What are you playing right now?

[Triaxx]

Cool. FAF's tweaked the balance a bit, but yeah, it's a great game.

[Zevox]

Not surprising about the music: Grant Kirkhope was the lead composer for both.

Really? Huh, and here I really thought it was just a coincidence. Cool.

[Zombimode]

The Witcher 3

And it IS as good as everyone has told me.

[Gnoman]

I've been pushing my way through Wizardry VI lately, since it's so much less malicious than I-IV. V is the first Wizardry that doesn't actively hate the player, but I didn't feel like dealing with wireframe dungeons right now either.

[factotum]

I've been pushing my way through Wizardry VI lately, since it's so much less malicious than I-IV. V is the first Wizardry that doesn't actively hate the player, but I didn't feel like dealing with wireframe dungeons right now either.

The only one in that series I've played is Wizardry 8, and I found the turn-based combat system...a bit annoying. Unlike any other TB system I've played, where you give your characters orders when their turn comes around, in W8 you give orders to all your characters simultaneously and they then play them out over their entire turn. This has two major issues:

1) You're literally sitting doing nothing but watch the turn play out, often for a couple of minutes at a time if there are a lot of enemies around.

2) If the target you originally assigned to a character dies before their turn to act comes round, they'll randomly pick another target. The number of times that random target will be a particularly tough guy that you put to sleep to keep them out of the fight, thus waking them up at an inopportune moment, is amazing!

Did the earlier games have the same problems?

[Gnoman]

I haven't played 8, and it has been a long time since I played the pre-6 ones, but in 6 you target groups, not individual monsters. This keeps the "big guy" problem from showing up, because he'll be in his own separate group.

Turn resolution is also pretty fast (often too fast, because the message delay is hard to tweak). The biggest problem is that spells still get used if the group they're aimed at is dead, to discourage novaing.

[Patram]

Right now, mostly Spiderman PS4. It's even better than I expected, to be honest. Really enjoying it.

[Grif]

Completed my recent space 4X run with GalCiv 3. Despite being far more feature complete, something in that game doesn't quite tick with me. Surprising, because I loved GC2. I think it's the opaque way the AI progressed and how seemingly easy it was to fall behind by the first 25 turns.

Now toying with Let It Die. Uncle Reaper made the game for me, even if the underlying rogue-like hack-and-slash didn't quite appeal just yet.

[GloatingSwine]

Forza Horizon 4, Octopath Traveller, and Stellaris (still).

Also after Joseph Anderson's video fired up Neverwinter Nights to play through the expansions again.

[unseenmage]

Saw Stardew Valley mentioned here so picked it up. Am enjoying it so far.

[Yora]

100% completed Metro 2033.Took only two playthroughs to get both play modes and endings completed, and only reloading two fights to get the required kills with special weapons together. Now I never want to play Cursed Station and the Library ever again!
They are not as terrifying after you got through them once, but they are still really unpleasant. In a good way.

Tomorrow I am going to start play Metro Last Light. Of that game I know much less. And looking at the trophies, you can get through a very large number of levels without getting detected and killing anyone. That was always the best parts in 2033. Russian Ninja. Ninya.
Really looking forward to that, and then soon playing Exodus completely blind.

[Silverraptor]

100% completed Metro 2033.Took only two playthroughs to get both play modes and endings completed, and only reloading two fights to get the required kills with special weapons together. Now I never want to play Cursed Station and the Library ever again!
They are not as terrifying after you got through them once, but they are still really unpleasant. In a good way.

Tomorrow I am going to start play Metro Last Light. Of that game I know much less. And looking at the trophies, you can get through a very large number of levels without getting detected and killing anyone. That was always the best parts in 2033. Russian Ninja. Ninya.
Really looking forward to that, and then soon playing Exodus completely blind.

Oh, the Library was the most excellent, terrifying time I've had in a video game. A friend was watching me play it the first time and he was analyzing everything they did and behaved to figure out their characteristics as I was going through it, give me tips to try and help me get past them. I can't wait for Exodus!

[Gray Mage]

Playing a little bit of Megaman 11. So far I'm liking it, it really captures the feel of the old games. Very nostalgic.

[Sermil]

Right now, I'm playing Murder Simulator: Classic Greek -- err, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey

It's certainly a gorgeous game. Absolutely huge, too. Lots to see and do, tons of side quests.

