Currently Playing...

Today, a short post about what I've been playing. Don't you just love those? Everybody does them. I'm never exactly sure why, although I will say that it's both terrifying and revelatory to go back a few years (Or even a few months, sometimes.) and find out how immensely important something seemed once that I can now barely remember at all. It's a reminder of how arbitrary and fleeting our obsessions can be.

Well, that was a cheery start. Perhaps I should just get on with the notes.

So, I've really only been playing three games: EverQuest II, Solasta and Wuthering Waves. I've patched up quite a few more with the intention of playing them - Once Human, Blade & Soul NEO, New World, Lord of the Rings Online - but the only one I actually got as far as logging into was LotRO and I only did that because I'd read all the news about the 64bit servers and I was worried I might lose access or names for all my characters.

As it turns out, that was premature, or at least I think it was. I read the ridiculously long and complicated FAQ on what to do and the upshot seems to be "Nothing, yet." Please feel free to correct me in the comments if there actually is something I should be doing. Otherwise I'll just wait until Standing Stone set some dates.

Of the others, as I think I mentioned before, the update process for Once Human is now so flaky and unreliable I ended up uninstalling the client and I haven't gotten around to reinstalling it on a different drive yet, which had been my plan. B&SNEO is still a few weeks away and as for New World, I lost interest there even before I could log in. I think that one may be cooked.

Of the games I was playing, albeit briefly in most cases, just short while ago, all have dropped off the schedule completely. Outer Worlds never got a second session, Divinity: Original Sin started to annoy more than it entertained and The First Descendant somehow got away from me. That one, I didn't intend to stop playing, I just did. I might go back at some point but not right now.

As for Cloudpunk, although I had every intention of carrying on and finishing the various side missions, it seems my brain is quite clear on something being "finished". I can't seem to persuade it to carry on.

Of the three games I have successfully managed to fire up and stick with for at least a full session, EQII and Solasta are far ahead of Wuthering Waves, which remains a sporadic pleasure at best. That's disappointing in one way but in another it's useful, in that it adds a very useful data point to the graph of game-playing compulsion. It appears games can be just too good to play often.

What I mean by that is that Wuthering Waves offers a very rich experience. The story is excellent, the gameplay requires thought and attention and an hour or two spent there feels very much like watching a really good movie. 

There was a time when I'd very happily watch a couple of movies in an evening, then do the same the following afternoon, but those days are long gone. Now, I have to build up to watching a film and then cool down afterwards. I don't think I've watched more than one movie a week for years. Wuthering Waves, at least while I'm pursuing the storyline, requires a similar degree of concentration and investment and a session every few days is about as much as I can handle.

Which brings us to EQII and Solasta, neither of which suffer from any such issues. The plots in both barely merit the consideration I'd give to a not particularly well-written TV show. In Solasta, the story serves mostly as a series of pegs on which to hang some enjoyably tactical fights, while in EQII the questline largely acts as a conveyor belt to move you across the map, while providing an ostensible reason to kill everything that gets in your way.

Both games manage to hit that difficult-to-achieve balance of immersion and relaxation, making them unchallenging yet still fun to play. For EQII, the lack of tension comes from the knowledge, common to almost any modern or modernised MMORPG, that no failure is ever going to set you back very far or matter very much, whereas Solasta allows you to save your game just about whenever you like, meaning it's possible to take any risk without worrying about the consequences, should it fail to pay off.

Also strongly in both games' favor is the fact that they run well on my laptop via Splashtop, something Wuthering Waves refuses to do. Since I like to go to bed early at the moment because it's just about the warmest, most comfortable place to be in this prolonged cold snap we're enjoying, that gives them a considerable advantage.

Replayabilty is another factor. I had thought, having gotten to the end of the main storyline in Scars of Destruction with my Berserker, that I might be done with EQII for a while but no. I used the free boost that came with the standard edition of the expansion to raise my Necromancer to the level cap, then I kitted her out with all the free gear that comes with it.

