The Assassin’s Creed Shadows development team is "actively exploring" options to introduce more challenging difficulty settings.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows‘s dev team are “actively looking at” adding options for a more challenging jaunt through the throaty-poke ’em up’s incarnation of feudal Japan. “We’re looking at these things and monitoring what people say about the game,” creative director Jonathon Dumont told GamesRadar+ at this year’s GDC.

Shadows currently features four difficulty options for both stealth and combat, ranging from ‘story’ to ‘expert’, as well as the ‘guaranteed assassination’ toggle from recent previous entries, which ensures that when you stab a man in the neck with a large sharp piece of metal, he does not react with a blasé “ow! Nevertheless…”.

Being a modern Assassin’s Creed game, however, the difficulty can vary wildly depending on whether you like mopping up optional content for shiny trousers, or just want to play the story or explore the world in peace, like our Brendy. I finished the game last week, and ended up whacking the difficulty down about half way though. Not because I wasn’t enjoying combat – but because there was too much of it, and it was getting in the way of me riding around on horseback enjoying some of the best bad weather in gaming.

If you’re someone who craves even more gruelling tests of swordsmanship, however, it sounds like the team are listening. “Obviously, we can’t do everything, but there are things that we’re going to be actioning on, and just for the next updates, there are quite a bit of bug fixes and little feature enhancement stuff that is coming in,” Dumont said. “I can’t just make a list. There’s quite a bit of it. So the team is always working to improve the game, and hopefully, people will be able to see the difference when they’re playing Shadows in the upcoming months.”

Ubisoft, perhaps intent on increasing the difficulty settings of life for their own employees (flawless segue, Reuben), recently spun off a new subsidiary in charge of Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six – a move which has allegedly devalued shares that staff were encouraged to take in lieu of other bonuses.