There's definitely a lot of stabby-stab though. Some of it makes sense -- "Hey, you're trying to kill me! Well, I'll kill you first then!" or "Look, bandit scum who rob and murder innocent travelers! Let me cleanse the world of their taint!" -- but sometimes... Like, I had a quest line "Thing X was stolen from a temple and the gods are pissed. It is currently in a fort with a bunch of basically-innocent Athenian soldiers. Go get it." (The soldiers didn't steal it, mind you; it was just taken to the fort by the thieves.) What are you going to do? Theoretically, you could sneak into the fort and get the X without alerting anyone, but the game actively discourages you from that. (You'll lose a bunch of XP.) You can't even try to go up to the fort and say "Hey, there's a thing in your fort that the temple needs back or the gods will be pissed" and try to talk them into giving you the thing -- the game assumes you will attack the fort so the soldiers will attack you on sight. So... I snuck up and murdered every last one of them, and, for good measure, some guy who came to see what was happening to the fort. At least the gods should be happy!

It's not Fallout, and it's not Planescape: Torment, is what I'm trying to say. You can choose your skills between the "kill at long range", "kill with stealth", and "kill in a straight-up fight" skill trees. I mean, you are a mercenary, and it is the Peloponnesian War, so it's not that surprising that there's a bit of violence, but sometimes, I do feel a little bad about the number of random soldiers I'm killing for no worse sin that being between me and some XP. What can I say, I like playing more straight-up heroic characters.

Despite my little moral qualms, I'm still having a lot of fun with the game. I'm a sucker for exploration and this game has a nearly endless amount to explore -- and I don't mean just "look, another identical level with different random tree placements." The entire Aegean Sea seems to have been hand-crafted; there's something new & interesting around every corner (well, most corners, at least). I do want to go back and explore right now, actually.

[warty goblin]

It's not Fallout, and it's not Planescape: Torment, is what I'm trying to say. You can choose your skills between the "kill at long range", "kill with stealth", and "kill in a straight-up fight" skill trees. I mean, you are a mercenary, and it is the Peloponnesian War, so it's not that surprising that there's a bit of violence, but sometimes, I do feel a little bad about the number of random soldiers I'm killing for no worse sin that being between me and some XP. What can I say, I like playing more straight-up heroic characters.

This actually sounds like a pretty authentic take on Greek heroism. I mean we are talking about a culture whose arguably most important myth can be summarized as "This one time a bunch of kinda effeminate but still badass foreigners stole some dude's really hot wife, so we spent ten years trying to kill all of them before finally tricking their dumb asses so we could kill all of them at once. This was totally not worth it and really tragic and coincidentally more or less cratered our civilization, but it was also totally awesome. Also this one time some dude got speared in the head so hard his eyes popped out and it was hilarious."

The really freaky part is that as foundational bronze age myths go, Homer is downright enlightened. I mean he at least recognizes that the Trojans are, you know, human.

[factotum]

Theoretically, you could sneak into the fort and get the X without alerting anyone, but the game actively discourages you from that. (You'll lose a bunch of XP.)

I don't know why more games don't do what Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader did--you would basically get up to 75% of the XP you would have for killing someone by sneaking past them instead. If they noticed you and you had to kill them, any sneak XP you'd already earned would be subtracted from what you got for the murder, so you couldn't game the system to earn more XP either.

[Gnoman]

I don't know why more games don't do what Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader did--you would basically get up to 75% of the XP you would have for killing someone by sneaking past them instead. If they noticed you and you had to kill them, any sneak XP you'd already earned would be subtracted from what you got for the murder, so you couldn't game the system to earn more XP either.

That game had actual clever mechanics? I never got too far in it, but I remember it being extremely bland and not going anywhere with the halfway interesting worldbuilding ideas. Of course, I was extremely bitter toward it when I realized that the "Uses the SPECIAL system from Fallout!" on the box only applied to the attributes, not the full game system as I had hoped for.

[warty goblin]

I don't know why more games don't do what Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader did--you would basically get up to 75% of the XP you would have for killing someone by sneaking past them instead. If they noticed you and you had to kill them, any sneak XP you'd already earned would be subtracted from what you got for the murder, so you couldn't game the system to earn more XP either.