For what seems like no good reason at all, none of the boosted gear has Adornments so I had to go to the Tishan's box in Sodden Archipelago and add the relevant Adornments from there. The gear in the  box has identical stats but already has the Adornments in place, so I might as well just have used that. Not to mention I needed the mount and the familiar and some other stuff out of the box too. Someone needs to give the whole expansion onboarding process yet another sanity check.

Once I'd finished setting my Necro up, though, the results were impressive. Every year I tell myself I'm going to focus on her and stop running the newest content for the first time with my Berserker. Then, when it comes to it, I balk at the difference in their gear and skills and end up back where I began.

This year I'm determined to be ready, when the next expansion arrives, to go through it on the Necro first. The sheer difference in power between them is astonishing. She's significantly less well-geared than he is, with lower quality spells and few of the incremental advantages he's gained from having been my main character for years and yet her time-to-kill has to be at least half of his, plus she has far greater versatility. Given my repeatedly-stated preference for going the easy route, it makes absolutely no sense for me not to be playing her far more than I do.

To that end, I will need to take her all the way through the storyline, something I usually don't bother doing with all my characters. I also should level up a tradeskill for her since, as I've observed many times, being able to do the crafting timeline is a huge advantage for adventurers, particularly when it comes to getting a head start on flight in the new zones.

Tradeskills are slow to level in EQII but there is a boost you can buy to skip the bulk of the grind. It's quite pricy but I have a lot of Daybreak funny money saved up. I might as well spend it on something useful. It would be a good project for this year, making sure the Necro is there and thereabouts as well set-up as the Berserker by the time the next expansion rolls around. I'll try to remember to do it this time.

Solasta is likely to remain my late-evening wind-down game for a while, a role it fits very well due to its pick-up/put-down nature. I can't say the story or the setting is doing a lot for me as I meander through the maze-like swamps and jungles, trying to balance one faction against another while not getting killed by the despotic ruler of the region but who cares about the story when the fights are such fun?

The important thing to remember about the DLC I'm playing, though, is that it also includes the feature that adds player-made scenarios to the game in a manner very similar to Neverwinter Nights 2. I haven't tried any of the add-on scenarios yet but I've had a look at some of the more popular ones and it looks as though there's no shortage of highly-rated adventures, most of which almost certainly have better stories than the official one. I wonder if they also have player-made voice acting? That would be... intereresting.

It's likely I'll be playing all three of these games, on and off, for the rest of the year but no doubt some new fad or obsession will bubble up soon enough to shunt them to one side for a while. Whetever that might be, I doubt it'll be the one game I ought to have been playing this last week but haven't played at all - Stars Reach.

There were several tests, a couple of which were at times I could have made, but I actually forgot all about them until it was too late. I think the sheer number of emails I get from Playable Worlds, what with them sending three (And now, for some reason, four.) copies of each has trained my brain to disregard them almost entirely. 

It's a shame because the most recent tests opened up just about everything for immediate use in an attempt to show potential backers the full extent of what's available in the game already. That meant I could have tried out a few things I haven't been able to get to so far, without having to spend most of the session grinding through stuff I'd done already. Didn't happen though. I'll have to wait and see what Wilhelm thought of it all, assuming he managed to play a few sessions.

The Kickstarter ought to launch for real this week, which should be interesting. I wonder if they plan on keeping the accelerated testing schedule going throughout the campaign to support it? 

If so, maybe I will add Stars Reach to the "Currently Playing" file after all.

Here, There And Everywhere

As may already be apparent, my game-playing in recent times has become fractured and fragmentary. I play something every day but what and for how long depends almost entirely on factors not wholly within my control. It's weird and annoying.

Factors affecting my "choices" include but are not limited to

• Dog-related interruptions and demands.
• Changing climactic conditions inside and outside the house.
• Work.
• Television programs to be watched at time of broadcast.
• Cloud gaming queues.
• Scheduled testing slots.
• Inertia, laziness and mithering.

