A Tactical Choice

The Steam Summer Sale ends in a few days. Back when it started, I spent maybe an hour going through the offers. I spotted a number of decent bargains and no fewer than eighteen of the entries on my wishlist were on sale for anything up to seventy-five per cent off. Surely there had to be something I could buy?

Well, nope. Apparently there wasn't. I looked at everything, on and off the wishlist, trying to imagine myself playing any of them across the summer and I couldn't do it. I could see myself playing them at some point but I definitely didn't get the feeling that point would be any time soon.

That's the problem with sales. If you're not going to play a game tonight or tomorrow or next week or even next month, is there any point buying it today? 

I guess there could be. Games aren't perishable. They don't go off. You could, quite reasonably, buy a game in the summer with the intention of playing it in the autumn or the winter or next spring. If it seemed likely you might do that, and if the game was on sale right now at a good discount, it might even seem like a sensible thing to do.

Except that games on Steam go on sale all the time. Not only are there the big Summer and Winter sales, there are numerous publisher sales and themed events plus the perpetual drip drip drip of everyday discounts that just never stops. 

There's not even much of an argument in favor of nailing down a good discount when you see it, even on a game you're sure you'll play "one day", just in case it never comes up for sale at that price again. Game pricing doesn't work that way. Once the discounts begin, they tend to keep on coming and they have a habit of getting bigger as the game ages out of the market.

It's true that at some point the price might hit a floor and stop falling . It might well bounce around a bit between big sales. It's never going to go all the way back up. If you miss a bargain in one sale it doesn't matter; there may well be a better deal in the enxt.

It's a very different mechanism from what  I'm used to in the book trade. At work, over the years, I've frequently had to explain to bemused customers that the brand new books on sale at half-price aren't commercial disasters we're trying to get rid of - they're the most hotly-anticpated, keenly-selling successes of the moment. 

For some reason that still isn't entirely clear to me after the best part of thirty years in the business, very successful books are often at their cheapest on publication. If you want to buy a just-published novel at half price, don't hang about. The first couple of weeks is your beat bet for a bargain. You might be lucky and pick up the same book for half-price a year later, just before the paperback comes out, when booksellers will try to get rid of any final, few copies they might have lying around but chances are any that didn't sell will have been returned to the publishers by then.

Even less comprehensible is the way the better-known and more successful the author is, the bigger the
discount is likely to be. Regular, mid-range writers have to hope someone's willing to pay full price for their new book, even though it's had little publicity and there's not much demand. Famous authors latest efforts get piled high next to the tills at half-price on the day of publication.

It's not quite as ruthless as it was a few years ago. Reading is hot right now and has been at least since Tik-Tok became a thing. A lot more books go undiscounted. Even so, rule of thumb remains get in quick if you want to buy cheap. If there isn't any money off when the book comes out, it's unlikely there'll be a discount later. (Caveat: that's how it is in the UK. I have no idea if it works like that in other territories...)

With games, it's pretty much the exact opposite. Wait long enough and you'll be able to pick up not just the game you wanted but all the DLC, for a fraction of the original cost. You might even get it all neatly packaged up together in an Ultimate Edition, assuming the game was successful to merit one.

With all of that in mind, I'd about reached the stage of writing off the Steam Summer Sale altogether. I just couldn't justify buying anything, even for cheap. (I almost stumped up for Penny Larceny but once again the game fell at the last hurdle; I do want to play it but I don't want to play it now. Also, it's only £9.99 full price. A 30% discount taking it down to £6.99 barely makes a difference. Sometimes full price is already low enough that a discount just isn't much of an incentive.)

And then last night I bought a game after all!

It wasn't on a whim but it was an almost-instantaneous decision. The moment I saw the discount I didn't hesitate. So what was it and why was it different this time?

I'd played Wuthering Waves in the morning and EverQuest 2 in the afternoon and I felt like playing something different in the evening... but what? Nothing came to mind, so while I was thinking about it I passed the time checking my feeds, which was when I noticed Tipa had posted about her experiences playtesting The White Raven, a game I'd not heard of before. 

It didn't really sound like my sort of thing but Tipa compared aspects of TWR to Baldur's Gate 3, a game I definitely want to play. That one, I definitely would play right away but I'm waiting for a good deal. 

I realise it might take a while. BG3 is in the Steam Summer Sale but only at 20% off. Then again, last time it was only down 10% so the needle is moving in the right direction. I'm waiting until it hits at least 50% off, which I suspect could still be a while. Like years.

BG3 might be out of contention but what about something similar? I had a think about what it was about The White Raven and Baldur's Gate that was making me itchy to play and it occured to me pretty quickly it wasn't the the deep storytelling or the top-class voice acting so much as the magic-based tactical combat. That was the itch I was trying to scratch. I wanted to throw fireballs at goblins again.

The last game I played where I got to indulge that urge was The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk: Amulet of Chaos, which I got free with Amazon Prime. That one turned out to be much more entertaining than I expected, a common theme in reviews of the game, whose charms seemed to take everyone by surprise. Something like that would be perfect. 

Unfortunately I couldn't think of anything like that, although something exactly the same was an option. There's a confusing amount of DLC in the Naheulbeuk series, all of it relatively cheap, so that seemed like an obvious fix. What put me off was knowing there had to be a good chance most of it would eventually pitch up on Prime for free, since that's Amazon's established pattern with franchises once they start giving them away. It would be really annoying to buy a bunch of sequels now, only to have them appear in the Prime offer a month or two down the line.

I couldn't come up with anything else but I thought I might know someone who could. For a given value of "someone", that is. I thought I'd ask Gemini, Google's AI, to suggest something suitable. It would either solve my problem or give me something to laugh about. 

I was even hoping Gemini might come up with a hidden gem or two. It did not.

It did, however, give me five extremely solid recommendations: 

Baldur's Gate 3 
Divinity: Original Sin 2
XCom 2
Battle Brothers
Solasta: Crown of the Magister

The question I asked was "Please give me the names of some games similar to The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk." You can't really fault that for an answer.

I've covered why I'm not considering BG3 at this time. D:OS2 I've already played. The XCom series doesn't have magic-based combat. Battle Brothers has one of those names that make me think "Nope" without even bothering to find out any more about it.

Solasta, though...

I remember Tobold posting about that one a few times. He rated it highly and he plays a lot of these sorts of games. I remember him saying it might be as good as BG3, in terms of the tactical gameplay, even if the story and acting weren't on the same level. And since it was the tactical gameplay I was mostly interested in...

So I checked and guess what? It's in the Steam sale with a whopping 70% discount. 

I can take a hint. I bought it without hesitation.

Then, as if to prove a point but actually because I really wanted to, I played it. An hour last night and another this morning, which was all the time I had available.

So far, I'm enjoying it, although I can hardly comment on the tactical gameplay I bought it for because I've yet to encounter any. Also, again as if to prove a point, the voice acting is arguably less convinving than the AI in Ales and Tales. 

As far as getting my money's-worth goes, though... two hours in and I'm not only still in the Tutorial, I haven't even finished going round the shops yet!

At this rate, Solasta will probably last me until the Steam Winter Sale.