I'm not generally fond of XP in the first place, since a lot of it just goes to obfuscate good mechanics with needless Skinner boxes, but when it comes to upgrades Dark Messiah had the right idea. You get XP for doing specific things like completing objectives, and the game cares not a wit how you do it. No grinding, no fussing with optimal playstyles, just doing whatever strikes you as fun, then getting more ways to have fun.

Of course being Dark Messiah there's an objectively best way to complete objectives; kicking everybody you meet into spikes or off cliffs. If you ain't kickin', you ain't livin'.

[Sermil]

This actually sounds like a pretty authentic take on Greek heroism. I mean we are talking about a culture whose arguably most important myth can be summarized as "This one time a bunch of kinda effeminate but still badass foreigners stole some dude's really hot wife, so we spent ten years trying to kill all of them before finally tricking their dumb asses so we could kill all of them at once. This was totally not worth it and really tragic and coincidentally more or less cratered our civilization, but it was also totally awesome. Also this one time some dude got speared in the head so hard his eyes popped out and it was hilarious."

Well, ya. I'm hardly an expert on Greek culture, but I've read many Greek myths, and it seems like there were a few, specific categories of people you weren't supposed to kill (immediate blood relations, in particular) and everyone else was fair game.

But I'm a 21st century American, not a negative-fifth century Greek, and sometimes it feels a little disconcerting. Still, generally enjoyable; just saying it gets its M rating honestly.

[oxybe]

So my current Sims 3 playthrough is going... nicely?

Spoiler

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I've played enough sims on & off to have done the whole "oh look, it's me only rich, famous and liked by my community" or "just recreate my friends and me and let the ai run them in a single house"

I wanted something a bit different

I wanted to create a supervillain type Sim and RNG got me this grumpy, frumpy ginger with a combover I called Quint Lowe. But since he was flat broke he needed to start somewhere. And a supervillain, a true supervillain, doesn't just set himself up with a 9-5 and kowtows the company line! NO! HE STRIKES OUT ON HIS OWN... his very, very, broke own.

So I had him build a tiny little microhouse, about 5x5 meters in size. it had everything he needed in one room: Shower, Toilet, Bed, PC, Bookshelf, Radio, Phone, Clock, Fridge, Microwave, Coffee maker, etc... That's kinda when I realized something: my supervillain in training has 0 skills to speak of. Hard to threaten superheroes with your powers of... microwaving a plate of lukewarm hotdogs. His living expenses are next to nothing, thankfully, since all he's doing is living off processed meats in a shanty, so I have him study the basics of logic & handyness, without needing to actually work, eventually have him stay up late hacking the gibson and funneling a few dollars into his bank account, enough to buy a mirror so he can practice his villainous monologuing.

All the while he's going a bit stir crazy from being at home all day preparing to take over the world. Still, he manages to keep some sanity about by listening to his favourite indie bands and trolling on the forums. That and eating a ****ton of hotdogs.

After some time building up his money and getting decent living amenities(a toilet that doesn't always break down AND self cleans? check please!), that's when someone lets him in on a secret. Something that would rock his world: Vampires are real. Not too sure on what forum or discord they met on, but someone let my boy Quint in on the masquerade.

So our vampire, Don, gets invited over, chatted with and eventually coaxed into turning Quint. SUCCESS! Not really the tragic backstory one would expect for a supervillain ("I was once naught but a poor hacker who had the tragic misfortune of politely asking to be bitten by a vampire I met on 4chan") but beggars can't be choosers. I've got my Superpowers and backstory, plus the added lifespan of being a freaking vampire.

Now embued with immortality Quint gets to work for the next bit hacking all night long and solving math the few hours during the day he's awake, even selling his precious hotdog nuking microwave (which he doesn't need now, truth be told) until he can build a second shanty and buying the basics, putting into motion his plan. He calls over Don to check out his new guest shanty...and promptly "invites" him in, permanently. MWAHAHAHAHAHA.

After a nefarious process that brainwashed Don into docility and niceness through drinking drugged blood packs and forced into watching all of the highly calming and heartwarming Bob Ross painting episodes, Quint now has a mysterious master painter locked behind doors, churning out magnificent pieces of work he's selling online for high prices. And he's planning on expanding his eeeeeevil operation... possibly by expanding into the cheap fantasy novel market!

The Sims is definitely a game series. I'm debating trying this out in Sims 2 where I have all the mods so more weird stuff can happen, like having a robot minion or drones patrolling and cleaning my evil lair, but it's much harder to manage multiple sims I find without them just up and dying by being sad for whatever reason.

