I’m glad I’m not the only one who found the world resets frustrating. I agree that the world is interesting and atmospheric, but as someone who enjoys thoroughly exploring, the resets just kept ruining my immersion into the world. Maybe one day I’ll go back to the game.
The game doesn’t go on sale very often because it’s very fairly priced at $35 and I’ve gotten each DLC the day of release so idk how they do bundles. It may be a long wait if you’re hoping for a deep sale as I’ve never seen it drop more than 25% below retail price.
You get a lot of the core experience from the base game+mods. So don’t feel like you need to get DLC to start because there’s a learning curve on the game anyway. The community endearingly calls your first 1000 hours in the game “the tutorial.”
It’s popularity was slowly waning and companies have been slowly pulling back on the marketing at the expo for almost a decade. Over the pandemic period the largest gaming names (Nintendo, Sony, etc) pulled out entirely and created their own marketing events of a similar style that were cheaper and easier to maintain while still accomplishing the same thing. E3 was left as a bunch of disjointed marketing events held around the same time. Geoff Kneighlys events ended up filling in the void it left over this period and E3 just never recovered.
I’m in an extremely similar relationship to OP it sounds like. Any time I’ve tried to play a VN style game hasn’t been very successful. They always end up bored unless it’s crazy engaging. ‘What Remains of Edith Finch’ comes to mind as one of the successful narrative focused games I found though.