Assassin’s Creed Shadows offers tons of options for customizing your gameplay experience. Our tip: Feel free to turn the sliders up.
Don’t worry, this is not going to be an elitist Only the toughest survive
If you just want to enjoy Assassin’s Creed Shadows on the easiest difficulty after work, then go right ahead! Levels of difficulty do not ennoble or condemn real gamers or fake gamers, that’s not what I’m getting at at all – but good difficulty levels do change a game to a certain extent.
And in the case of Shadows, I at least want to invite you to experiment with these changes a bit, because I have drastically improved my personal (!) Gaming experience with them. Fortunately, if it’s different for you, you can always reset.
So: Let’s first clarify how difficulty levels work in Shadows at all.
How Difficulty Levels Work in Assassin’s Creed Shadows
Shadows lets you customize the game experience in many ways. For example, you can disable Quicktime events, turn on guaranteed assassinations, and switch between specific quest markers and vague hints about your mission objectives. In the case of the actual difficulty levels, there are two rough options:
- You can adjust the combat difficulty in four stages. In story mode, Shadows scales back the fighting so you can concentrate fully on the story. On Expert, the opposite is true: Naoe and even Yasuke can only withstand very little in battle, so you have to time your guarding perfectly.
- The Stealth difficulty can be adjusted in three levels. On Easy, enemy colleagues are a little slower on the uptake, you can hide more easily, and so on. On Expert, it gets really tricky: guards can even see you on rooftops – from experience, this is actually a blind spot for Assassin’s Creed guards.
At first glance, the combat difficulty in particular sounds like a step backwards compared to Valhalla, which, after all the patches, easily offers ten different levels of difficulty, from Story Mode to Ultra-Super-Duper-Hardcore-Drengir.
I enjoy Shadows more on Hard
Valhalla (just like Odyssey before it) mainly increases the enemy level at higher levels. Where you take down an enemy Viking with three hits on easy, you’ll be hacking away at him like a plow ox on Drengir level. Shadows also tweaks the values, but makes the opponents less spongy. Even on expert, my Yasuke chops up an opposing samurai pretty quickly.
But the opponents are deadlier. It takes just a few hits for both main characters to bite the dust – Naoe even faster than Yasuke. So (and this was already true in Valhalla) I not only have to familiarize myself more with the game’s systems, optimize my equipment effects, create synergies and so on, but… Shadows is also becoming a pure stealth game, at least as Naoe.
In Valhalla, I was annoyed that Eivor could always break through the door with the guard. Sure, it fits the scenario, but I love good stealth games in which I am sometimes forced to take the quiet route. If you turn everything up to full blast in Shadows, then that’s definitely the case.
Not only do you have to remain undetected, you also have to use all the tools in your arsenal. Hiding on the roof no longer works. I have to turn off lights, lure guards, sometimes deliberately kill them indoors, or alternatively go around them completely.
What’s more, Shadows has a nicer progression curve than the last parts of the series at the highest difficulty level. Yes, the opponents level up, but their values don’t increase linearly with mine. If I skill properly, wear the correct armor and coordinate effects, then my Yasuke will become increasingly better than the competition as the game progresses. And so, even on expert difficulty, I take apart an entire camp as a mighty samurai at the end of my journey. That, too, feels like a very cool reward for me personally.
As I said, the difficulty can be reset at any time in the options if it gets too tough or exhausting for you. But give it a try if you like stealth games.