[factotum]

That game had actual clever mechanics?

It did, yes, and the first half was actually pretty fun. The second half of the game devolved into more or less continuous fights/sneaking with no real interaction with anyone, which is where it went a bit to pot.

[Yora]

Oh, the Library was the most excellent, terrifying time I've had in a video game. A friend was watching me play it the first time and he was analyzing everything they did and behaved to figure out their characteristics as I was going through it, give me tips to try and help me get past them. I can't wait for Exodus!

The problem with the librarians and also the final mindscape section, is that there is too little room for error. Make one little mistake, that you have no idea is a mistake, and you're instantly dead and have to reload to the start of the hallway. Getting through the sections is trial and error to learn the exact rules of what you're supposed to do. When you die in the same spot four times, it stops being creepy and becomes tedious. "Run to that corner, wait for 20 seconds, sneak forward through the third doorway, wait 10 seconds, ..." When you have completely memorized the entire animation cycle of a librarian threatening you, they stop being scary and are just an animatronic.
I have no idea what they were thinking at the end: "There are three nonthreatening looking doors out of the room. Two doors play the same cutscene of you dying and put you back in the room. The whole mindscape section at the end works like that. All the paths look identical but all but one play the same death cutscene and put you back to the start. That kills all tension. What such levels need is the illusion that a single mistep is deadly but without actually having the player reload more than once or twice. Repeating means memorizing, and the feeling of not knowing what will happen is the important part.
Which is a shame, because the mindscape it is really awesome when you first get to that section and the rest of the final level is one of my favorite game endings ever.

Spoiler

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There is no final boss. You beat the game by climbing the tower, that doesn't have any actual enemies. Both D6 and the Tower are amazingly tense and dramatic levels, but there is almost no fighting. In D6 there are only the amoeba, and at the tower are only the nosalises at the base. But when you properly set the brightness to where it is supposed to be, D6 is pitch black. Here they pull of the illusion of massive danger very well, which makes the other two sections even more puzzling.

I have to say, the enemies I hate the most in the game are the lurkers. Which are the smallest, weakest, and pretty rare enemies in the game. But they are so fast and quiet. Even when you know they are there, they are suddenly right next to you, biting you in the legs. And doing pretty serious damage. And when you miss them they dart away just as quickly. They are the enemy where you have the least control over the fight.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen.

So, WotC was on sale due to a new DLC (which is free for a limited time), so I finally bit the bullet and went for it. So far, it's nice, not that different from the base XCOM 2, but the changes so far are pleasing and nice. My third mission, though, had this SITREP thing where there's supposed to be extra resources on the map - chests or something that I can open. I completed the mission and got no extra resources (despite the reality that there was no-one left to contest me, which means I should have had plenty of time to recover them. I hate that kind of silly mechanic, but that aside...), nor did I see any chests during the mission.

Now, I kept a save at mission start just in case of this eventuality. What am I looking for? I've googled this, but other than a couple of wikis mentioning what I already knew, I can't for the life of me find even one such chest. Do they not highlight? The map is in a very busy sewer/underground map full of pipes so I might have missed the chest thinking it was just cover.

Any help would be appreciated.

Grey Wolf

[Zevox]

So, still slow going on Fire Emblem, since I'm playing mostly on lunch break at work, and recently I've been using the free DLC mission to grind out supports without actually gaining levels or the like, so even less progress. But for the couple of missions I have done, oh boy...

Spoiler: Conquest mid-game.

Show

So, after Corrin finally gets it through his head that King Garron is Obviously Evil, mostly through Azura straight-up telling him, he finally decides on a plan to deal with that. And that plan is pretty damned awful. And unfortunately I doubt it will change, since it explains why the subtitle of this version of the game is "Conquest."

Seriously, he's willing to basically sacrifice the entire nation of Hoshido to the literal monster running Nohr, just to avoid even the possibility of betraying his Nohrian siblings. He'd rather go with this plan of tricking Garron into sitting on a magic throne in Hoshido that will reveal his true nature so that he can be 100% sure his siblings will side with him in overthrowing Garron than admit that he may have been wrong to side with Nohr, or try to convince his siblings of Garron's true nature and get them to overthrow him without first conquering another nation in a war he now knows for sure is entirely unjust. This is the supposed to be the same guy who was refusing to kill any Hoshidan soldiers he fought earlier despite the fact that he was fighting in a war and they were surely trying to kill him, and of course his adoptive father repeatedly ordering him to do so. But apparently his moral convictions completely fall by the wayside as soon as they rub up against his attachment to his adopted siblings, and he'd rather try for something that's emotionally easier on him no matter what it means for an entire other country.

