Assassin's Creed Shadows Developers Are Considering An Even Tougher Difficulty Option

Depending on the gameplay options chosen, Assassin's Creed Shadows can be a challenging game, but Ubisoft is considering turning the difficulty up to 11 in the future. Amidst community feedback and patches, Ubisoft says it is "actively looking at" making a higher difficulty setting for fans who want to put their skills to the ultimate test.

Speaking to GamesRadar, Assassin's Creed Shadows creative director Jonathon Dumont said that the developers are thinking about making "a tougher setting for difficulty for some of our players," while also monitoring what people have to say about the game.

"Obviously, we can't do everything, but there are things that we're going to be actioning on, and just for the next updates, there are quite a bit of bug fixes and little feature enhancement stuff that is coming in," Dumont said. "I can't just make a list. There's quite a bit of it. So the team is always working to improve the game, and hopefully, people will be able to see the difference when they're playing Shadows in the upcoming months."

Currently, Assassin's Creed Shadows offers the standard selection of easy, medium, and hard difficulty options, as well as several gameplay modifiers to further fine-tune the experience to be more forgiving or more punishing.

Interestingly, the game that Shadows is often compared to, Sucker Punch's Ghost of Tsushima, put a spin on an extreme difficulty mode not long after that game was released in 2020. Lethal Mode made Ghost of Tsushima feel more dangerous overall, as both players and enemies could deliver lethal damage with a single attack.

Alongside smaller parry windows and enemy aggression being dramatically increased, that made the open-world samurai game more interesting than simply turning enemies into sponges that could absorb an absurd amount of damage; perhaps Ubisoft could adopt a similar approach with Shadows if it chooses to introduce a new difficulty mode.

Assassin's Creed Shadows has been off to a strong start so far--although not quite as strong as Assassin's Creed Valhalla for a variety of reasons. Ubisoft also announced a major change to its organization last week, as it revealed that it had created a new "dedicated subsidiary" focused on Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six. Tencent has invested $1.25 billion USD in a minority stake of this subsidiary.