Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Is A Ship of Theseus Remake for Better and Worse

Ok, so stick with me here. Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag released in October of 2013 as a much-needed palate cleanser for the series following the mixed response to Assassin’s Creed III. It wound up being so successful and beloved by fans that Ubisoft put out standalone DLC in the form of Freedom Cry, focusing on the protagonist’s former quartermaster, Adéwalé. People loved these games and rightly so; they have aged pretty well. Thanks to smart art direction, they still look great. Captain Kenway is a compelling and unique begrudging protagonist in the series, and the cast of outlaw pirates from James Kidd to Blackbeard all feel like doomed rebels without a home. All of this is helped by the game’s de-emphasis on the recently concluded modern-day Desmond storyline being foregone for a very meta Abstergo and Templar conspiracy at the Ubisoft offices narrative.

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Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced brings a host of changes to an already incredible game.

Building the same ship again

Alongside Freedom Cry, a second expansion was planned in the form of a project being worked on by Ubisoft Singapore. This project began to grow in scope until it became a pirate MMO called Black Flag Infinite. However, at this point it was so long in development it was spun off into an independent project as Black Flag’s core technology (built for the now-aged PS3 and 360) had become dated. Skip along to 2017, with the setting having now changed to the fictional Hyperborea, and then again to East Africa and Southeast Asia, when Skull & Bones was announced at Ubisoft’s E3 press conference as a pseudo-live-service MMO with PvP and PvE for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, all in the style of a Destiny, but instead of playing as Guardian fighting in space, you are a captain of a boat.

Speeding things up, the game saw the addition and removal of survival elements, delays from Q3/Q4 2018 to 2019, then a delay to sometime after March 2020, then to sometime in the 2021-22 fiscal year. Studios like Ubisoft Berlin were called aboard to help steady the ship; the game received a quiet rename that removed the ampersand to Skull And Bones. It came out that the project could not be canceled due to a complicated subsidization deal with the Singaporean government. It was delayed yet again to 2023, before Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillomet made the questionable claim that its planned $70 price tag was indicative of the project being a “quadruple-A game.” It was delayed one more time (for old times’ sake), eventually releasing in February 2024 on PS5, Xbox Series, and PC (with the PS4 and Xbox One versions scrapped).

And after all of that, it was quite bad. Not like devastatingly broken or offensive, just a somewhat thin and repetitive live service boating game, lacking the Assassin-ing and freerunning to break up seafaring combat. As a result, the game underperformed. However, now, just two years later, after all that turmoil and toil, Ubisoft Singapore (and almost a dozen other Ubisoft studios) have released Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, an admirably faithful remake of the 2013 game. And thus, Theseus’ Ship was built… again, and it was called the Jackdaw.

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Black Flag Resynced does a great job of mixing the new with the old.

Sturdy old bones

I highlight all this because the feeling of “having been here before” is a core part of the experience of playing Black Flag Resynced. I’m not sure if you’ve ever gone back to one of your old schools later in life, but that is what playing this game feels like. All those halls that were once big enough to house dozens of kids feel comparatively small. The once endless high seas of 2013 feel like boating around a large lake with a relatively manageable amount of sidequests and objectives now, when compared to the maybe actually endless string of content in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Shadows. The geography is the same, but the scale is wrong; no, the scale is just different than you remember.

While disconcerting at first, this feeling quickly became something of a draw for me as I played. Unlike recent AC games, I actually feel like I could see and complete everything in Resynced, most of which I have forgotten in the intervening 13 years. Is this maybe me being nostalgic for an ever-so-slightly simpler time in games? Probably, but it energized me in a very real way, literally putting the wind in my sails when it came to the somewhat exhausting franchise. And by the end of my time reviewing Resynced, I was looking at the price of other older Assassin’s Creed games on Steam.

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Black Flag Resynced sees new characters added to the story.

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While old favorites are enhanced with the new coat of paint.

Something that I found best preserved was the main narrative of Black Flag. While it might sound like damning with faint praise to say that a story that was good in 2013 is still good now, there is a lot about Black Flag that works better now than it did then. Edward Kenway’s dysphoria as a Welshman struggling with his identity and relationship with an English woman living in Bristol, and his distrust for the Empire he once lived under, feels much more resonant in 2026, to the point that his need to escape the West Indies feels much more understandable.

Other characters like James Kidd/Mary Reed, Adéwalé, and Charles Vane were series highlights; however, the redone voice acting from returning actors (including returning Ralph Ineson, Matt Ryan, Olivia Morgan, and Tristan D. Lalla) is really good. The often squabbling outlaws really do feel like the last of a doomed and dying breed as both Spanish and English forces hunt them down. While the choice to remove the modern-day Abstergo/Ubisoft/Templar plotline may be divisive, it ends up giving the performances and the story as a whole a lot more time to breathe.

For new players, this lack of modern-day segments alleviates the series’ long-running trouble with narrative tension, too. After all, it’s hard to get too invested in the tragedy of these characters if at the end of every chapter you are just being reminded that they are fictional memories of long-dead characters you can have no real effect on.