Seriously, in this version of Fates, Corrin isn't just an idiot, he's downright despicable and cowardly for that being his plan. And Azura's going along with it, too, and didn't even try to suggest anything else, so she's not much better. And on top of that, up until now his other siblings have seemed to have a much better grasp of their father's true nature than Corrin ever did, so I honestly think it's entirely possible that he could convince them to turn on their father without needing the magic throne to show them that he's a monster literally as well as figuratively, but that never even seems to cross anyone's mind as an option. Hell, there shouldn't be anything stopping Azura from using the mirror she used with Corrin to reveal their father's true nature to them either.

Just wow, Conquest is so much worse than Birthright for that. Birthright felt like a pretty standard Fire Emblem game story and character wise, just with the slightly interesting twist of the close connection that Corrin had to the royal family of the enemy nation. But in Conquest he's practically a completely different character, and far less likable for it, and dragging other characters down with him.

I hope Revelation is better than this. Would be kind of sad to think that they came up with three different versions of this game, and I played the only one with a decent version of the story first.

Also, roughly halfway into Mario + Rabbids, and it's still quite a bit of fun. Pleased to see the difficulty finally amping up enough that there were a couple of missions I didn't achieve a perfect score on, and it's fun to see the variations in the different characters' play styles. I so did not see Princess Peach's weapon of choice being a shotgun-type like Rabbid Mario's coming. I do find it weird that they don't seem willing to let me use Luigi and Peach in the same party though - what, do they want to force me to always use at least one Rabbid or something? Not seeing a point to it otherwise, but if that's the point, it would be nice if I weren't locked into always using Mario and having only a three-person team. But that's a minor gripe.

[Resileaf]

So, still slow going on Fire Emblem, since I'm playing mostly on lunch break at work, and recently I've been using the free DLC mission to grind out supports without actually gaining levels or the like, so even less progress. But for the couple of missions I have done, oh boy...

Spoiler: Conquest mid-game.

Show

So, after Corrin finally gets it through his head that King Garron is Obviously Evil, mostly through Azura straight-up telling him, he finally decides on a plan to deal with that. And that plan is pretty damned awful. And unfortunately I doubt it will change, since it explains why the subtitle of this version of the game is "Conquest."

Seriously, he's willing to basically sacrifice the entire nation of Hoshido to the literal monster running Nohr, just to avoid even the possibility of betraying his Nohrian siblings. He'd rather go with this plan of tricking Garron into sitting on a magic throne in Hoshido that will reveal his true nature so that he can be 100% sure his siblings will side with him in overthrowing Garron than admit that he may have been wrong to side with Nohr, or try to convince his siblings of Garron's true nature and get them to overthrow him without first conquering another nation in a war he now knows for sure is entirely unjust. This is the supposed to be the same guy who was refusing to kill any Hoshidan soldiers he fought earlier despite the fact that he was fighting in a war and they were surely trying to kill him, and of course his adoptive father repeatedly ordering him to do so. But apparently his moral convictions completely fall by the wayside as soon as they rub up against his attachment to his adopted siblings, and he'd rather try for something that's emotionally easier on him no matter what it means for an entire other country.

Seriously, in this version of Fates, Corrin isn't just an idiot, he's downright despicable and cowardly for that being his plan. And Azura's going along with it, too, and didn't even try to suggest anything else, so she's not much better. And on top of that, up until now his other siblings have seemed to have a much better grasp of their father's true nature than Corrin ever did, so I honestly think it's entirely possible that he could convince them to turn on their father without needing the magic throne to show them that he's a monster literally as well as figuratively, but that never even seems to cross anyone's mind as an option. Hell, there shouldn't be anything stopping Azura from using the mirror she used with Corrin to reveal their father's true nature to them either.

Just wow, Conquest is so much worse than Birthright for that. Birthright felt like a pretty standard Fire Emblem game story and character wise, just with the slightly interesting twist of the close connection that Corrin had to the royal family of the enemy nation. But in Conquest he's practically a completely different character, and far less likable for it, and dragging other characters down with him.