For a few weeks now it's been a rare day when I've been able to sit down at the time of my choice, in the place of my choice, with the device of my choice and play the game of my choice for as long as I choose. I can't remember any point in the entirety of my gaming life, which goes back to the very early 1980s, when I had this little control. It's ironic, considering I am now semi-retired with ostensibly fewer responsibilities or commitments than at any time since I left college.

I only mention it to explain why it's so hard to find any through-line in what I post here any more. Of course, that's assuming there ever was one...

As I say, though, I am still playing games. Quite a few, in fact. The selection I'm mostly choosing from at the moment includes

• Cloudpunk
• Wuthering Waves
• Divinity: Original Sin
• Solasta: Crown of the Magister
• The First Descendant

That seems like more than enough to be flipping between but missing from that list only because I have not, as yet, gotten around to making it possible for me to play them on the laptop are

• EverQuest II
• Once Human
• Nightingale

Those three theoretically remain in my "Currently Playing" pile, a designation flawed only in that I'm not currently playing any of them.

Astute readers will notice the absence of a couple of titles I supposedly was playing

• The Outer Worlds
• Hard West

I'll refrain from listing all the games I've bought recently but not yet played at all or those I've signed up for or am thinking about. I probably need to play some games before I add any more to the heap.

On the positive side, I did finish something! Granted, it was only a demo but still. When I posted about Hard West, an anonymous reader left a comment recommending I try Mutant Year Zero. So I did. The demo, anyway.

And I liked it. The setting is interesting, the characters are appealing, the graphics are attractive and the gameplay is involving. When I finished the demo my immediate response was to go to the Steam Store to buy the full game. It was on sale at the time, although I forget what the discount was.

I didn't end up buying it, for two reasons. The most sensible was that, as I think I've made clear, I already have way too many games going unplayed to start adding more. MYZ isn't going anywhere so it makes much more sense to wait and buy it when I might actually play it.

The real reason I didn't pull the trigger right away, though, was the reviews. I read a bunch of them and they were mostly very complimentary. The game has an all-time Very Positive rating on Steam. Many of the reviews, however, make a point of saying how challenging and difficult the game gets in later stages and how important stealth becomes. 

I am not really in the market for anything "challenging" right now, if indeed I ever was, and I have never enjoyed stealth mechanics all that much, so that put me off somewhat. All of which goes to prove that, yes, reviews can make a difference to purchasing decisions.

Nevertheless, chances are high that I will pick up the game at some point, most likely in a sale. I have it on my wishlist. Thanks again to the anonymous recommender. 

As for the games I have been playing, I have a few notes:

Cloudpunk is really good. The story is really draws you in, helped enormously by the way it's told. It would work as a TV show or a movie but for once playing the game is adding to rather than detracting from the narrative experience. 

Things have opened out somewhat from the endless fetch quest architectonics of the early game and there have been some unexpected twists. Camus gets more and more delightful as does Rania's relationship with him. I'm loving the whole thing.

Divinity: Original Sin, though? Not loving that so much. All the same, I'm playing quite a lot of it, mostly because so far it's the only game I have set up to play directly on the laptop without using some sort of remote streaming. That means it's my default choice far too often just because it's less of a faff to log in. I need to do something about that.

Interestingly, when I visited Can You Run It? to see what games would run on the laptop, I checked D:OS and apparently it won't. The laptop doesn't meet the minimum specs. Weird, then, how it runs smoothly at high settings for entire sessions, with the laptop showing absolutely no sign of strain. I used to trust that site but I'll look at the results there a lot more skeptically in future. 

As for the game itself... it's a bit wordy, isn't it? I mean, I count myself as someone who's willing to undertake a good deal of reading (Or listening.) when playing video games. I generally like to give myself the full quest text/voice acting experience. But even I'm finding this one a bit much. It's all talk. If I play for an hour I'm lucky to get five minutes of combat - and I have to go looking for even that much. 

It wouldn't be so much of a problem if the writing was great. It's not. It's good, as in competent, grammatically correct, appropriate and all those professional kind of things so many games fail at but it isn't really doing much for me. The jokes aren't very funny, the characters aren't very characterful and the plot isn't very compelling. I'd rather it had less polish and more heart.

