Ubisoft is wrapping up major content support for Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced with Title Update 1.0.8, which went live on October 27 across all platforms. The main draw is the New Game+ mode Ubisoft promised back in July and confirmed last week. It lets players restart Edward Kenway's campaign while keeping almost everything, including unlocked weapons, outfits, the Jackdaw's upgrades and pets, and the Kenway fleet. Quest items, recruited officers, and captured forts do reset, though. Difficulty climbs with each run, as Elite Soldiers appear more often and max rank ships start patrolling the seas, up to New Game+++++.

Players after a tougher fight get Nightmare Mode, where enemies deal 1.8x damage, parry timing is tighter, and the one-shot kill safety net is switched off. Stealth gets harsher too, with faster detection and enemies hearing anything quicker than a walk. A new currency called Escudos, earned from challenges and from chests that were already looted, unlocks outfits and items exclusive to the mode. The patch also restores hidden blade, unarmed, single sword, and gunblade takedown animations from the 2013 original, and Ubisoft has hidden new community chests without offering any hints.

Rebel Wolves has confirmed that Update 1.1 for The Blood of Dawnwalker arrives next week, a little later than the "early October" window the studio mentioned last month. There's no exact date yet. The biggest addition is the Draught of Mind Rebirth, an item that lets players reset their Swordmastery, Witchcraft, and Vampirism skills and get back the in-game time spent learning them, which matters a lot under the game's 30-day limit. There's also a new Story difficulty with extra combat assists, while the existing Story mode gets renamed to Forgiving. Combat targeting, lock-on, and disengaging have been improved, Shadowstep and Planeshift should feel more responsive, and the camera has been tweaked. Players can also pet dogs and cats now, using the directional combat system, of all things.

For PC players, frame generation is getting an update along with its own dedicated settings, though Rebel Wolves hasn't shared any specifics. The game already supports NVIDIA DLSS, and in a September interview, game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz said broader optimization work was still ongoing, so it's reasonable to hope some of the 1,100+ improvements and fixes target performance. The update also adds larger font sizes and subtitles for all dialogue, and it removes blood and gore censorship from the Japanese version. The Blood of Dawnwalker launched on September 3 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, and sold a million copies within days, on a budget that is reportedly just $40 million.

Meta has detailed Horizon Create and Horizon Studio, two generative AI tools that can let people build playable 2D and 3D games from text prompts. Horizon Create is a mobile app aimed at quick, on-the-go creation, while Horizon Studio is a web-based tool with more granular controls for editing details like difficulty, art direction, and progression systems. Both run on the Meta Horizon Engine and let creators publish across Meta's apps, including Facebook and Instagram. Describing what the tools can do, Horizon VP Saxs Persson said:

"You have an idea, you open the app, describe the game you want to build in your own words, and the system starts building it with you. It's not a sketch, it's not a prototype, you build playable 2D and 3D games with real depth. From there, everything is one prompt away; reimagine the environment, change the characters, make a new quest or a new level, tweak the difficulty so new players can stay with it."

The Blood of Dawnwalker launched at the start of September with a strong start, selling over a million copies within the first week of launch. Following that success, it was confirmed that a sequel was already in the works, however, apparently one sticking point for many players was that the game didn't launch with enough difficulty options—especially not ones that make the gameplay more approachable. According to Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, game director for The Blood of Dawnwalker, in a recent interview with Eurogamer, an October update is en route to add a new difficulty mode.

[Editor's note: Our in-depth handheld performance review of The Blood of Dawnwalker is now live]

We will introduce an additional difficulty level, but an easier one, because many people are asking for a more easy difficulty. The Story mode which we have right now will be a different difficulty—we will call it Demanding or something like this—and we will add a new Story mode which will be even easier for people who don't want to experience the combat, they just want to learn the story and go through the game without this gameplay challenge.

It seems as though the tide is turning on Souls-like game developers eschewing difficulty and accessibility settings, with Capcom recently confirming granular difficulty settings in Onimusha: Way of the Sword. Following that revelation, Cold Symmetry recently revealed that Mortal Shell 2 would also feature a unique twist on difficulty settings.

Instead of difficulty sliders, Mortal Shell II will effectively allow players to add or remove buffs with in-game special items. A recent Bluesky post from the developer's official account shows off the Slayer Seal, which helps players regain health to make encounters easier, and the Gloombound Flame, which amps up the game's combat difficulty.

Souls-like games have earned a reputation for their skills-based combat and for being particularly challenging, but as they have made it into the mainstream gaming scene, discussions have sprung up about the genre's accessibility. In a recent interview with Game Informer, Onimusha: Way of the Sword producer, Akihito Kadowaki explains that Way of the Sword will include granular difficulty sliders. He explains that

"We've built this game with the intention of essentially creating a new swordplay experience—the pinnacle of swordplay action games," he explains. Souls-like games are still intimidating to many players, and Capcom's intention with the difficulty sliders is to bring in as wide an audience as possible. According to the executive, the game will have "modular difficulty settings for that—we have story, we have action difficulty settings, and even between those, you can change the settings."