I hope Revelation is better than this. Would be kind of sad to think that they came up with three different versions of this game, and I played the only one with a decent version of the story first.

Spoiler

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I can reassure you that Revelations has a much smarter protagonist. Azura and Corrin make a plan to convince both families to work with them to stop the war from the beginning, making preventing fighting between both sides their number one priority. Corrin is still... Well, Corrin, but he at least doesn't come across as being willing to sacrifice a kingdom to spare his families' feelings.

Conquest was the one I liked the least as well. Its saving grace is that it's truly challenging and difficult, without being Awakening-cheap (enemies attacking upon spawning when you had no chance of knowing where they'd appear, anyone?).

[tonberrian]

Also, roughly halfway into Mario + Rabbids, and it's still quite a bit of fun. Pleased to see the difficulty finally amping up enough that there were a couple of missions I didn't achieve a perfect score on, and it's fun to see the variations in the different characters' play styles. I so did not see Princess Peach's weapon of choice being a shotgun-type like Rabbid Mario's coming. I do find it weird that they don't seem willing to let me use Luigi and Peach in the same party though - what, do they want to force me to always use at least one Rabbid or something? Not seeing a point to it otherwise, but if that's the point, it would be nice if I weren't locked into always using Mario and having only a three-person team. But that's a minor gripe.

Yep. You must have a rabbid with you at all times. I don't know why. I wish this had 4 person teams.

In other news, after nearly beating everything in DQ11 I have a hankering to take on VIII again. But I have no tvs that will accept component input, and the 3DS version is still at full price everywhere, and I'm too poor to buy it.

[Zevox]

Spoiler

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I can reassure you that Revelations has a much smarter protagonist. Azura and Corrin make a plan to convince both families to work with them to stop the war from the beginning, making preventing fighting between both sides their number one priority. Corrin is still... Well, Corrin, but he at least doesn't come across as being willing to sacrifice a kingdom to spare his families' feelings.

Conquest was the one I liked the least as well. Its saving grace is that it's truly challenging and difficult, without being Awakening-cheap (enemies attacking upon spawning when you had no chance of knowing where they'd appear, anyone?).

Spoiler

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Yeah, glad they did away with that annoying as heck mechanic. Though honestly, I'm not feeling like Conquest is all that hard - though I am playing on normal.

Yep. You must have a rabbid with you at all times. I don't know why. I wish this had 4 person teams.

In other news, after nearly beating everything in DQ11 I have a hankering to take on VIII again. But I have no tvs that will accept component input, and the 3DS version is still at full price everywhere, and I'm too poor to buy it.

Ouch, that sucks . Surprised the 3DS version hasn't come down though, it's been quite a while since it released.

On another Mario + Rabbids note, the third boss, the Phantom of the Bwaperah, is the greatest damn Mario boss ever, for reasons entirely unrelated to the actual boss fight. Just wow, did that ever put a smile on my face.

[Resileaf]

Spoiler

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Yeah, glad they did away with that annoying as heck mechanic. Though honestly, I'm not feeling like Conquest is all that hard - though I am playing on normal.

Spoiler

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You're still fairly early into it, and yeah, you're on normal. But I'm sure that you've noticed that compared to Birthright, it's no cakewalk.

[Zevox]

Spoiler

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You're still fairly early into it, and yeah, you're on normal. But I'm sure that you've noticed that compared to Birthright, it's no cakewalk.

...it occurs to me, there's actually no reason for this part of the conversation to be in spoilers. In any case, I actually haven't noticed that, but that's probably due to a combination of two things: first, it's been a while since I played Birthright - did that back when the game came out. Second, I actually played Birthright on hard, since I knew it was an Awakening-style game where resources would be infinite. I'll probably go back to that for Revelation, too.

[Resileaf]

...it occurs to me, there's actually no reason for this part of the conversation to be in spoilers. In any case, I actually haven't noticed that, but that's probably due to a combination of two things: first, it's been a while since I played Birthright - did that back when the game came out. Second, I actually played Birthright on hard, since I knew it was an Awakening-style game where resources would be infinite. I'll probably go back to that for Revelation, too.

Oh, yeah, Birthright on hard is just about the same difficulty as Conquest on normal, so no surprise you have the same feeling of difficulty.