Solasta: Crown of the Magister, by comparison, is less professional in just about every possible way but also way more fun. The plot is much more linear but that means I know what I'm doing every time I log in, something that absolutely cannot be said for Divinity: Original Sin. I need to get Solasta onto the external drive asap so I can play it instead.

The First Descendant, as Tyler Edwards suggests, is a lot more fun than it has any right to be. It's the video game equivalent of one of those dumb action movies your friend drags you along to see and you think you're going to hate but you end up having a really good time even though you don't want to admit it. 

I'd be playing it more if it wasn't that the queues on GeForceNow are pretty chunky in prime time. I dropped out of the line twice yesterday evening because it was taking too long and I lost patience but then I tried again in bed and got in almost immediately. Bad omen. 

I played for an hour and spent my free token on Sharen before the event ends today just in case the option goes away. (I wanted Freyna but she wasn't in the offer.) Then I did two missions in a group to get the parts to make the Bunny costume. I had no idea what I was doing of course. I just followed one of the other players and shot stuff and we beat both missions and no-one yelled at me so op success!

There was some issue with the Bunny rewards. One I got, the other I didn't, which I suspect might be because my inventory was full (Don't say a word...) or maybe it was the wrong mission. I think there's a machine you can go to to get stuff from missions you didn't pick up so I'll have to check that next time. 

It's a fun game, anyway, if insanely over-complicated on the back end. I will be playing more.

Once Human I also want to get back to at some point. It's going to need a post of its own soon, for one thing. They're making even more peculiar changes to the Season system, which is now so ludicrously convoluted I can't imagine most players have a clue what's going on. I know I don't. 

I would have picked a new scenario but there's not much chance of me playing until I'm back on the desktop full time. I will try to make time to go through the process though, so I can at least attempt to describe it, if only so I understand it myself.

EverQuest II is another game I really want to get back to playing. It might run natively on the laptop, too. I need to get it onto the external drive to find out. 

I haven't really touched the new expansion, which just feels wrong. I saw the 2025 Roadmap and as usual it's a case of get on the bus or get left behind. I don't want to get left behind but I do wonder if my days as even a semi-regular player may be coming to an end. If I'm honest, I just like modern games better than old ones now. I enjoy the old games when I play them but when I'm thinking about playing I mostly want to play the new.

Speaking of which, I absolutely am going to get back to Wuthering Waves very soon, not least because Naithin says the new content has raised the bar on storytelling in the game and I already thought it was pretty darn good. I have to finish the Black Shores to get to Riniscita so I'd better get on with it.

And that's where I am right now in regards to gaming. I suppose this almost counts as one of those "My Gaming Plans" posts that I keep reading on other blogs but never do myself. Maybe I need to start. Winging it doesn't doesn't seem to be working quite as well as it used to.

Currently Playing...

Time for a quick update on what I'm playing, I guess. Because that's what we do here, right? 

Not sure I could explain to a space alien why it's what we do, even assuming it's anything a space alien would want to know, which seems unlikely, now I come to think about it. You'd imagine, if they'd come here all the way from Alpha Centauri, which always seems to be where most of them come from, any self-respecting space alien would have better things to do with their time than quiz random bloggers on why they keep telling everyone what games they're playing.

Or not playing, come to that. It's not like I'm keeping a tally but I'd have to guess I've read as many posts about what games someone has stopped playing as I have about those they still are. And that's not even getting into the count for games we're all thinking of playing!

So, what started all this introspection, if that's the word? ( I was going to say "nonsense" but I think Belghast has that one trademarked.) Well, if you really want to know it was Jeromai.

Jeromai's signal blinked back to life yesterday after a couple of years of silence, proving yet again how crucial it is never to remove anyone from your blog roll. Well, not anyone you would actually want to hear from again, that is...

The name of Jeromai's blog is Why I Game, which seemed exceptionally appropriate for his post on coming back to Guild Wars 2 after a long layoff. Among other things, he talks about coming home to a former MMORPG and indeed back to the corner of the blogosphere where he used to chat about such things. His conclusion is that you can't really come home to somewhere that was never really home in the first place, which really puts another layer on that overused line of Thomas Wolfe's. 

