card packs if you have Fallout 1st as some sort of very useful thing. That…is not even vaguely useful. At all. You get to choose a perk card at each level up, and by the time you reach level 70 or so you’ve gotten all the ones you want, and anyone over 100 or so generally has around 10 perk cards sitting there they’ve forgotten to even select yet. No one needs five _random_ ones, those are mostly scrapped for perk coins.)
As for the constant repair and repeatable stuff…that’s literally how MMOs operate. You will eventually run out of content in the game, and start doing things again, and part of the play cycle is making you have consumables that you have to do minor things to refill before you can do some of the big stuff.
Cycle without that for top level players:
Fight biggest, most challenging enemy.
Fight biggest, most challenging enemy.
Fight biggest, most challenging enemy.
Cycle with that for top level players:
Fight biggest. most challenging enemy.
Do some farming to collect mirelurk meat because you want some boost that requires, cook that.
Repair some armor and guns.
While you’re there, fix the damage to your house some idiot visitor allowed.
Sell some stuff to buy some chems, restock those.
Actually, you need money in general, so you craft some serums and sell them at the mall…
It’s the exact same reason they have random things you have to do to earn S.C.O.R.E. to get seasonal stuff. It’s not because it’s useful, it’s because interjecting randomness and small tasks (One that hopefully are not too annoying) into the play cycle keeps players from getting bored.
MMO cost money to run, and they need people to keep playing them a _lot_ longer than possible any main plot could hold their attention. They are indeed about maintenance, not finishing a story. But that’s basically the premise of the genre.
And none of the ‘main plots’ in an MMO (Fallout 76 has half a dozen.) can to do anything to the game world at all, which makes them somewhat limited. You can’t have the plot stop the scorched because you’re in a game world where other players have not done that. Completing main game questions mostly just individually gives you access to things, like additional vendors or nuke launches.Report
Picked up Balatro.
Uh-oh.
I may be in trouble.Report