Pricewatch!

VCUBI30 is giving 30% off their store for next couple of days even on sale items. That makes Assassin's Creed Origins £35 and its cheaper than all legit retailers. Now this may be UK only code but many people have gotten it to work with VPN from other countries.

yup that 30% works for the UK sore, but Rogue is £16 on the UK store:(
 
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Brutal Legend is free at Humble store:
https://www.humblebundle.com/store

Awsome idea, awsome music - but you'll probably never finish it if you hate grinding as trashmobs cannot ever die for good.
It's not RPG.
Still, a freebie? Grab it.
 
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BundleStars ... errr, now Fanatical has stared their Thanksgiving sale:
https://www.fanatical.com/en/
40% off Middle Earth: Shadow of War. A bundle that includes Demonicon and Drakensang for about $3. Another that includes System Shock Enhanced Edition for $3.50. 75% off Mad Max.

Meanwhile, over at IGN... errr... Humble there's Valkyria Chronicles for 75% off, Tales of Berseria for 60% off, 80% off the 3 Shadowrun games

Steam seems to just be extending the weekend deals in prep for it's Fall/Thanksgiving/Black Friday sale. Oh! Endless Space 2 is now the top seller in my region! #3 globally. I guess the free weekend is working!
 
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Meanwhile, over at IGN… errr… Humble there's Valkyria Chronicles for 75% off, Tales of Berseria for 60% off, 80% off the 3 Shadowrun games

All the Sega published games are on sale too. That includes all the Warhammer and Warhammer 40K titles.

I noticed Elite Dangerous for cheap as well. What's the opinion on that one? Is there much depth to the single-player campaign?
 
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I noticed Elite Dangerous for cheap as well. What's the opinion on that one? Is there much depth to the single-player campaign?

It doesn't have a single player campaign. It's pure sandbox :) .
 
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Ah ok. I was mainly wondering about the exploration. Are there a lot of interesting things to discover, or is mostly just about obtaining wealth?

Hmmm... that is very difficult to answer and depends a lot on what you call "interesting". At first when you start the game many things are quite interesting like the different kinds of starports or oribtal docks you can land at or the planetary/asteroid bases etc.

Then when you get into advanced exploration, you could fly to some of the sites that have alien ruins or barnacles or simply to some planets and explore icy canyons, mountain ridges etc.
It will be time consuming to find such things on your own. You would have to check guides for system names and coordinates since the game itself completely fails at pointing you in any direction via in-game means.

Finally, you could take off into the black and travel thousands of light years to interesting constellations, nebulae, asteroid belts and so on.
Or head off towards the galactic fringes and see how far you can get... or create challenges for yourself like a galaxy circumnavigation (there is a community-driven exploration tour with that goal ongoing and they plan to take -IIRC- 18 months or so to pull it off).

The game has 400 billion(!!!) star systems and is a mix of an accurate astronomical model (e.g. our solar model and many known stars are represented accurately) of our milky way and of procedural generation to fill in the blanks.

So, even though the game has ~3 million lifetime sales so far (including the expansions so the number of actual lifetime players is lower), there is still a lot of unexplored galaxy out there. According to statistics it is still less than 0.1% discovered.

Personally, I went on a longer roundtrip in the game a few weeks back and discovered a few hundred unexplored systems on the way.

The exploration mechanic is rather unremarkable. You jump to a system, you fire your discovery scanner and then this populates the system map so when you open it, you can see all the astronomical objects in the system.

The vast majority of systems consist of one (or several) stars ranging from white/brown dwarves to neutron stars or red giants which are orbited by icy rocks. Very unspectacular... unless you are inclined to get close and personal, fly down to the surface of a planet and discover some cool landscapes.

What most people are after when exploring the black is earth-like worlds, water worlds and so on. They yield lots of credits as a reward and it's just nice to find such relative rarities. You also get your Commander's name on every previously unexplored "virgin" object if you are the first to turn in the data (yes, you have to make it back safely ;) ).