I have a seasick feeling I covered all that stuff here once before and anyway it's not what I wanted to talk about today. I'm a lot more interested in something I said in my reply to Jeromai's post (Well, there's a surprise...).

Looping around to those blogging about blogging discussions that always come up during Blaugust, I've mentioned a few times how I tend to just sit down and type to get a post going and how that sometimes means I end up writing something I wasn't planning. Like this, in fact.

It goes further than that.

Writing the way I do, not just in posts but in comments as well, sometimes means I hear myself saying things I had no idea I thought. It's not that unusual for me only to find out what I think about something when i read back what I've written. It's even more common for me to think I think one thing, only to discover, as I try to put it down in words, that I don't quite think that at all but something else entirely.

In this case, what I discovered when I replied to Jeromai is that right now I prefer not having a "main game", as I did for more than twenty years from the late 90s onwards. It's liberating. And relaxing. And more fun.

I remember how important it felt to have that one game, always an MMORPG, naturally, as the spine of my gaming anatomy. How unmoored and at sea I felt whenever I reached the end of my time with my game of choice at the time.

There were many times when I felt the urge to move on but it always seemed extremely important to have a new game to go to whenever I considered leaving an old one. Gaming was like serial monogamy back then. You stayed faithful to one game until you broke up, then you either began a new relationship with some other game you'd been eying up for months or you thrashed around desperately until you either swallowed your pride and went back to what you knew or somehow managed to convince yourself you'd fallen in love all over again with something else - anything else.

The life of an MMO gamer could all too easily descend into a series of intense, increasingly short-lived relationships or, if you prefer a less emotionally taxing metaphor, an endless skip across a line of ever-decreasing stepping stones, heading always into deeper water, farther form any safe shore. OK, that wasn't much more re-assuring.

It absolutely wasn't just me, either. It was the way it was for a lot of people. Leaving one MMORPG for another was reckoned a Big Deal. There used to be all kinds of talk about loyalty that seems positively delusional now: loyalty not to the people you might have been playing the games with but to the games themselves. As though they knew or cared.

Some of that still clings to the periphery of the hobby but the zealots and loyalists eem ever thinner on the ground. No-one cares as much and ironically that feels like progress to me. Or  perhaps I mean persepctive.

Even calling it a hobby is telling. No-one ever called it a "hobby" back then. It was a lifestyle as much as anything. Maybe even a calling, a vocation.

Now, it's a hobby. Maybe even a pastime. A bit of fun. If we're lucky, a lot of fun. Just not anything that really matters any more. That has to mean some kind of emotional growth, doesn't it?

It feels that way, to me, anyway. Or it does at the moment. In that comment to Jeromai I surprised myself when I said "I tend to get heavily into each as it comes, play for 50-100 hours then get caught up in the hype for a new one and move there instead to do it all again. I think it’s a vastly more healthy way to play games than getting stuck with one and just trying to keep convincing myself I like it because it’s familiar." 

It's true, though. And now I point it out to myself, I realise I've been doing it ever since I stopped playing GW2, which may have something to do with how loathe I am even to consider going back. I don't want to become one of those bitter vets who can't leave their old game alone even though they haven't played for years but sometimes the metaphor that comes to mind is less one of a relationship that soured than of a substance finally purged from the system. And you know how careful you have to be about those.

This blog has always been a record of my gaming infidelity, of course. I've played countless games, gotten excited by them, posted frenetically about their pleasures, then dropped them and moved on to the next. And often I've gone back, again and again. As with romantic relationships that turn into friendships, it's always good to keep in touch and hang out together occasionally. Sometimes, though, you have to make a clean break.

