Barely noticed they released a new DLC, so I wanted to check if there are any good deals to have on the original game+dlc.
What I found was actually quite shocking.
As of right now Steam is offering XCOM 2: War of the Chosen for 39,99€
To play that you need the base XCOM 2 game for 49,99€, that's basically 90€ just to play the new XCOM 2 expansion, if you don't own the base game already.
If you still got money to burn, after buying that, there are additional 90€ worth of DLC's available for the base game, 180€ of pure XCOM 2 software!

Buying XCOM 2+WotC through key-resellers comes to a total of around 50€, 20€ for the base game + 30€ for WotC. That's actually a sensible price.
I wonder why 2K doesn't put out an official deal like that: A GOTY version with all the DLC included for people on the fence?
Do they really expect people to pay 90€ to play their new expansion?

Funfact: Pirating that whole 180€ package comes as a 55 GB download, that's around 3€ per GB of game, the most useless metric ever.

It's an expansion pack. That's how they work and always have. You can get XCOM 2 on sale all the time.

The game is huge and worth the money. Sometimes you pay for quality. Games need to cost some money, I'm tired of people complaining about that constantly. If you want to wait, wait. That's it. It's seriously "shocking" to you they want money for their product?

War of the Chosen is a real ass expansion pack, and they charged appropriately given the amount of content.

I think War of the Chosen is intended more for people who have already gone through the vanilla XCOM 2 campaign. If you were buying the game today, I would suggest waiting for a 60% off sale which happens every 2 months on Steam, or waiting six months to a year for both the game and expansion to go on sale. From the time I've put in with WOTC so far though, it seems to be worth far more than $40 to me. It's practically a whole new game.

@artisanbreads: Where did I "complain" that they want money? I'm merely pointing out that the price they are asking for this is totally out relation to what I'm willing to pay for a 1,5-year-old video game (so much about "waiting"). If you are currently on the verge of getting into XCOM 2, with the expansion which supposedly fixes a lot of issues with the original release, they expect you to pay 90€. And you are seriously pretending this isn't completely overpriced, really?

With pricing like that nobody should complain when people buy their games over key-resellers.

@mike: Waiting another six months to a year would put the game at nearly 3 years old, that's a darn long time ;)

Tbh I'm just really shocked that one can pay 90€ for a game and still miss out on so much content because those 90€ only give you the base game+WOTC but none of the other content DLC. 2K can get away with this kind of pricing because the game still sells like crazy, and fans pushing the hype, but imho they'd sell more/make more money (and get new people into the franchise) if they'd offer some kind of "GOTY edition" with all of the DLC+Game at a discounted price.

It's pretty much the same thing Firaxis did with Civ 5. You get a fairly decent base game, but it doesn't really feel like a whole game until the expansions are out. XCOM Enemy Unknown was a great game made better with Enemy Within, but I wouldn't recommend XCOM 2 without the expansion at all because it adds so much needed stuff. Necessary or not, I also think it's complete crap to keep all the stability and bug fixes to the expansion only. It loads two or three times faster now and I've only had one crash in around 50 hours of playing, compared to base XCOM 2's constant chugging and crashing within the first couple hours. I'd definitely say getting the complete set of stuff is worthwhile, but also wait for sales. I would've been much better off not buying XCOM or its dumb season pass at release. I'm certainly never getting another Firaxis game at launch or for full price again.

The base game goes on sale a lot. I just bought the OG version for $24. That would make the Expansion + OG $64. Everything I've seen/heard about the expansion makes it seem like it has the content to back up the price tag.

The base game was on sale for $24 twice in the last month on Steam. As others have noted, it's on sale fairly often. You missed those sales? Wait a couple weeks. The pricing is not especially out of the ordinary as is; but whether on Steam or on Humble or Green Man or Amazon or [insert retailer here] it will be on sale again, and probably soon.

Xcom 2 and WoTC are well worth the asking price to the people who have played it. You can either accept that or not I don't know what to tell you.

Maybe play the game and decide for yourself? Or you could wait for a sale and decide later?

I don't know how far complaining about the value of a game or piece of content you haven't played yet is going to get you.

The expansion price seems fine to me. A bit high for me at the moment since I have a bunch of other stuff to play, but I'll just wait until it's on sale. It does seem odd that XCOM 2 is still a $60 game. I would have thought it would be down to at least $40 by now. I guess people must still buy it.

The price as an expansion is fine (as most run to the $30 mark anyway for Civ and Sims). The chief beef I have is that they added performance fixes to the XPAC only, which feels like crap. I'm working through vanilla XCOM 2 now and I'm curious on how the improvements do, but I don't wanna add the extra stuff in ATM.

Seems like its worth it for people who want it, if you are waiting to play vanilla then just get it on the next sale. It is worth it by itself and is a great game(despite what most the bomb crew think imo). Still mulling picking it up myself, the new gb series and the mario rabbids stuff kinda has my xcom itch acting up again. Btw i have over 120hrs in vanilla xcom 2, so its definitely worth its money in content alone and the xpansion seems to add a lot more to it.

