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In Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the difficulty system is a bit different from what you might expect from the typical Assassin’s Creed games. While most recent titles in the series aim for accessibility, Shadows leans more toward rewarding players who engage with the game’s systems and progress at a steady pace. This means that the difficulty can feel a bit more intense, especially if you try to push through the main story without keeping up with side content. Due to that, we’ll explore the difficulty settings of Assassin’s Creed Shadows and offer suggestions on which difficulty is best to play on.
Difficulty Settings and tuning in Assassin’s Creed Shadows
The game offers four main difficulty settings: Story, Forgiving, Normal, and Expert. The latter three correspond to the traditional Easy, Normal, and Hard modes, while Story is designed for players who want to focus on the narrative without worrying too much about combat or challenges.
You can fine-tune the Combat difficulty separately. Captured by VIdeoGamer
You can set the Stealth difficulty to your preference. Captured by VIdeoGamer
Lastly, you can toggle Guaranteed Assassinations. Captured by VideoGamer
When you start playing, you’ll only have access to the standard difficulty options, but as you progress, you can also fine-tune your experience through the Difficulty Tuning menu, found in the game’s Options, under the Gameplay tab. This menu allows you to adjust combat and stealth difficulty separately and even enable Guaranteed Assassination, which instantly kills an enemy when a stealth attack is successful. However, high-level enemies can block assassination attempts, making this option less useful in many situations.
Which difficulty setting should you choose?
When it comes to selecting the right difficulty setting, it’s important to consider your playstyle and what you’re hoping to experience in the game. Normal or Forgiving are ideal for more casual players who want a balanced experience, where combat and progression are still challenging but not overwhelmingly difficult. On the other hand, Story mode is the best choice if you’re primarily interested in the narrative and don’t want to struggle with difficult enemies. For players looking for a challenge, Expert is perfect. If you’re skilled at the game’s mechanics and enjoy tougher battles, this is your go-to setting. With that said, we recommend playing on Normal mode to get the most balanced experience in Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows doesn’t have any Achievements or Trophies linked to the game’s difficulty. That means that you’re free to change it on the fly and it won’t hurt your chances of getting any of the game’s bragging pop-ups.
However, keep in mind that the value of your gear and level will still impact how easy or hard it is to progress through the main story. It’s important to note that the difficulty in AC Shadows is strongly influenced by your gear and level. Every main mission has a recommended level, and if you’re underlevelled, most difficulty settings won’t make the mission significantly easier. Even on Story mode, enemies will hit harder, and your assassination attempts will fail if you’re not adequately prepared. Therefore, players who want to focus purely on the main story might find the Story mode the most enjoyable, as it minimizes combat difficulty, though you’ll still need to tackle some side content to level up and progress.
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