Black Flag Resynced Looks Amazing, But Not For Purists

Everyone hates loading screens, so it’s welcome news that Black Flag Resynced has been engineered to get rid of them, promising a seamless experience when transitioning from the vast open world into the intricately detailed cities and settlements where Black Flag becomes a traditional Assassin’s Creed of urban parkour and streetwise sneaking.

This also implies that all the land masses here might be fully explorable, as with Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s expansive Aegean map where, for the most part, no piece of land is off limits for exploration. This stands in contrast with the original Black Flag, which was full of carefully cordoned-off areas that you could see but not touch.

Good: Faithful Art Direction

Hopefully we will be able to see more of the Caribbean because, from what we’ve seen so far, it is heartbreakingly gorgeous: a crisp and vibrant presentation that expertly updates Black Flag’s appearance without compromising the original’s look and feel. This is hugely important, because remakes and remasters in general have a reputation for tossing artistic intent out of the porthole in the pursuit of lighting and texture work that merely looks a bit more modern at a glance, or in some egregious cases, just plain looks worse than the original. Ubisoft themselves are repeat offenders in this regard.

All the best video game makeovers achieve one crucial thing: they match your memories of the original. Going back and playing an old game, even one that still holds up as well as Black Flag, can be jarring in how lo-fi it looks compared to how you remember it, because we are imperfect beings whose memories are more akin to re-enactments than recordings. Black Flag Resynced is, to my mind, an excellent example of a makeover done well, one that I believe will set a new high bar for this sort of thing going forward.

Bad: An Incomplete Story

Look, I get it: people complain bitterly about the modern day segments of all the Assassin’s Creed games, and Black Flag’s infamous Abstergo sections are often cited as among the worst ones. They’re incongruous first-person segments that mercilessly take you out of Edward Kenway’s story and force you to play a low-level office grunt in some sort of meta self-parody of Ubisoft Montreal itself.

But real ones know that the Abstergo segments are, firstly, a vanishingly small percentage of the total experience, and secondly, vitally important to the plot, and its wider connection to the rest of the Assassin’s Creed saga which is, let’s not forget, about an ideological battle that bestrides the entirely of human history like a four-dimensional Stretch Armstrong.

I won’t spoil the particulars here but quite how the developers plan to plug the big hole this blows in the story is a source of genuine bewilderment, and their vague explanation so far has been the opposite of illuminating.

Don’t get me wrong, of course it’s possible to replace these bits with some other means of narrative delivery, or perhaps relegate them to short cutscenes. The prevailing theory right now is that there’ll be a Final Fantasy 7 Remake style meta-layer to the story that makes it a quasi-sequel as well as a do-over, that we’ll be entering the animus as a yet another observer from even further in the future.

There’s lots of ways to cut out the modern-day element, and some of them might even be clever. But that’s not Black Flag. It’s a fundamental change that glosses over the significance of where Assassin’s Creed 4 sits in the timeline, both in-universe and out. This was the first Assassin’s Creed to take us beyond Desmond’s character arc and into the ongoing ramifications of his sacrifice, as well as exploring the world beyond his narrow perspective.

It’s good that there are no plans to make the original game unavailable, so it’s not like these segments will be lost to time, but I do think that their removal from the remake is a shame and frankly, pandering to a lot of voices that don’t really have much investment in this story in the first place.

Good: Kenway’s Fleet

One of the first questions I had when we first heard about Black Flag Resynced was whether it would still include the Kenway’s Fleet minigame. This moreish autobattler was originally a piece of the game you could take with you in the form of a smartphone app: this sort of interconnected experience was all the rage at the time, so much so that the South Park guys saw fit to mock the trend at E3 once upon a time.

Kenway’s Fleet stands out as a compelling example of smartphone integration that not only farmed out a fun piece of the game you could check in with on the go, but one whose ties to the base game didn’t feel like an afterthought or a silly decree from the c-suite. Building on the Assassin’s Recruits system from the Ezio trilogy, it allowed you to capture ships in the open world and send them on missions outside the Caribbean, as far away as Europe and Africa, to secure in-game resources, upgrade blueprints, and tonnes of cold hard doubloons. It was neat, it made the world beyond the game feel real, and I’m pleased to have it confirmed that it’s in there.

Good: Modernised Gameplay

The old-school AssCreed’s are often criticised for their simplistic combat. For a series ostensibly about sneaking around, it’s remarkably easy to just go around battering everyone. With a generous parry window and enough leeway in the system to let even the most artless button-mashers get through any fight, it’s safe to say that the fighting in Black Flag is one thing that doesn’t really hold up in a FromSoft ascendant world where even the most mainstream gamers crave a legitimate challenge.

So it’s good that Resynced’s combat is based on that of the recent Assassin’s Creed Shadows rather than sticking to the old system, providing for an expanded moveset you can adapt to your own individual style. It’s still going to be a piece of piss, this is Assassin’s Creed after all, but Kenway’s butt-kicking has never looked more fluid or fancy, and given that the combat in the original Black Flag has never been singled out as one of its standout features, this is one area I’m happy to see getting a total gutting.

The stealth mechanics are enjoying a similar overhaul: gone is the weird, unintuitive auto-sneaking that many found jarring in the original. Just like in the recent AssCreed’s, you now have total control over Kenway’s crouching, meaning he can sneak around anywhere, not just in thick vegetation, which opens up a lot more options for dealing with unsuspecting cleanshirts.

Another toggle Resynced gives you total control over is the HUD: yes, all that screen furniture can be flicked on and off at will without having to go into the pause menu, which is hugely welcome in a game as gorgeous as this where you want be able to take in its sheer sun-soaked beauty without having it spoiled by an annoying, mostly pointless quest tracker.

Bad: An Incomplete Challenge

In a crowd-pleasing move, Black Flag Resynced more or less makes it impossible to fail the game’s notorious eavesdropping missions. And while I’m going to be vastly in the minority on this one, it’s a hill I’ll happily die on: this is unnecessary.

Yes, those missions could be annoying. But that’s part of the challenge! Having to keep your wits about you, and use the geometry of the map in order to stay within hearing distance of a target without spooking them, is the entire point.

In a game so lacking in genuine skill challenges it’s sad to see one of its few examples of player friction nerfed so pathetically. Perhaps the margins could have been adjusted to ease the sense of frustration if, for example, you fail because Edward gets unintentionally stuck on a bit of scenery which admittedly does happen. But to remove the challenge altogether and make it possible to just kill your way through, apparently without any wider consequences, is a huge over-correction.

Good: The Possibilities

No amount of quibbling over artistic details and gameplay compromises can change the fact that Black Flag Resynced is a hugely exciting project for fans and newcomers alike. The original game is a great onramp for people unfamiliar with the series and this new version looks to smooth out any bumps in the road for modern audiences, all of this is a good thing for players and the longevity of the Assassin’s Creed Franchise.

As a devoted lover of the original, it’s a bittersweet prospect, but I also believe that there’s no point in remaking these things if you aren’t going to change them by bringing them up to date, continuing their ongoing conversation with their audience and the wider culture they belong to.

But most importantly, I can’t wait to see how they crowbar Kassandra into it.