Steam's Train Fest has begun, meaning there are deals and discounts on lots of locomotive games, even a few brand new ones like Denshattack, which just came out this month.

But when it comes to train sales there's really only one train game to talk about: Train Simulator Classic, a sim notable for having a whole heck of a lot of DLC: a whopping 790 pieces of it. And almost all of them are on sale this week.

The base game itself has a hefty discount of 80% off, making it a steal at only $6 during Train Fest. And just about all of that tasty DLC is also on sale for anywhere between 20-80% off as well.

I won't lie, it was trickier than I expected to figure out what the total discount on all that DLC adds up to. Perhaps for obvious reasons, Steam won't let me add all 790 pieces of DLC to my cart at once, but it also won't just display all of the pieces of DLC in a nice tallyable column, truncating the list to a mere 200 entries. Even the ever-useful Augmented Steam extension won't let me fill my cart with every piece of DLC in one fell swoop. Come on, storefronts, let me accidentally purchase thousands of dollars of software!

But after a lot of clicking and scrolling and digging and copy-pasting raw data into a spreadsheet, and then doing a whole bunch of organizing and sorting and calculating, I think I've worked it all out.

Typically, in order to buy every piece of DLC for Train Simulator Classic at full price, you'd have to spend about $15,621.11. With today's Train Fest Sale where most of it is heavily discounted, it'll only run you about $6,933.80. That's about 55% off! Not bad if you have thousands of dollars to blow on train DLC—or, far more likely, if you've been looking for one or two bits of DLC and were waiting for a sale.

If you're looking for some train games that won't cost as much as a used car, there's quite a few to choose from, even newer games. As with Denshattack, train survival game EverRail also came out this month and is 10% off, and Fogpiercer, a strategy game also released this July, is 25% off.

No deals on Monster Train 1 or 2, however. Feels like a missed opportunity. Here's the Train Fest trailer with more sales to choo-choo-choose from:

This week, Path of Exile will ditch a system that defined it for over a decade, making the action RPG considerably easier to approach for new players. The developers at Grinding Gear Games told PC Gamer that they're questioning everything that's sacred going forward, but apparently some things are still off the table—at least for now.

A major roadblock for new and returning players is PoE's lengthy campaign. Every new league, or season, you have to clear 10 acts before you enter the endgame, like a 20-hour tutorial. Veteran players can race through it in five or six hours, but most people need at least double that.

For years, people have asked GGG to shorten it or provide a way to skip the campaigntorial after leveling your first character to no avail. Those same questions now happen every time a new Path of Exile 2 league—where campaign completion remains a requirement—starts, too. Nobody wants to do what feels like homework to get to the fun part.

But no matter how common the criticism is, GGG isn't going to budge on this one. Speaking to PCGamesN about the possibility of a campaign skip, game designer Christopher "Octavian" Laferriere and game director Mark Roberts said it isn't happening anytime soon.

"I'd want to give a lot of consideration to something like that," Laferriere said. "Maybe it is worth another look—that said, personally, it feels very wrong to me."

Roberts said skipping the campaign makes you "have a lot less care for your character," and that he knows first-hand what it's like because they use tools to do that as developers. He said that it "just genuinely makes the game worse—the work to get there is the satisfaction."

Instead of giving people a way to skip the campaign, Roberts wants to ensure new leagues freshen it up so it stays relevant. Otherwise, Roberts said, PoE would "lose its quality quite fast if we were to say, 'Oh, campaign doesn't matter anymore.' I think that's a very, very bad way to go."

There was a time, however, that the team thought it would be sacrilege to change the multi-colored sockets on gear that limit what skills you can equip in early parts of the game. But enough developers agreed that maybe they didn't add anything particularly meaningful to the experience and decided to cut them out.

PoE has plenty of inscrutable things when it comes to the new player experience. I'm not convinced the campaign will be next on the chopping block, especially given how stubborn they've been about it for all these years. I asked PoE 2 game director Jonathan Rogers about a campaign skip in the sequel, and he basically intimated that it'll never happen as long as it's a game he's in charge of.

I respect that decision and think PoE 2 at least is a better game because the campaign is so good. Skipping it would ruin the pacing and make most of the story events that happen in the endgame kind of weightless. Every new league I get a little faster at completing it and that sort of meta-level skill is fun to improve on, even if I sympathize with all the people who find it to be a slog. That said, if GGG were to ever reach a compromise with players and offer a way to shorten it for secondary characters, I would gladly make use of that.

Of the many remarkable abilities possessed by Dishonored hero Corvo Attano, perhaps the most remarkable is, well, possession: Corvo can possess creatures, most famously the game's plentiful rats, to get up to all sorts of trouble, including accessing locations that would be inaccessible to his full-sized body. As it turns out, this wasn't an entirely original idea. More than a decade earlier it had been considered for use in Dishonored's masterpiece progenitor, Thief: The Dark Project.

Thief basically is Dishonored, speaking very broadly: A guy who's good at sneaking around gets caught up in a bunch of political nonsense he'd really rather avoid because of a woman he can't admit to being in love with because it'd be weird. One chief difference is that Garrett, the titular thief of the Thief games (the ones that matter, anyway) doesn't have any powers.

He almost did, though. In a 2018 PC Gamer magazine interview marking the 20^th anniversary of Thief's debut, lead designer Tim Stellmach said Looking Glass Studios had pondered giving Garrett the ability to shrink himself and travel through small passageways like drains. The idea was ultimately dropped, though, for eminently practical reasons.

"We just decided it was gonna be way too much work to do it right," Stellmach explained. And, maybe more importantly: "It started raising questions that we didn't want to answer."

Stellmach didn't expand on the nature of those questions, but it's not too difficult to guess. As a pure stealth game (another big difference between Thief and Dishonored: Garrett is not great in a fight), getting from point A to point B without being seen is central to the experience: Being able to transform into a small, innocuous rodent might make traversing Soulforge less of a brain-crushing grind, but it'd also suck the fun out of the whole thing, right?

Thief is, in many ways, an unforgiving experience, and as we noted a few years back, many of its innovations have been left behind in favor of mainstream accessibility. Stealth is an option in games like Dishonored, but there's always a Plan B of 'kill everyone' if you blow it or just get bored of sneaking around. That's just not an option in Thief, where Garrett can generally handle one guy at a time but no more than that. But it worked: As Richard Cobbett wrote in his own retrospective on how Thief defined the stealth genre, the game's singular focus resulted in a singular immersive sim experience.

Thief is back in the news these days thanks to the Nightdive remaster announced at the PC Gaming Show in June, which despite being called Thief: The Dark Project Remastered will also include the additional missions from Thief Gold, along with a beefy slate of other improvements and upgrades. To ensure it's done right, Nightdive has brought back Thief artist Daniel Thron to help revamp the game's cutscenes, a vital part of any serious Thief reconstruction effort.

There's still no release date on the remaster but as PC Gamer immsim weirdo Joshua Wolens correctly stated when the game was revealed, "Oh hell yes."