Assassin's Creed Shadows update adds nightmare difficulty, an "open-world alarm" system," a potato mode for low-end PCs, and a new story quest crossing over with D&D series Critical Role

Ubisoft's post-launch support for Assassin's Creed Shadows continues apace with another chunky update arriving on June 25. The publisher has just revealed the full patch notes for Title Update 1.0.6, with upgrades ranging from a new high-end difficulty setting to a free bit of story DLC crossing over with long-running D&D web series Critical Role.

The update launches June 25 at 7am PT / 10am ET / 3pm BST, as Ubisoft details in a new Steam blog, and depending on your platform of choice you might wanna budget a little extra time to download it. On PS5, the update is 6.27GB, and that size grows progressively bigger through various PC versions up to the Xbox Series X/S edition at a whopping 19GB.

Some chunk of that download will be dedicated to a new crossover story quest called A Critical Encounter, where you'll meet Robbie Daymond's character Rufino from Critical Role's Assassin's Creed Shadows one-shot. Daymond will voice the character himself in Shadows, adding a little extra authenticity to the collab. Shadows' earlier crossover with Dead by Daylight seemed to be broadly well received, so here's hoping the Critical Role crossover is of similar quality.

The other headline addition here is the new nightmare difficulty setting, which sounds like it's living up to the billing. Enemies deal more damage, parry timing is far narrower, and "enemy AI is smarter, faster, and more aggressive in a variety of circumstances." The difficulty boost applies to stealth, too, and you'll now be in danger of being heard even while crouching as Naoe.

There are a bunch of other nice little changes, including the option to show - not hide - your headgear in cutscenes, and alter visual effects like parry indicators and the like to customize what gets overlaid in-game. The biggest gameplay change is a new open-world alarm system, which will put you at risk of triggering a regional alert for "repetitively attacking Civilians or Military units outside Castles."

And one more extra bonus for PC players trying to make this open-world opus work on potato-level rigs: an ultra-low spec mode. "This will allow PC players with a limited GPU configuration to experience the game in better framerate conditions," Ubisoft explains. Shadows is likely still going to be very demanding at a CPU level, but at least you'll be able to squeeze out a few more frames if you're rocking an older graphics card.

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