Sailing under a new flag

While the adherence to everything from the game’s geography to the cutscene direction. Not everything in Resynced is the same. And the very short version of the story here is that, in large part, these changes and additions are very good. Combat receives one of the more notable overhauls, pivoting attacks and parries away from the face buttons and onto the more modern format of the shoulder buttons and triggers. This puts Resynced’s combat slightly more in line with the recent RPG entries; however, the ability to parry into an instant-kill riposte on almost every enemy feels more in line with the original games. It largely works, though, and even facilitates a handful of more involved boss fights.

The graphical overhaul also cannot be ignored. Assassin’s Creed IV was by no means a bad-looking game, and even today, running on new hardware, its carefully prebaked lighting and sharp use of contrast to create the feeling of a sunbaked open ocean look great. Resynced’s move to raytraced lighting, folded into a more dynamic weather system, definitely gives off a more realistic and less timelessly stylized look, but it’s undeniably gorgeous in motion. The game itself feels like something of a culmination of the current iteration of the Anvil engine that has produced so many good-looking open worlds. Which, considering the recent shuttering of Ubisoft Belgrade, the studio that led development on Anvil, Resynced could prove to be something of a swansong to an impressive internally-maintained tool.

While the Ubisoft/Abstergo framing device has been pulled back, Resynced has replaced it with a handful of new quests and new characters to accompany them. The two you will spend the most time with are Lucy Baldwin and the Padre. These two officers that Kenway can recruit both have pretty substantial questlines, and the actual narrative arcs of them are surprisingly compelling. Finally, towards the end of the game, you will unlock another “endgame” quest that involves the fate of Blackbeard and a third new crewmember but feels noticeably less connected than the other two actual plotlines of the game.

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Black Flag Resynced is gorgeous at times.

New cracks

This leads into some of the unintended consequences of the otherwise positive changes and additions. The one you’ll find yourself noticing most acutely is how shafted the character of Adéwalé feels. Freedom Cry was originally a DLC for Assassin’s Creed IV, before getting a standalone release; however, Ubisoft has made it pretty clear that that story will not be receiving the same treatment. It is a real shame because his characterization remains excellent, and with the addition of three new officers, his relatively minimal side content and backstory in this game feel even more noticeable.

The other big thing that is almost impossible to forget is that this is, at the end of the day, a modern Ubisoft game. That means that every time you boot it up, you are first launched into the “Animus” launcher showing you where on the timeline of other Assassin’s Creed games it lies. This screen also gives you the opportunity to launch into a different Assassin’s Creed game instead, as if I didn’t just click on the “launch Black Flag Resynced” button on Steam for a reason. It’s a needless hook into the failed vestigial remnants of Ubisoft’s “Mothership” metaverse push and makes all the work done to unhook the narrative of Edward Kenway from the melodrama of Abstergo feel rather pointless.

Adding to this is the return of both seasonal content, a cross-game battle pass, and frankly embarrassingly overdesigned Diablo-esque purchasable cosmetics. While the battle pass can summarily be ignored, and the gaudy “Hellfire” and “Sea Serpent” packs are so costly that they virtually price you out of even needing to care about them, the existence of seasonal content (and probably to a lesser extent those previous two things), highlight Ubisoft’s fundamental misunderstanding that anyone would want Assassin’s Creed to be their “forever game”. I do not need seasonal “what if” stories for Black Flag — I played Black Flag because I liked the story of Black Flag. Now that that time is over, I will move on. I don’t care about aimlessly sailing around an open world; I have collected everything with mythic skins straight out of a fantasy game. Edward Kenway is a cool pirate who deals with real struggles of identity and purpose. Giving him a neon green dragon sword is just lame.

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The addition of battlepasses and cosmetics undermines the feeling that Black Flag Resynced is going for.

Boulder on a hill

In some ways, Resynced sums up Ubisoft (the real-world company) quite well. The game is at its best when it’s true to the original, a swashbuckling adventure that is enhanced by focus on characters and sense of place. There is clearly an appetite for games like this, if Resynced’s early sales are anything to go by.

However, the same day that Resynced came out, Ubisoft Barcelona, one of the core other teams working on this game, had massive layoffs. Workers at the company said they expected this was coming as they were not assigned a new project in advance, as is usual at Ubisoft. While it’s clear that the ever-growing contingent of players appreciates the more reasonable scope and time demands of Black Flag, Freedom Cry, and Rogue, Ubisoft has spent its last handful of investor calls talking about investing in bigger, higher-stakes projects that will demand more time (and hopefully money) from players.

There is a lesson to be learned from Black Flag Resynced, but it seems like Ubisoft is determined not to learn it. Instead, it chooses to toil away, following the same plans as before and making the same mistakes. Maybe Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced isn’t the Ship of Theseus being rebuilt again; maybe it’s Sisyphus’ rock sliding all the way back to the bottom of the mountain.