Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the latest addition to the franchise, but before you jump into the action you are able to choose your difficulty from four available options - Story, Forgiving, Normal, and Expert. The last 3 are the game’s Easy, Normal, and Hard mode, whereas Story is focused on those wishing to have a more relaxing story-driven experience. This is not a permanent choice however, and can be changed at any time in Settings. It is also possible to have different settings for both Combat Difficulty and Stealth Difficulty if you want to fine-tune the gameplay challenge.
Assassins Creed Shadows Difficulty Levels - Which one should you choose?
For players wishing to sit back and enjoy the Assassin’s Creed Shadows story, Story mode is of course the correct choice here. You won't need to worry much about challenging combat or stealth experiences and can take the game at an easy pace.
Forgiving represents a slight step up from Story mode and offers a bit more in the way of combat and stealth but most players will still find this to be a fairly relaxed experience with limited, if any, challenging experiences.
With that said, things do ramp up quite a bit as we look at the final two difficulties, especially in terms of combat. on Normal, Yasuke will have a much harder time dealing with opponents that hit a lot harder and can take a fair beating, whereas you will need to be a lot more careful in your stealth approach when playing as Naoe as enemies are more aware and vigilant.
As for the Expert difficulty, this is where the game becomes much more challenging. Even simple encounters will present a challenge if your Equipment isn't optimized and stealth will be much more difficult.
Additional Difficulty Settings in Assassin’s Creed Shadows
Alongside the four primary difficulty levels mentioned earlier, AC Shadows will give players access to 'Enable Guaranteed Assassination'.
Enabling Guaranteed Assassination will allow you to assassinate targets, even if they are much higher level than you. Without this enabled, you will find that when you attempt to assassinate much more powerful targets, it will fail.
Changing the Difficulty Level in AC Shadows
You can change the Assassins Creed Shadows difficulty level at any time if you are finding the game too easy, or too hard. This is possible by doing the following:
- Open the game’s menu and go to “Settings”.
- Choose “Gameplay”, select "Difficulty Tuning" and then select your preferred difficulty level(s).
Check out all of our Assassin’s Creed Shadows guides if you want to know more about the game.