The price is fine with a sale, but outside of that asking for 90€ ($107) just feels like a rip-off for something that ain't even the "complete package". 110€ ($130) get's you a GOTY kinda "complete package", that's one month of electricity for me, in terms of money.

I guess I'm just getting old for thinking that's quite expensive, even in "expansion pack" terms. There are so many ways they could have made this a more appealing deal, like adding past DLC to the already expensive expansion.

I'd really like to support them and get everything, not wasting my time with an "incomplete" feeling game, but darn that's a lot of money.

Edit: Buying the basegame+reinforcement pack+wotc through a key-reseller comes to a total of around 60€, that's nearly half of the price asked on Steam. I wonder who's missing out on that money if anybody at all?

Besides the base XCom 2 was just on sale on all platforms for $15-20.

I just got xcom2 + the xpac for 70 dollars total. That is the version of xcom 2 though that comes with ALL the dlc except that bad cosmetic one. So you could have, if you did the steam sale, gotten the entire thing for 60 dollars instead if you didn't want the little dlc things that came with original xcom 2.

Xcom 2 seems to be on sale on steam every few weeks or every month or two, so just wait for it. I would just wait for it to go on sale again. I see no reason to rush on it now unless you just have to play it this moment. If you MUST play it this moment though yeah you gotta pay the price hehe.

The xpac totally seems worth it to me. Pretty cool.

That isn't ludicrous; I think Payday 2's DLC is ludicrous.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person not stressing about owning every possible piece of dlc.

I feel like the actual trend at work here is the move away from games getting permanent price drops at the same speed they have previously. Instead we see games going on sale far more frequently but remaining at the original price point outside of those sales. I imagine it's a marketing technique where a tag of '50% off for this week only' leads to more sales than permanently dropping the price to that level sometime after release.

Yep. If ever a game had far too much DLC to spend money on, that game is Payday 2 (either that or DoA 5 with all of its costume DLC).

I don't think it's fair to accumulate the DLC prices and consider it 'one game'. Especially since this stuff was released over time and worked on during this time. The base game XCOM 2 is not really in contention to be argued of being feature incomplete. It's not like War of the Chosen is a piece of DLC that is needed to enjoy and get your money's worth out of the base game. It is hard to go back to vanilla XCOM 2 after having played War of the Chosen, but that's because War of the Chosen is that great a piece of content. Not because vanilla was that lacking.

I understand that it is common practice nowadays to discount your game within the first three months, but XCOM 2 sold relatively well and they just don't need to do it. It's not like there are better games on Steam that do the exact same thing. The base game is worth its asking price. The DLC is definitely also worth its asking price. Combining them together will make it steep, but WOTC is meant for people that already enjoyed XCOM 2 and want more great reasons to keep playing.

It's not really spending 90 bucks. It's spending 40 bucks on something awesome you spent 50 bucks on a few years ago that was also awesome. It's not quite the same.

The expansion is bigger than the base game of XCOM2 and has been stabilized greatly, no hitching and loading is almost instant on SSD's, they even considered making this XCOM 3 but decided not to because that would mean to write and develop a complete new story as well. It might as well be a new game and the price is below the standard.

I do agree the requirement of owning the original is a bit dumb but without it they would need to rebuild it from scratch along with the expansion.

It does seem weird that WotC didn't launch with a bundle pack for at least the Base Game + Expansion. Games usually do that, right?

Here's the secret. The base game is totally a complete package. Honestly, with the quantity and quality of things they stuffed into the expansion, it's almost enough to call it a completely new $60 game. Not quite enough, but really very nearly there. So honestly, the asking price is not insane at all.

Also, I'd think that older people would be more comfortable in high prices for expansion packs considering how these things used to be back in the days of Blizzard expansions, C&C expansions and the like.

Finally, key-resellers continue to be scummy.

Someone link those train games on Steam with over $1000 worth of DLC. Then someone else quote that person and tell them how you don't need to buy all that DLC.

My guess is they had their original DLC before War of the Choosen was put into production. I just bought the expansion yesterday and I glanced at what else they had, and it is kind of ridiculous. That said, the amount of content in both the base game and the expansion have to eclipse what is being sold as DLC. At this point, why bother.

I would bet they will release a GOTY edition at some point, especially since XCOM 2 is around 18 months old now. I don't know where the split is between the XCOM team and the Civ team, but I imagine the XCOM 2 support is going to die way down after this.

Yeah you just missed the constant xcom 2 sales, and there was a huge big one over the summer. Just wait it will go on sale again :)

@crazybagman said:

That's not really it, I couldn't care less about visual stuff. But when it's actual playable content, integrated into the base game nontheless, then I feel like I'm "missing" out playing without having that stuff. Especially in a game like XCOM, with it's RNG events, "more stuff" is usually better to prevent repeat events from popping op, it gives more variety and options.

