Pay the $2. This is no minimal DLC. Both DLC’s are 10+ hours of full gameplay and I actually enjoyed the stories in them as much or more as the main game.
I got the whole thing for $15 and it was tons of hours of gameplay.
I went ahead and picked up all three games I mentioned above: The Forest, Tomb Raider, and Project: Wingman. Under $24 after tax. I uninstalled GTA V to make room (101 GB!), which left me room to also install Fallout 4, finally. And then with space still left over I also reinstalled Alien: Isolation, which I got free from Epic Store months ago. My 1 TB system drive now shows 372 GB free, compared to 322 GB before uninstalling GTA V. (I like to keep it over 300 GB.) Man, GTA V is big.
At this point I’m thinking I might want to hold out for a 2 TB M.2 games drive instead of 1 TB. Now that I realize it will require pulling out and reinstalling my air cooler, may as well make the trouble worth it, right? I’d love it if I could grab a 2 TB for around the same price as I originally paid for my 1 TB system drive, which was $156 plus tax. My PCPartPicker price watch list for my potential upgrades shows the 2 TB games drive still at $240, which actually isn’t unreasonable.
Being PCIe 3.0, I’m hoping those prices crater by next Black Friday. It’s not like I’m actively hurting for space. Nor am I eager to rip the air cooler off my cpu anyway, as cleaning off and re-applying thermal paste sounds about as fun as a root canal. Waiting a year from now feels about right.
Picked up a cool little game called Townscaper. No goal, no in-game currency, no limits (besides the gameplay boundary). You are presented with a small house on a small island in an endless sea. Click anywhere to create land. Click anywhere on land to create a building. Click anywhere on that building to expand that building. Change colors and create new buildings in that color. That’s entirely it. Create an organically built, Old-World style city from just clicking on the screen. Create a wild fantasy city. Do anything you want. Been having a lot of fun playing around with it last night and this morning.
(not my creation, just a demonstrative image for you)
That looks a lot like Dorfmatic, which has similar art and feel. Though it does have goals and and end state, it’s still very chill and calm.
I just heard about and tried the demo of Inscription and it’s really cool so far. It’s part card game like Slay the Spire and part not.(escape the room). It’s a hard game to talk about without spoilers. (Finishing the demo also has spoilers I believe) it’s about 18 dollars on Steam, with a small sale discount.
Ursula Vernon had a nice thread on Twitter that used Townscaper to create a story.
Funny.
Another cool thing with this game is that you can export your creation to an .obj file that can be used in most 3d software packages!
you can check out the developer’s other projects on his website:
https://oskarstalberg.com/game/house/index.html
https://oskarstalberg.com/game/planet/planet.html
Gamepass is running a $1 for 3 months deal currently. Strongly recommend it. It would be basically impossible not to be able to get $1 worth of entertainment out of it, gamepass is fantastic.
Well I do want Age of Empires IV.
Gamepass games install like any other service? Similar to Steam, Epic, etc?
And then if you cancel the service you just can’t run the games, but they’re still installed until you manually uninstall them?
EDIT: My real question is: Are Gamepass games hidden inside a walled garden on your computer like Microsoft Store games? I don’t like that setup, not the least of which is because you can’t move them to a different drive. (Or even see the folders.)
You can install Game Pass titles to wherever you like. I’ve picked different drives for them and even installed one onto an external hard drive (to test a different computer without a fast download connection).
When your sub expires, you just can’t launch the games but you can still uninstall everything via the client and then uninstall the client if you’d like. I assume they might leave some lingering traces in your Documents folder, etc but that’s more a function of the games themselves than a Game Pass thing.
Gamepass is built into the xbox app, which I think is built into windows 11. It’s similar to steam in that you have an account and it manages your game installs, updates your game, keeps track of friends, etc.
I’m not sure if it’s like windows apps, exactly. It installs in the same folder by default but you can stick the files anywhere. I think I’ve read that some games are hard to mod because there’s something non-standard about the file/folder structure.
You know, I’ve heard the same. So it could be that there’s something “walled” about the system that I just never had reason to bother with.
It’s not walled if you can open up Windows Explorer and navigate to the folder and look at the files. It sounds like you’re saying you can do that.
You can’t do that for Microsoft Store apps. I bought Halo: The Master Chief Collection at 50% off from the Microsoft Store, and it installed as an app. The actual files are inaccessible, hidden away in some unknown path on the system drive. The apps list says it’s 62 GB, which feels like a lot to be hidden away inside the OS.
I wrote a little game menu program that I can control with my Xbox controller so I can go in and out of controller games without having to use the mouse or keyboard. Typically, when I install a game I open the game folder and export the icon from the EXE file to display in my little program. I was unable to do that for Halo because it’s like there is no path. Store apps are fully walled off.
(Problem solved by screen capturing the icon from the apps list via Settings => Apps.)
I might have to backpedal on this one. I went to an installed Game Pass title’s shortcut and tried to Open File Location but it’s greyed out. So I think it is walled off as you dislike.
That’s a bummer. But, I mean, it’s not necessarily a deal-breaker. $1.
The big problem with store apps is they have to be on the same drive as the system drive. Being able to install to a different drive is a huge improvement even if still walled.
EDIT: I remembered last night that the 2 TB games drive I covet, which is now $240, was $330 when I bought my computer in January. That’s a pretty nice price drop so far.
When we did the Crusader Kings succession game here a while back, I was playing on Game Pass. I remember having a hell of a time trying to even find the save files, and I think I may have had to open up some protected file locations. I don’t know how that would translate to modding, but the files are accessible with the right instructions and arcane rituals.
A cursory googling indicates that Game Pass games install exactly the same way and in the same location as Microsoft Store games.
It also looks like I wasn’t entirely correct about the limitations of those installs. They can be split up drive by drive, and they can be navigated to in explorer (theoretically), but doing either is far more difficult than it should be.
Whoever on the Microsoft team designed the way games install was pretty clearly not a gamer.
Their timing is crap! I have summer vacation June-August. That’s when I need the $1 deal.
Regarding the pass itself: it’s probably the best deal in gaming at the moment. Even at ten bucks a month, I always get my money’s worth. Microsoft has had a number of AAA day-one releases; enough that the subscription pays for itself several times over.
Everything else about it ranges from annoying to crap. The social interfaces are absolute garbage: adding contacts and getting into games with friends is consistently frustrating. The obfuscation of file locations is weird and the opposite of user friendly. The tie-in with EA (which gives access to even more great games!) is unintuitive garbage as well.
Tl;de is that it’s a fantastic subscription service but I would never ever actually purchase a game through their distribution platform.
OK, I’ve been noticing glitches when I play Fallout 4 where the game freezes and an 8 character code in numbers and letters in parenthesis shows up on the screen. I have to force-quit the game and start again. It happened infrequently earlier but now it’s happening more often, like when I try to switch weapons at critical times, and it’s really breaking my flow. Does anybody else experience that with F4, or is it just me?