Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia will bump up the difficulty in an update next week

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Complaints that the strategy game is too easy have been heard.

Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia is a strong, streamlined strategy romp let down by a weak late game—so said Fraser in his review. Some AI niggles, odd victory conditions and abundant resources gifted him easy wins, and in one case he earned two victories before turn 30. It got so bad that he had to manufacture his own problems, adopting a noble that he knew would cause trouble. Creative Assembly wants to address those issues in an update next week, which is designed to make the game more difficult in general.

"Some of you are finding campaigns too short, food and money too abundant, battles too easy," game director Jack Lusted said in a blog post. "Thrones isn’t giving you enough of a challenge for you want to keep you playing. This is something we can address quickly since it is in large part down to balancing."

The patch, which will enter a public beta on Tuesday, will adjust victory conditions, increase food consumption, bump up building costs, reduce the amount of gold in the late game and dampen certain tech bonuses. "We hope [it] will improve the difficulty level and serve up more challenge," Lusted said.

It's not the only change that Creative Assembly plans to make: some fans think that Thrones chops off too many of the features that they're used to from a Total War game, and streamlines others too liberally. "We need to look at the mechanics, especially culture and faction mechanics, and decide what may be possible to change to address this," Lusted added.

Fraser was generally on board with the streamlining, saying that getting rid of needless features made it feel "slicker and more cohesive than any of its predecessors". He did say that certain changes "make some parts of the game feel perfunctory", so let's see what the team come up with before passing judgement.

If you want to provide feedback, Creative Assembly is welcoming it through the Total War forums.

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.