There's also the factor that I usually don't plan on replaying a game several times, especially not when a playtrough can easily go into the dozens of hours, so I'd rather see all the content there is in that one playtrough. Tbh it feels like the nature of this DLC, being so integrated into the base game, does not give me any "expansion" vibe along the lines of "play this after you finished the main game".

@imhungry: The base game seems to suffer from the same issues the original XCOM did, and many other Fireaxis games do. They are competent games on release, but often feel very basic/barren at release compared to the "full versions" with all the DLC down the line. Btw the "expansion" comparisson still doesn't fly with me especially because I'am one of those "older" people and even back then not everything was golden, case in point: Diablo Hellfire expansion was an overpriced pos, just like Rise of the Necromancer for D3 is quite overpriced. Imho it's comparing apples to oranges, I bought C&C and Warcraft expansions, but I did so because I wanted more new the stuff after finishing the campaigns, not a "remixed campaign" with some new stuff thrown in between.

Then there's the fact that back then even expansions, aka "big DLC" came with in its own physical box with a physical manual and sometimes physical goodies.
Nowadays you get none of that but are still expected to pay more/a comparable price, just doesn't add up to me.

DLC pricing overall is a little nuts. Just recently you could get Wolfenstein the New Order for pennies while the Old Blood, arguably standalone, DLC cost twice as much despite being half as long and (once again arguably) half as good.

Once I made a stink about the way Destiny used to lock away content with their DLC and people basically shouted me down with "we like Destiny so we don't care" and the like.

Some people just don't care about the price as long as they enjoy the end product.

While it's very muddy waters today, there is still a pretty big difference between an "Expansion" like this and traditional DLC. Having pumped 20 hours into WotC over the long weekend... It seems pretty worthwhile. That said, I have to say I was not going to buy it at full price myself. It was only because I had some cashback from my American Express that I pulled the trigger, otherwise, I'm broke as shit.

I don't feel, from what I've seen, that the price is too high. It seems like a tremendous amount of content (frankly it's overwhelming most of the time). It's also been a long time since XCOM 2 came out, so I was looking for a reason to go back.

I would expect a bundle deal with the base game this holiday.

@nethlem: XCOM 2 was on sale last week for like $24

See, if they price it for $40 now then on the inevitable Steam sale they can still get $20 for it. If you want this game cheap, you just need to wait a little while.

@nethlem: there was nothing barren or incomplete about vanilla xcom 2. Only issues were technical, it had almost double the amount of content as enemy within and not to mention great mod support. From what I've read the expansion almost adds too much content.

I was totally into the idea of buying this on PS4 a week ago. When I saw the price (130 CAN$) I quickly changed my mind. People are all ''wait for a sale or something'' but I'm moving on to other games. Maybe I'll end up picking it up down the line but probably not. The buzz for what sounds like a great expansion was high last week and the game had no competition. That was the time to drop the price. Make it a permanent price drop and include the expansion in a full price bundle. That would be reasonable and net you a bunch of new customers. Instead they just squandered this opportunity. I guess 2K doesn't want my money.

The base game is also almost 2 years old and from the assessment of the staff of the this very website, it's kind of unbalanced and middling. Now if you ad this latest expansion it does sound like you get a great game. A great game at the low low price of 130 CAN$ (full games are 80). It is 100% insane. No one is going to pay that.

They put the base game on sale on steam last week, for €20 I think. I guess you just missed it.

I would try for a physical copy, as I'm fairly certain that comes with a steam code as well, and it should be much cheaper than €50.

They should really just price it at $60 and include the base game as an option, but there's a chart somewhere saying they'll make less money that way so they didn't.

@alexl86 said:

Good point about the physical copy, I don't even think about those I just assume they don't even exist anymore. Amazon is selling the boxed PC version of Xcom 2 for €25, that's half the price Steam is asking yet you get a box with 6 DVD's vs just a digital download from Steam, videogame prices be crazy yo.

@oursin_360: Really depends on your point of view, I've read more than one review which called WotC the "definite version of Xcom 2" (Eurogamer) or pointing out how WotC fixes one of the fundamental issues present since XCOM:EU, the need to play a "cookie cutter" or else fail horribly, forcing every player and playthrough into roughly the same playstyle (RPS I think).

From what I've seen so far WotC adds a couple of new missions around the Chosen and, most importantly, the covert actions system which allows the player some actual freedom in their choices. Without the covert action stystem, the player got stuck with whatever RNG events the game threw at him in the strategy layer, with barely any room to adapt. The covert actions seem to allow a more free-form way to play by giving the player more options, in terms as how to react to the RNG thrown at him. Are you short on a resource? Avatar project progressed too far? Covert actions tend to have an answer for most of these, allowing the player to approach the game in more diverse ways, just like the new faction soldiers do.
In a way, it's a way better version of the black market because it gives you stuff you need while leveling your soldiers.

I'd have way less issue with any of this if WotC would actually be its own stand-alone campaign, separate from the vanilla campaign, I'd consider that actual "expansion worthy" content, just adding to the base game with more variety is mere DLC territory, at least for me.