This thread will attempt to provide a place to discuss past/present/future PC gaming deals. While mainly focusing on Steam games, any standout sales may also be presented. I will not be updating every Daily/Weekly/etc. sale. The tools to help individuals become a smarter shopper will be provided below.
See this POST for links to store sale pages, threads of interest and other tools to help you become a more informed PC game shopper.
Has anyone tried out Steam Families, yet? Not Family Sharing, apparently it is a new-ish thing in the Beta. Seems like a good way to keep games tied to my account for my littles.
Has anyone tried out Steam Families, yet? Not Family Sharing, apparently it is a new-ish thing in the Beta. Seems like a good way to keep games tied to my account for my littles.
I set it up last week for my nephews. Overall works pretty well. I like the fact that we will be able to play different titles in my library concurrently without conflicts. And I was able to individually select 220 games out of my library to share to the kids' profile. This lets me keep them away from "murder is fun" sims or games in which MysterD's mom makes an appearance.
As for downside, i was surprised how strict the geo locking restrictions have been set in place. They live a few blocks away from me and steam would not let me add their existing steam account to my family. Apparently that account has associations (IP history, I'm guessing) indicating it was not in the same household. In this case the easy workaround was creating a new account, adding it to my family, and then adding the new account as one they can switch to in their own steam installation.
Cool. This was the thing I was really interested in. I have games already in my account that I know they might be interested in but having to re-buy on their accounts so that I could still play something else at the same time was annoying. That means I can redeem new games for them on my account and have them accessible to both kids (not at the same time, of course). And being able to control what games are shared is definitely necessary for me. The location restriction is something I expected, especially with streaming channels cracking down, but luckily shouldn't be an issue for me.
I set it up last week for my nephews. Overall works pretty well. I like the fact that we will be able to play different titles in my library concurrently without conflicts. And I was able to individually select 220 games out of my library to share to the kids' profile. This lets me keep them away from "murder is fun" sims or games in which MysterD's mom makes an appearance.
As for downside, i was surprised how strict the geo locking restrictions have been set in place. They live a few blocks away from me and steam would not let me add their existing steam account to my family. Apparently that account has associations (IP history, I'm guessing) indicating it was not in the same household. In this case the easy workaround was creating a new account, adding it to my family, and then adding the new account as one they can switch to in their own steam installation.
All it takes to bypass any restrictions is to invite the account and then log into it using your IP. Accept the invite on that account on your IP and it should let it into your family. The biggest problem with the new steam family system is that it disables the old system completely when you create a family. Also, you can't invite anyone to your family that's from a different country, even if you try to use the IP trick. The only work around for that would be to add a new payment method to their account from your country (to change the store region) and then invite them.
Basically the new system is a great improvement as long as your entire family that you want to share with is in the same country.
Has anyone tried out Steam Families, yet? Not Family Sharing, apparently it is a new-ish thing in the Beta. Seems like a good way to keep games tied to my account for my littles.
Has anyone tried out Steam Families, yet? Not Family Sharing, apparently it is a new-ish thing in the Beta. Seems like a good way to keep games tied to my account for my littles.
I shared my 20,000+ games with my partner with Steam Families. We live in the same household. It took about 10 minutes to set up, and accounts can be locked to play only certain games. The family creator has administrative oversight over the individual accounts. Licensing is an aggregate of combined libraries--if one account owns a game, then the family can play at most one concurrent session of that game, but co-op games require as many purchases of that game as there are accounts that want to play together. My girlfriend is free to play Sex Adventures Cuckold Gym from my library while I play Black Myth Wukong from hers, so benefits can subjectively outweigh negatives.
I shared my 20,000+ games with my partner with Steam Families. We live in the same household. It took about 10 minutes to set up, and accounts can be locked to play only certain games. The family creator has administrative oversight over the individual accounts. Licensing is an aggregate of combined libraries--if one account owns a game, then the family can play at most one concurrent session of that game, but co-op games require as many purchases of that game as there are accounts that want to play together. My girlfriend is free to play Sex Adventures Cuckold Gym from my library while I play Black Myth Wukong from hers, so benefits can subjectively outweigh negatives.
