For a long time, I’ve held firm that arguments about the necessity of video game remakes are largely boring and pointless. After all, what makes any video game necessary? Who gets to decide that?
I still don’t know the answers to those questions, but I do know that Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is the first time in a long time where I can’t really think of a good reason why a remake should exist. That’s not to say the work that Ubisoft has done to rebuild one of the best games in the series was shoddy; in fact, I’ve really enjoyed the handful of hours I’ve spent roaming the recreated world of 2013’s Black Flag.
But I think I’m largely enjoying it because it’s built on such a solid foundation that it would be hard to screw up. Black Flag Resynced seems like a high-quality take on a game that isn’t old or flawed enough to have needed it.
Black Flag Resynced is an enjoyable throwback to Assassin’s Creed‘s past
I haven’t spent enough time with this new take on Black Flag to render a definitive verdict on it, but after having played enough to freely sail around the Caribbean in the boots of roguish pirate privateer, the best case I can make for the existence of Resynced is that it’s a warm reminder of what Assassin’s Creed used to be before the series took an RPG turn around a decade ago.
There’s no such thing, as far as I can tell, as an enemy who can resist being assassinated in Black Flag Resynced. If you sneak up behind a guy, he is dead. You’re not spending a lot of time sifting through gear or agonizing over a skill tree in this game, and even as someone who generally really likes the four big RPG Assassin’s Creed games, I cannot emphasize enough how nice it is to play one of these that doesn’t revolve around that stuff. It’s nice to be reassured that the old ways work just as well now as they did 13 years ago.
It’s fair to wonder, then, what exactly is different about Black Flag Resynced if Ubisoft didn’t morph the game to conform to the franchise’s modern design standards. You can read a substantive account of all the changes on Ubisoft’s website, but in summary, the parkour system was subtly refined, traversal routes through the game’s many tropical and urban environments were massaged to account for that, and mission design was reconsidered in order to give players a bit more latitude to succeed even if they “fail” to do something like tail an NPC for a story objective.
Mashable Top Stories
The boat combat is still great.
Credit: Ubisoft / Steam
That last point is crucial. You can now fail a tailing mission (long the bane of every Assassin’s Creed fan) and rather than a hard game over screen, the game will pivot the mission objective, giving you an alternate path to success. In more open-ended stealth sequences, I’ve also noticed a lot more instances of being able to eavesdrop on guards to find different methods of finishing the mission. The basics of stealth here are largely unchanged, to my memory, but it feels a lot less rigidly mechanical, and I think that works to the benefit of Black Flag Resynced.
On top of that, there are new crew members to collect, new side missions, and optional Animus Rifts to fill out the story. One change I absolutely cannot approve of, though, is the exclusion of the modern-day story elements from the original Black Flag. Those first-person sequences set in a fictional game development studio (which was obviously a riff on Ubisoft) were some of the best frame story moments in the entire Assassin’s Creed series.
I understand there’s a segment of the population that just doesn’t care about the present-day sci-fi nonsense in these games, but they always gave the series a distinct character. That has never been more clear than it has been in the last couple of games, which have been almost entirely uninterested in engaging with that character. It just bums me out that you can’t play an Assassin’s Creed expecting to see a plot point about a Roman goddess taking control of the internet anymore.
I’m just not sure this is the specific Assassin’s Creed game that needed it
Modern-day quibbles aside, Black Flag Resynced is an exceptionally respectable take on a great game. The changes to mission design alone will probably make it a little more palatable to a modern audience, to say nothing of the gorgeous new visuals. That said, was this really the Assassin’s Creed game that needed this treatment?
If Ubisoft wants to dedicate resources to remaking these games, I just feel like there are a couple of better candidates. The very first game in the series immediately comes to mind, especially given that it barely resembles any of the releases that came after and, frankly, was not a very good game when it came out in 2007. Honestly, the idea of a less punishing mission structure would actually benefit the original Assassin’s Creed far more than Black Flag, as would a simplified approach to parkour traversal.
I could also make a case for 2012’s Assassin’s Creed III, which is similarly one of the worst in the series despite an incredibly compelling American Revolution setting. That would admittedly be a taller task for the developers, as III suffers from a heavy dose of racist Native American stereotypes and other narrative foibles on top of its gameplay shortcomings. But the point remains that if remaking a game can be a redemptive act, I would have rather seen the effort that went into Black Flag Resynced go into a recreation of one of these other, lesser games instead.
But hey, if nothing else, I’m happy to sail around while listening to sea shanties again. Gotta take every win you can get these days.
