Assassin’s Creed Shadows 1.1.10 quietly walks back a bad DLC call

When a patch quietly tears down a paywall, that’s not balance tuning – that’s a studio backing away from a bad idea. Assassin’s Creed Shadows Title Update 1.1.10 lands across all platforms, and buried in the bug fixes is a clear message from Ubisoft: some of the early monetization and platform handling wasn’t going to fly.

Key takeaways from Assassin’s Creed Shadows v1.1.10

• The Bo staff is no longer effectively DLC-locked: non-legendary versions can now drop as regular loot once you’ve unlocked a single Bo.
• PS5 Pro finally gets Sony’s PSSR 2 upscaling, meaning sharper image quality and more stable performance in cities and open fields.
• Nintendo Switch 2 gains full mouse and keyboard support, pushing it closer to “handheld PC” territory than a traditional console port.
• A long list of quest, progression, UI, weapon and perk fixes aims to stabilize saves and clean up some nasty “missing content” and stat bugs.

Ubisoft just un-gated a weapon it never should’ve sold

The standout change in 1.1.10 isn’t graphical wizardry or a new mode – it’s the Bo staff. Until now, getting your hands on this weapon type basically meant owning the Claws of Awaji expansion. In a franchise that already has a reputation for aggressive monetization around gear, gating an entire weapon class behind DLC was a step too far for a lot of players.

With this patch, that wall comes down. Once you’ve unlocked a single Unique Bo, non-legendary Bo variants can drop from enemies, appear in chests, or be bought from merchants out in feudal Japan. Crucially, you can now obtain Bo weapons without owning the expansion – they’re part of the actual loot ecosystem instead of an upsell.

Is this Ubisoft being generous? Not really. This is Ubisoft course-correcting before “DLC-locked weapons” becomes the defining narrative around Shadows the way “XP boosters” did around Odyssey. The fact that it’s happening in the first substantial title update tells you they heard the backlash and decided the short-term revenue wasn’t worth the long-term stink.

If I had one question for the PR team, it’d be this: why was a core weapon class ever walled off in the first place? Because 1.1.10 doesn’t feel like a planned rollout — it feels like a climbdown.

PS5 Pro finally gets treated like a real platform

The other big headline is technical: PS5 Pro now supports PSSR 2, Sony’s in-house upscaling tech designed to squeeze more detail and stability out of higher resolutions. In practice, that means sharper landscapes, cleaner city vistas and countryside traversal that doesn’t look like someone smeared vaseline over your HUD when the camera moves.

Up to now, a lot of “Pro” and mid-gen hardware features across the industry have felt like marketing stickers more than actual support. You get a resolution toggle, maybe a “performance mode” that still dips, and that’s it. Baking PSSR 2 into Shadows is a signal that Ubisoft is willing to treat PS5 Pro as a real tier in the ecosystem, not just a slightly faster PS5 that gets the same settings with a higher ceiling.

Don’t expect miracles — this is still an open-world Assassin’s Creed with all the CPU-heavy crowd AI and streaming that entails — but stronger upscaling can be the difference between a muddy 4K checkbox and an image that actually looks like a generational step up from base hardware.

The uncomfortable implication: if PSSR 2 makes a noticeable difference now, it also means the launch build wasn’t making the best use of Pro hardware. Once again, 1.1.10 reads less like a feature drop and more like Shadows finally reaching the technical standard it probably should have shipped with on Sony’s top-end box.

Switch 2 mouse and keyboard: gimmick or statement?

On the other end of the spectrum, Nintendo Switch 2 gets something nobody really expected from an Assassin’s Creed port: full mouse and keyboard support. Dock the console, plug in your gear, and suddenly this looks a lot less like a “scaled-down console version” and a lot more like a compact PC build running a mainline AC.

On paper, it’s an odd fit. Most people buying Shadows on a hybrid handheld aren’t itching to break out a mouse. But the decision matters for two reasons:

• It shows Ubisoft is willing to meet the Switch 2 halfway instead of pretending it’s just another underclocked console. If the hardware can behave like a PC, they’ll support PC-like inputs.
• It’s a quiet nod to the growing chunk of players who treat these hybrid machines as travel rigs for serious games, not just platforms for cosy indies.

Whether this becomes a widely used feature is almost beside the point. What matters is that Ubisoft didn’t take the cheap route: no “good enough” control scheme slapped on top of a scaled-down port. Instead, they’re giving the platform options — and options are something this series has historically used as a way to sell boosters, not empower players.

The quiet fixes that actually save your save

Beyond the flashy bullet points, 1.1.10 is stacked with the kind of fixes that only sound boring until they hit your playthrough. Ubisoft calls out multiple quest and progression issues, including a “Missing Content” problem that left some players without access to things they’d legitimately unlocked or bought. That’s the line you never want a live game to cross: the second your save starts lying to you, trust evaporates.

The patch also touches:

• Gameplay and abilities – correcting upgrades and skills that weren’t behaving as described, which is code for “your build finally works like the tooltip promised.”
• Weapons and perks – sorting out stat display issues and perk interactions, particularly on higher-end gear where one broken modifier can trivialize or ruin combat.
• UI and localisation – cleaning up text, stat readouts, and menu bugs that make theorycrafting builds harder than it needs to be.
• Fast travel and mission flow – fixing cases where fast travel or mission triggers could leave you stranded or stuck in a loop.

This is the unglamorous part of live service support, but it’s also where you see a publisher’s real priorities. Ubisoft could have headlined this patch with a new cosmetic set or another cross-promotion and left half these bugs for “later.” Instead, 1.1.10 is mostly plumbing work. For a franchise that’s been accused — often fairly — of prioritizing storefront content over systemic polish, that’s a meaningful shift.

Why this patch actually matters

Put all of that together and 1.1.10 looks less like a routine day-one-plus-a-week patch and more like a statement of intent. Ubisoft is doing three things at once:

• Backing off an overzealous DLC decision before it defines the game.
• Proving they’re willing to use platform-specific tech instead of shipping a lowest-common-denominator build.
• Stabilizing the foundation so that future DLC and live events don’t land on a broken save structure.

None of this wipes away the lingering concerns around how Assassin’s Creed handles monetization, or whether Shadows will slowly fill up with paid gear packs and “time savers.” But it does show that, at least for now, the studio understands there’s a limit — especially when you’re already asking players to bet big on a new historical setting and a new generation of hardware.

What to watch next

There are three specific things worth keeping an eye on from here:

• The next title update – If 1.1.20 (or whatever it’s called) is another round of core fixes and platform tuning rather than store content, that’s a good sign this wasn’t a one-off “please stop yelling” patch.
• Future weapon releases – If any new weapon class or major mechanic shows up as DLC-only after the Bo reversal, you’ll know the lesson didn’t stick.
• PS5 Pro performance reports – Once players get time with PSSR 2 in the wild, we’ll see whether the Pro version is finally a clear step up or just a sharper version of the same stutters.

Those are the tells that will show whether Shadows is being treated as a long-term flagship or just another seasonal product on Ubisoft’s assembly line.

TL;DR: Thrown to the dogs, patched for the diehards

Assassin’s Creed Shadows Title Update 1.1.10 does more than squash bugs: it unlocks the Bo staff for non-DLC players, buffs PS5 Pro visuals with PSSR 2, and hands Switch 2 proper mouse and keyboard support. The patch also quietly fixes a raft of progression, UI, weapon and quest issues that were undermining trust in the game’s systems. Verdict: if you bounced off Shadows over broken quests or the feeling that core gear was being held hostage by DLC, 1.1.10 is the first real sign Ubisoft is at least trying to earn you back rather than just selling you more.