So, the fascination with exploration in Elite Dangerous is mostly for people interested in the physical accuracy of the galaxy, the astronomy, the vastness and scope of space (the Elite galaxy is absolutely daunting in that regard)... you know, the sense of being WAY out there and away from the human bubble with just your tiny, fragile little ship against the odds the universe might throw at you.
Prevalent risks are e.g. running out of fuel, overheating when refueling with a fuel scoop near a star, crashing into a neutron star/white dwarf, crashing while attempting to land on a high gravity world etc.

Many people are hoping for more meaty exploration gameplay in the future since it does get old relatively fast at the moment. You just jump, scan, jump scan, jump, scan, hoping for a rare "spectacular" find.

Other than that, yes, the game is more about acquiring wealth. The basic concept of Elite has always been "here is 100cr and a crappy ship, good luck".
So what most people do in the game is trade, haul passengers, mine, explore, bounty-hunt etc. to increase their balance to buy bigger, better ships which you can then modify via engineers if you own the Horizons expansion so you can do the above mentioned things faster, better, more effective etc.

In a nutshell most of the gameplay fun lies in owning, upgrading, buying, modifying, outfitting ships or equipment for whatever gameplay mechanic, whether it is combat or non-combat related, is the most fun to you.

As you might have guessed from the links above, one of the go-to YouTubers for all things Elite: Dangerous is ObsidianAnt so if you want to take a closer look that might be a good destination. There is also the official channel, of course.
Elite is unfortunately doing a poor job of presenting info in-game and has a much steeper learning curve than necessary so YouTube and other outside sources are pretty much required to play the game.
 
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Thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed breakdown. Yeah, it looks like it would appeal more to fans of realistic astronomy. I was hoping there was going to be more science-fiction involved.

I still might check it out at some point. It seems like a remarkable game from a technical standpoint.
 
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ED is the best VR experience I've had in terms of "real" gaming.

Execution is amazing in a technical sense - but it's utterly, utterly boring if you want actual content in your game.

It's more like a series of cool systems than a game, in my opinion.
 
Hm, hm, hm. I've had ED on my radar for a while, as I am grossly intrigued by anything related to the exploration of space. The thought of flying around the solar system and exploring the planets sounds just incredible, but yeah, the depth of it all has me worried as I suspect the wow-factor quickly washes away.

From what I read, it seems there's a lot of grinding involved? Is that correct? Did you guys play solo or MMO-style?
Also, do you need a joystick to properly play it, or is it doable for kb+m?
 
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Hm, hm, hm. I've had ED on my radar for a while, as I am grossly intrigued by anything related to the exploration of space. The thought of flying around the solar system and exploring the planets sounds just incredible, but yeah, the depth of it all has me worried as I suspect the wow-factor quickly washes away.

From what I read, it seems there's a lot of grinding involved? Is that correct? Did you guys play solo or MMO-style?
Also, do you need a joystick to properly play it, or is it doable for kb+m?

There are no planets to explore as such, only moons - and they're pretty boring in my opinion. You can scan planets, yeah, but you can't land on them.

Well, as for grinding - it depends on what you mean. If you want to progress in terms of ships and upgrades - then, yes, you will have to perform missions that will very soon feel nearly identical.

On the other hand, you could also stop grinding once you have a ship that you're happy with - and just go exploring.

But, honestly, there's really not much in the way of exploration - unless you're satisfied with texture variation on meshes. There's an extreme lack of unique and distinct content.

That's what Star Citizen is for ;)

As for mouse/keyboard - it's playable with that setup. However, I have to say I think the HOTAS approach is FAR superior and I would absolutely recommend that setup big time. VR, too.
 
Hm, hm, hm. I've had ED on my radar for a while, as I am grossly intrigued by anything related to the exploration of space. The thought of flying around the solar system and exploring the planets sounds just incredible, but yeah, the depth of it all has me worried as I suspect the wow-factor quickly washes away.