As long as you have the adult role, you're treated the same as the creator. For example, if I invited someone and gave them an adult role they could even remove me from the family if they wanted to, but if you invite someone as a child role they'll have restrictions
Not an amazing deal but Play-Asia has 3 games for $5 until October 2nd. This has a lot of older games, but some more recent bundle fodder too. I recommend Revita.
I picked that up and installed a modpack (mod launcher?) called Moguri Mod. Wow wow wow. Makes the game look brand new, everything's upscaled so much that you can see details that I never knew existed despite playing the game many times over the years. Pretty easy to install on Steam Deck- just had to pop into Desktop Mode, install Protontricks (manually), and then run the bash install script on the mod's Install page.
I picked that up and installed a modpack (mod launcher?) called Moguri Mod. Wow wow wow. Makes the game look brand new, everything's upscaled so much that you can see details that I never knew existed despite playing the game many times over the years. Pretty easy to install on Steam Deck- just had to pop into Desktop Mode, install Protontricks (manually), and then run the bash install script on the mod's Install page.
That mod is shockingly impressive and makes me real tempted to pick up the game. There's certainly plenty of reasons to worry about AI art and such but upscaling projects like this are phenomenal and I hope we continue to get more and more of them.
All the Final Fantasy games are also now on sale on GMG for a bit more than Steam and as cheap as they ever tend to get, 67% off ($6.89) for FF9.
I picked that up and installed a modpack (mod launcher?) called Moguri Mod. Wow wow wow. Makes the game look brand new, everything's upscaled so much that you can see details that I never knew existed despite playing the game many times over the years. Pretty easy to install on Steam Deck- just had to pop into Desktop Mode, install Protontricks (manually), and then run the bash install script on the mod's Install page.
That mod is shockingly impressive and makes me real tempted to pick up the game. There's certainly plenty of reasons to worry about AI art and such but upscaling projects like this are phenomenal and I hope we continue to get more and more of them.
All the Final Fantasy games are also now on sale on GMG for a bit more than Steam and as cheap as they ever tend to get, 67% off ($6.89) for FF9.
There is not. The pc release of CC Radical Dreamers is much more recent with more modern work than the pc version of ffix. I can also heartily recommend the moguri mod. The artwork of the backgrounds and environments in ffvii-ffx are some of my favorite parts of those games. As josh1 described, the AI & manual work that went into moguri really let's those art elements shine. Ffix + moguri has probably been the single best experience I've had on steam deck since the original deck's launch day.
Acktshually there's a stackable 3% off code in the montly xp pack that makes it $6.68
Good to see a number of new drops on previously standard/repeat sale prices. DQXI S for $15.91 is a tempting drop. But I'm still bitter enough after buying vanilla DQXI that I'll wait to see EOY prices - even if they're unlikely to move again from these points.
Live A Live is one of the best new historical lows on GMG if you don't have it yet. It's a charming JRPG with a bunch of chapters that are completely separate from each other until the last one.
Little antivirus heads up. I used Kaspersky on my Windows installation, and I guess as part of the ongoing Russia thing, Kaspersky transferred all US services to a brand called Ultra today. Long story short, Kaspersky automatically uninstalled itself and installed UltraAV and Ultra VPN on my computer with zero input from me (sounds like a common experience). Judging from a quick google, the AV may be aggressively wiping programs (even false positives) without user input if allowed to run, and some users report that trying to uninstall the programs in the usual ways doesn’t prevent them from reinstalling themselves on subsequent bootups. Based on that information I used a third party uninstaller to uninstall both programs (as well as Kaspersky Password Manager, which was still on my computer), and my system seems to be clear after a reboot.
Situation is still fresh so there may be a lot of misinformation out there, but at least exercise caution if you had Kaspersky.
