Assassin’s Creed Shadows is doing a lot of things differently with its dual protagonist approach, giving you a bruising warrior in Yasuke and an agile, stealthy assassin in Naoe. In many ways, the latter is the ultimate embodiment of what it is to be a lead character in Ubisoft’s long-running series, with her nimble parkour, vast toolbox of sneaky tactics, and the ability to still hold her own in open combat. However, when it comes to Naoe silencing enemies with AC’s iconic Hidden Blade, things can get dicey if you try and assassinate tougher enemies because it’s not always a guaranteed one-hit kill. What you might not know though is that you can return to the good old days of the Hidden Blade with an option that’s buried deep within Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ settings.
After Ubisoft’s long old streak of underperforming games, it needed Assassin’s Creed Shadows to be a success. So far, it seems to be just that for the company. While I had some reservations about it in my early preview, and Reid felt let down by its narrative and repetitive loops in his Assassin’s Creed Shadows review, it appears to be doing well. The open-world game crossed the one million player mark less than 24 hours after launch.
For anyone returning to the series after a long absence, or for anyone hoping for more flickers of the earlier games after Assassin’s Creed Mirage’s nostalgic gameplay, you may be disappointed to know that Naoe’s Hidden Blade can’t one-hit assassinate every target. Enemies come with various levels of health, represented by bars, and if you haven’t upgraded your Hidden Blade enough, you’ll simply chunk a few bars of health away rather than fully assassinate them.
The more massive, sprawling RPG games of recent times (Odyssey, Origins, and Valhalla) have, by default, worked in the same way, allowing you to only one-hit assassinate enemies of the appropriate health level by default. Mirage undid this and returned to the traditional way of doing things, but that hasn’t stuck for AC Shadows. That is unless you head to the settings and make one quick but significant change.
As spotted by IGN in the video below, if you go to the Gameplay tab of the settings and head into the Difficulty Tuning section, you’ll find an option called Guaranteed Assassination. Working similarly to a setting found in Valhalla, this will let you revert back to the one-hit assassinations of the older games and Mirage.
This will of course make things much easier, especially if you can sneak your way right up to Assassin’s Creed bosses and key assassination targets during quests, so perhaps think about cranking up some other difficulty settings to balance it out if things are becoming a bit too breezy.
If you’re looking for more ways to make your experience easier, check out our guide to the best Assassin’s Creed Shadows builds and find out how to recruit all of the Assassin’s Creed Shadows allies that can help you in battle.
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