All of which is an extremely long and uneccessarily introspective introduction to a post that was going to be about my having completed the main questline and all the sub-quests added to Wuthering Waves for the Moonchasing Festival, about having done as much of Solasta as I think I'm ever going to and about why I'm not playing Once Human at all at the moment

I was full of praise for Wuthering Waves' first major update, when I wrote about it almost three weeks ago and I'm very pleased to say the high standard was maintained throughout. There's hours of content in the event, all of which I found involving and entertainning. The storytelling is solid, the characters are engaging, the voice acting is convincing and the mini-games are fun. 

I didn't run a timer but I would guess the whole thing took me six or eight hours to do, a great deal of which was watching and listening to scripted narrative of sufficient quality to hold my attention throughout. There was hardly any combat at all and the couple of set-pieces that did pop up were quite manageable even for someone as bad at the fighting part of the game as I am. (I'm really bad.)

The whole thing ended with an excellent, lengthy cut scene of the quality usually reserved for promotional trailers. Don't take my word for it, though. Take a look for yourself.

Of course, without the kind of parasocial relationships built up between player and NPCs over dozens of hours in game, the emotional impact is lost, but the production values still shine through. Wuthering Waves is a quality game.

So is Once Human as far as I can see, although even people who like it insist on describing it as "janky" and "full of bugs", neither of which has been my experience. I was fully intending to carry on with OH once the Season system came into operation but I just haven't and I can't even say why, for certain.

It would be neat to claim it had something to do with the way the Seasonal process derails progression but I'm playing Wuthering Waves still and that has absolutely the worst "progression" system I've seen in years. I probably ought to do a whole post about that but the tl:dr is that almost every reward and drop is some kind of consumable used to upgrade your character but as yet I haven't felt that upgrading any of them is something I much want to do. I just do the bare minimum I can get away with and then carry on enjoying all the excellent narrative content, most of which doesn't seem to care whether I've upgraded or not.

At the moment I'm sort of thinking about letting my server in OH expire, forcing me to Eternaland, then waiting for the next PVE scenario, whenever that is, before picking the game up again. By doing that, though, I feel there's a real danger I might just never get around to going back in any serious fashion at all. Once Human would then become yet another in my large pile of games I used to like but don't really think about any more. Which would be a shame.

And yet, I can't say I really care. That old loyalty to individual games that used to come so naturally is a lot harder to find, now. It burns hot still when the games are new but allow it to cool and it gets harder and harder to fan it back to life.

It seems much easier and a great deal more enjoyable to get excited al over again about something new. If there was a shortage of good games to try (Or, indeed, old ones to revisit.) then cultivating a loyalty to a specific title might make more sense. As it is, though, I feel the problem revolves more around finding the time to try all the interesting new possibilities than finding something to hang onto like a life-raft.

Which brings me to Solasta, about which I haven't really posted anything and now most probably never will. I've been playing it somewhat obsessively and with considerable pleasure for what Steam tells me is more than fifty hours but now I'm all but certain I'm done with it. 

A couple of nights ago I found myself unexpectedly in the midle of what felt like it had to be the grand finale, the big battle to decide the fate of the world. I was completely unprepared for it, both in terms of where I'd thought I was in the game and in the sense of being in a position to have any chance of succeeding. 

After the first couple of catastrophically unsuccessful attempts I did some googling and found that, yes, it was indeed the very last fight but also that, if I somehow managed to win, the game would literally flash up a Game Over screen and that would be that. I wouldn't even get to loot the corpses of my enemies.

That put a pretty large dampener on the prospect of completing the game at all but I still might hve tried because the comabt in Solasta is a lot of fun and I would quite like to have finished that last fight. When I found out through trial and error that there didn't even seem any way to back out of the whole thing and start over, having prepared myself a bit better, short of going back to a save that was several hours of progress in the past, it seemed to me that the rational reaction was simply to treat the game as over and move on. So I have.

An that's a good thing. I was never a completionist. I never felt I needed the closure of a Game Over screen in a single player game and I'm happy to say I no longer feel the need of a "good reason" to stop playing an MMORPG. 

Now I think when it's time to stop, you know. And if you don't know why you're still playing, then it's time to stop. At least, that's what I think now. I'll know what I think tomorrow when I read what I've written about it then.

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.