I beat Space Marine 2 and played all the co-op missions several times. My thoughts follow, if you care.
Game is brutally overtuned for single player. I know, the "skill issue" crowd will crawl out of the woodwork, but as someone who's 100% a majority of From Soft's catalog, this is the unfair kind of hard, not the "git gud" kind of hard.
Common arguments can be found regarding lackluster bolt-based weaponry, ranged gribbles that hit way too hard for shit guns (lore-wise), melee gribbles that can tank a thunderhammer hit, and Chaos generally being less fun than 'nids to beat up on.
Add in melee that's not as responsive as one would like along with a set of two bumble- AI during the campaign if you're playing alone and you've got a frustrating time on anything but Easy or Normal difficulties.
That said, lowering it to Easy doesn't impact achievos, if you care, and allowed me to enjoy the actual events of the game. As a Warhammer 40k fan, this is certainly the most cinematic title to date with plenty of moments that make even a Smurf hater quite entertained. Plenty of "hell yea!" moments to be had up until the end.
The multiplayer is having server issues and the class designs are quite imbalanced. Tactical (my fave) are sleepers and require grinding to get going, wherease Bulwarks and Heavys are top classes. Vanguard and Sniper can play a role, if played well (less point and click), and assault marines got the ass end of it all by nerfing the jump packs into nothing. Add in wonky jump pack controls and you get a lackluster class that most agree is the weakest.
However, having no voice chat and maneuvering around with two other people is pretty easy. There's a good "look there" mechanic by pressing "Up" on the DPAD (wish it was stick-click) and the operations also round out the story beats that happen off screen. The Chaos missions are less fun than the Tyranid ones, and one specific Chaos mission has me worried about the intelligence of gamers and whether or not they need more of these in schools.
You get a difficulty system more closely tied to character level than player skill, which requires grinding each class independantly versus an account. With only six missions right now and no horde mode, it definitely is thread bare. Still fun to jump into, but more scenarios and a horde mode are very much needed.
I don't play PvP, so won't review that.
The paid DLC is too expensive and you have to unlock it with in-game grind currency; you don't automatically get the cosmetics you paid for, but have to "earn" them. That's lame.
Disclosure: I got the game for free with my new AMD CPU as part of their on-going promotion.
You better be ready on the CPU-side of things as this game is crushing an AMD 7800X3D and an RTX2080. I have to do a lot of tweaks to get it nearly locked at 1440/60FPS. DLSS, variable resolution, fidelity tweaks... all necessary. And I have to use v-sync, even on a g-sync monitor with NVIDIA card, because the tearing was/is so bad. It's both graphical impressive, but somehow astoundingly unoptimized to require so much CPU power. I can only hope for optimization passes to make the horde mode not a stutter fest.
Oh, and stutter fest? Even with pre-cached shaders, it still stutters. Sigh.
Overall, I would say 7.5/10 for mass audience, wait for for a discount around $40 if you think you'll play co-op, $20 for single player only. For Warhammer 40k fans, 8.5/10, there's canon moments you won't want to miss.
If they actually put out the game content the promise and fix what they have, this could be a 9/10.
Thanks for the review. My impressions of the game from watching people play it match yours. I kind of got bored watching it after a few days here and there. I was going to pick it up on humble but I think I'll wait. Hardware wise it has been interesting on the gpu front, as it seems designed to stay around 8-12GB of vram. CPU wise it looks to be a good cpu tester game in the future.
I played almost 3 hours of The Crew Motorfest trial. It was really good, I'm going to buy the bundle with that and Crew 2. To my surprise it let me import my vehicles from The Crew 2 PS4, that was great. I initially had some issues getting going, it kept disconnecting me immediately after character creation. I closed everything and restarted, ubisoft client made me sign in over again, and then it worked. After that, no disconnects or crashes for the whole time, so that's a relief.
That's dumb, I bought The Crew Motorfest and I have to download the whole game over again even though I have the trial installed. When I bought Crew 2 the trial just turned into the full game, no re-download.
