Six months on, and Assassin's Creed Shadows has long since faded into the general live-service background susurrus that underlies all of videogames. It has its players, its haters, its curious onlookers—but the fires of capital-d Discourse have been burnt out for a while.
Which is quite nice, honestly, but it doesn't mean Ubisoft doesn't have a crack squad of dedicated and alarmingly French (or so I like to imagine) developers working on updates and DLC for the game. Its first expansion—Claws of Awaji—is due out on September 16, and to lay the groundwork, the studio put out a big ol' 1.1.1 update for the game today.
There's actually a whole bunch of stuff in this one. The level cap continues its inexorable crawl upwards (it's 100 now), you can now advance the time of day at-will once you have a certain hideout upgrade, and scouts have gotten better—upgrade them enough and they'll be able to spot viewpoints and safehouses when you dispatch them to foggy areas on the map. Which seems like quite a big deal, really, as by paying a pittance on the map screen you'll presumably be able to unlock those safehouses and immediately fast travel to them.
Both the whizzy new scout abilities and the time-of-day magic are the product of new hideout upgrades. "Each unique [hideout] building now includes 2 additional upgrade levels, bringing a total of 20 new enhancements, alongside 3 new Hideout levels." That's probably for the best, as I ran out of things to build in my hideout long, long before I finished with the game.
Anyway, I've really buried the lede on this story because 1.1.1 also gives you a big stick and a cat dressed like Ezio. Videogames are incredible.
The big stick is a bo staff, a new weapon for Naoe that you can unlock by pursuing a new free questline: Go With The Bo. Honestly? I'm way into it. In a world of katanas and kusarigamas, I just think there's something incredibly cool about your weapon being essentially a pool cue. It belies a quiet confidence, I think.
The cat, meanwhile, you unlock as part of the game's new pseudo-battle-pass system in the Animus Hub. You know the one: it's the thing you sometimes accidentally click into from the main menu, realise you've accumulated a bunch of currency for from somewhere, and then use it to buy some dumb cosmetic nonsense. Well, now that dumb cosmetic nonsense is a cat dressed like Ezio Auditore da Firenze, and I won't pretend I'm not thrilled.
I can confidently predict the update will get me to return to AC Shadows for perhaps 20 minutes. Any more than that? We'll have to see. Like all recent AC games, I ran into the problem whereby I was done with the game long, long before it was done with me. Perhaps a break and the new content is just what I need to get back in? Or perhaps not. But at least I have a stick now.
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