From what I read, it seems there's a lot of grinding involved? Is that correct? Did you guys play solo or MMO-style?
Also, do you need a joystick to properly play it, or is it doable for kb+m?

I play the game in a PvE group (called 'Mobius'). The group has a max limit of 20K players so that is the max pool of players you could ever encounter. It is the same as open play (full PvP) on principle but the gentlemen agreement of the group is to not attack other players and in 400+ hours this has worked out fine for me.

Otherwise, you have to choose between open or solo. Open is definitely not for the faint of heart. Last time I tried open I was blown to bits in my unarmed(!) non-combat ship in under ten minutes of logging in and it was quite costly at the time (your ship is insured but there is a rebuy cost). Rest assured I will never ever play in open again.

And, yes, it is grindy if you want to acquire the money for a really nice ship with nice equipment and nice engineering mods but the beauty is also that you do not really have to. If you really just want to explore (short range exploration in the so called human bubble) then you could do that relatively quickly with an OK ship and a non-combat build that anyone can afford.

The grind kicks in when you want the bigger ships that cost dozens of million and especially if you were to get into PvP and really serious engineering (= tuning) and optimization of a combat build in particular.

Personally, I don't do PvP but I did do some engineering (also because working towards unlocking the engineer requirements was kinda fun) on my non-combat ship(s). Out of 400+ hours in the game I have spent maybe 2 hours max in combat.

It is hard to estimate how long it would take to get a decent exploration ship like the very nice Asp Explorer (this example build would be very decent for example).
If you sort of know what you are doing... run some missions for earning your way from the starter Sidewinder to a Cobra Mk III ASAP and then grind more, better paying missions and maybe partake in a few community goals, well, two to three weeks of playing for a couple of hours almost every night maybe.

The thing is the first million is hard to get as well as the first ten million but once you have worked your way up the food chain a little then the credits start rolling in much easier at some point.
There are passenger missions, if you have a big ship like the Anaconda, where you can make what that build I posted above costs, easily in one single semi-long trip (20 - 30 minutes for 20m to 25m credits).
 
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Brutal Legend is free at Humble store:
https://www.humblebundle.com/store

Awsome idea, awsome music - but you'll probably never finish it if you hate grinding as trashmobs cannot ever die for good.
It's not RPG.
Still, a freebie? Grab it.

Ooh, thank you for this. I really enjoyed Brutal Legend back in the day, glad to be able to play it again for free. The music is glorious.
 
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GOG sale has started. You can get MDK for free right at the top of the main page for the next 36 hours. Spend $15 and you can get StarCrawlers for free, which sounds pretty sweet to me.

I was actually surprised more by how many games are NOT on sale. No Divinity games on sale at all, for instance. With D:OS2's popularity, you would think those would all get some discounts.

There's still some good ones around, though, and bundles for Heroes of Might & Magic, Tomb Raider, Wing Commander, and Ultima (if you want to find out what a palidin is).
 
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I was actually surprised more by how many games are NOT on sale. No Divinity games on sale at all, for instance. With D:OS2's popularity, you would think those would all get some discounts.

I notice some games don't go on sale as much anymore. Maybe we are entering the Post Sales Era thanks to analytics.
 
As most of y'all have probably noticed already, the Steam Black Friday sale is on. Lots of good deals, of course, so just a few mentions:

- Prey - €19.99
- Divinity Original Sin Enhanced Edition - €13.59
- Fallout 4 GOTY - €29.99
- The Witcher 3 GOTY - €19.99
- Dishonored Death of the Outsider - €14.99
- Skyrim SE - €19.99
- Southpark The Stick of Truth - €7.49
- Deus Ex Mankind Divided - €7.49
- Bayonetta €9.99

… and so on… and so on… and so on… ;)
 
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