Lunar Silver Star Story Complete and Lunar 2 Eternal Blue Complete remastered coming to Steam next year. Same with Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver 1 and 2 remastered which I've never played late this year. And apparently Horizon Zero Dawn remastered is also a $10 upgrade for PC owners but sounds like it requires a PSN account.
Lunar Silver Star Story Complete and Lunar 2 Eternal Blue Complete remastered coming to Steam next year. Same with Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver 1 and 2 remastered which I've never played late this year. And apparently Horizon Zero Dawn remastered is also a $10 upgrade for PC owners but sounds like it requires a PSN account.
Eh I'm still not sure if it's worth the $10 upgrade, it's a remaster that no one wanted.. but at least a $10 upgrade is a lot more fair. If they're going to remaster shit.. they should remaster shit that people actually want like the Uncharted trilogy and bring it to steam.
Eh I'm still not sure if it's worth the $10 upgrade, it's a remaster that no one wanted.. but at least a $10 upgrade is a lot more fair. If they're going to remaster shit.. they should remaster shit that people actually want like the Uncharted trilogy and bring it to steam.
Notes:
- If you bought it 14 days or so before this announcement, you can get refunded.
- Hood: O&L is getting delisted on Oct. 16th, 2024 from purchasing.
- End of Service of the game happens on Feb. 18th, 2025; the game & its service will be then be dead.
The main thing for me is the announcement of Ghost of Yōtei, which I will buy & play after it's eventual pc release.
The Lunar games land in my primary genre but they just don't do anything for me. I tried played Lunar Silver Star Harmony for the first time after the PSP/vita release and the whole game felt generic and ho-hum. These games were probably just a bit before my time originally and I'm missing out on the nostalgia condiment. I know multiple people who are excited for them though, so I'm happy for them.
I generally don't play mobile games and am skeptical of pc/console products converted from mobile games. So I'll need to wait to see how Fantasian turns out.
The main thing for me is the announcement of Ghost of Yōtei, which I will buy & play after it's eventual pc release.
The Lunar games land in my primary genre but they just don't do anything for me. I tried played Lunar Silver Star Harmony for the first time after the PSP/vita release and the whole game felt generic and ho-hum. These games were probably just a bit before my time originally and I'm missing out on the nostalgia condiment. I know multiple people who are excited for them though, so I'm happy for them.
Lunar will hit Steam and other platforms such as Switch. It's listed in Gungho's Lunar video on YouTube. Glad that Fantasian is close. It was stuck on Apple for far too long.
I just completed Zero Dawn for the first time earlier in the year. I know it was released in 2017, but it was the PS4... and they're remastering it for the PS5? I can't imagine how/why it needs to look much better that it does already.
Good story/world though. Waiting for a good deal on Forbidden West
I just completed Zero Dawn for the first time earlier in the year. I know it was released in 2017, but it was the PS4... and they're remastering it for the PS5? I can't imagine how/why it needs to look much better that it does already.
Good story/world though. Waiting for a good deal on Forbidden West
Yeah pretty weird. I heard Days Gone is coming as well, but only a rumor so far. I don't mind as much since I only played the main game and not the dlc on PS4 and it's been awhile.
I replayed HZD with the PS5 patch last year, it was as great as the first time. I would like to see it in the same fidelity as Forbidden West, but I'm not exactly itching to replay it yet again. Perhaps once the third and final game is out I'd feel motivated to replay through 1 and 2 first.
Since I haven't seen it mentioned yet, it looks like Ubisoft is going back to Day One releases on Steam starting with AC Shadows in February. And Star Wars Outlaws is coming to Steam in November.
Since I haven't seen it mentioned yet, it looks like Ubisoft is going back to Day One releases on Steam starting with AC Shadows in February. And Star Wars Outlaws is coming to Steam in November.
AI during the campaign if you're playing alone and you've got a frustrating time on anything but Easy or Normal difficulties.
