Before I even started Assassin's Creed Shadows, I knew I'd be playing on Expert difficulty. It wasn't an inflated ego or a sense of masochism that brought me to the decision. It wasn't even confidence with the series' combat – the last Assassin's Creed I played was Black Flag. Instead, it was Expert Mode's promise to dial up Shadows' stealth gameplay.
Expert Mode does make fights a little harder, but its biggest selling point is that it improves enemy detection and pathfinding, giving your enemies the ability to detect your presence when you're on the roof. For Naoe in particular, this is an absolute gamechanger. A parkour expert – unlike the somewhat clumsier Yasuke – she's supposed to spend most of her time freerunning atop buildings rather than charging around at ground level. At normal difficulties, being on a rooftop acts almost like an invisibility cloak, a safe place for Naoe to retreat to if stealth goes wrong. But in Expert Mode, you're forced to play a lot smarter.
In the first castle I tackled, it wasn't long before a growing detection indicator showed me that a nearby guard had caught wind of me as I crept over a nearby roof. Standing out in the open, any attempt at sneaking through the rest of the castle could have been for nothing, but I quickly threw Naoe prone, using the triangular peak of the tiles around me to break line of sight.
Out of sight does not mean out of mind, however. If you're quick enough to use the architecture to your advantage, guards will generally ignore you, but if you can't hide in time, they'll come looking for you, at which point being ten feet off the ground isn't enough to keep you safe. I've watched guards circle the rooftops where I've been crouching, desperately hoping they get bored and wander off, only for them to finally find an angle where they can see me and call for backup.
At that point, even the rooftops aren't safe, but Shadows does give you a few tools that might help your elevated flight from any guards. A projectile indicator lets you know if you're actually at risk from any distant snipers, coupled with a ghostly apparition that shows where you broke line-of-sight and lost your pursuers, help elevate the stealthy ideas offered by Expert mode even further.
Get good
But Expert difficulty isn't the only new way to play that I've opted for in Shadows. I've also turned on Assassin's Creed Shadows Immersive Mode, which switches dialog to the language it's actually spoken in. For Naoe's part of the story, that's almost exclusively Japanese, lending an authenticity to cutscenes that's already proved popular in games like Ghost of Tsushima (and is likely to return in the upcoming Ghost of Yotei). But for Yasuke, it means a regular swapping back-and-forth between Japanese and the Portuguese spoken by the Jesuits who he accompanies to Japan at the start of the game.
As well as encouraging me to pay full attention during every conversation in case I miss something, Immersive Mode is actively contributing to the story. We meet relatively few Portuguese characters, but those we do meet are pretty low in social standing in Nobunaga's Japan, and their language is one of the few real tools at their disposal. That puts Yasuke – who's able to learn Japanese far faster than anyone around him expects – at a fascinating advantage at the start of the game. While that story takes a backseat after his introduction, it made for an entertaining shifting of the power balance in the character's tense opening scene.
Between them, Assassin's Creed Shadows' Expert and Immersive modes have elevated my time with the game. This might be a slightly new era of Assassin's Creed, but we're still contending with a Ubisoft open-world in a series that has long been struggling to decide where it lies on the 'RPG to stealth game' spectrum. Now, with a new mode that sacrifices nothing of the open-world RPG gameplay but massively heightens the stealth aspects and Immersive language that helps bring the story to life, I'm pretty sure I'll never be turning either of these options off – and I hope they stay for future games.
Check out our Assassin's Creed Shadows review.
