Ghost of Tsushima receives a few game-changing options in a new update today. The 1.05 patch will include a new difficulty level, a new combat accessibility setting, and some additional options for the game’s text.
The new difficulty level is called Lethal, and it sounds exactly like that: Enemies are both more aggressive and more astute. They’ll spot you faster and attack you more frequently than in the lower three difficulties. They’ll also deal more damage — but, to balance things out, you will too. The windows for parrying and dodging will also be tighter than they are on the other settings. Best make sure your loadouts are in tip-top shape.
The second new addition, Lower Intensity Combat, will be found in the accessibility menu. It changes enemy behaviour: For instance, when you use resolve to heal, enemies won’t attack you. They’ll also take longer to detect you, mimicking one of the benefits of wearing Ronin Armour so you won’t constantly have to switch to it for stealth missions. Some unblockable attacks (those with a red glint) will be blockable, though not all. You can even use heavy attacks to interrupt those annoying combos that Brutes love to use.
Presumably, you’ll be able to increase the difficulty and then turn on Lower Intensity Combat for a makeshift custom mode that’s tougher than what you’re used to, but not quite as tough as full-blown Hard or Lethal. It will also be helpful for players who struggle with timing-based combat.
Finally, Ghost of Tsushima’s text is getting an overhaul. There are four new text colours options to choose from (blue, green, red, and yellow). You’ll also be able to remove the speaker’s name. But the biggest change addresses one of the more pervasive problems in modern gaming: tiny text. Enabling the large text option will size up the typeface across the game — in subtitles, mission objectives, and interaction prompts — by 150 per cent.
Patch 1.05 comes out later today.
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Comments
4 responses to “Ghost of Tsushima Patch Adds Higher Difficulty, ‘Lower Intensity Combat’ Setting”
More difficulty options are always better. After starting Control and being annoyed with zero difficulty options I turned to WeMod for trainers. Really glad I did, I’ve used it on a bunch of games now. I find the challenge / combat of multiplayer games much more fun. I just play single player games for the story and puzzles really, and a mild challenge.
I’ve really developed a love for trainers as a means of adding the difficulty options that the developer probably should have, themselves. Some mechanics are nonsensical/annoying and the game is better without them – a trainer can remove that. Sometimes devs will do that themselves, but they’ll lump it together with other things that will make the game trivially easy in ways you didn’t want.
I’ve seen a lot of mods that do this with things like survival mode in Fallout 4/Skyrim, too. Those survival modes by default are fantastic and really can help change up the way you play,but they don’t give you as much control over the experience as a good set of difficulty-option mods.
I’d really love to see devs adding more granular options for difficulty instead of turning to 3rd parties to try and hack the thing apart or brute force with trainers and modified config files to do what would’ve been a lot cleaner for the developer to add into the UI.
Totally agree. I think things are slowly changing (can’t recall any specific examples but I know they’re out there).
Shipbreaker’s a pretty good example. It’s still early access, but their latest patch introduced additional modes which increase or decrease the number of clones (lives) you have, and add/remove features like the shift time limit, the speed of oxygen decrease/paying for it, and similar.
And like I mentioned, Fallout 4’s survival mode does give you some granular control over it. And the new Tsushima patch with options around intensity/lethality is pretty great.
The new Ghost Recon: Breakpoint ‘immersive experience’ overhaul came with a ridiculous number of difficulty/UI/gameplay element opt-ins/outs that blew my mind and far exceeded the expectations I had for simply removing gearscores. It’s a phenomenal thing, really. There are literally dozens of gameplay configuration options to select for yourself, individually, not grouped together in clusters like every other game. That should be the gold standard, moving forward. Big-ups to Ubi on that one.