The release of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced seems to be right on schedule to hit its July 9th release date across PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. Ubisoft has taken to social media to confirm that the title has gone gold, which means that development on the title has been completed, and the company has the software on to Sony and Microsoft for certification before release.
Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is going to be a remake of the beloved Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, which originally came out in 2013 on PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Nintendo Wii U. The title follows the exploits of Edward Kenway – a pirate who stumbles into the world of Assassins and Templars. Its primary setting is the Golden Age of Piracy, and the story features appearances by many historical characters, including Edward “Blackbeard” Teach.
The remake is slated to bring in a host of improvements to the visuals and gameplay of Black Flag, since it has been developed using Ubisoft’s more modern in-house game engine. In an interview last month, design director Julian Koch said that Black Flag Resynced is “definitely a remake”, and that it is “a love letter to the original”.
As for the kinds of gameplay elements that are being improved, Koch confirmed that, among other things, parkour has been a major target. This decision also led to the team having to deal with cascading systems. In the case of parkour, the studio also had to fix up the game’s collision systems. The addition of the ability to crouch also introduced new challenges, since the original Black Flag wasn’t designed around the protagonist being able to crouch.
“For the barrel, the metrics need to change because of the crouch, the new level of detail we’re adding,” he explained. “The parkour needs to follow; we’re redoing the collision as well. The base of the gameplay is the same, all of the design, but we have more tools to play with. But it needed to be rebuilt from the ground up.”
Creative director Paul Fu has noted that, despite these changes, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is “definitely an old-school, classic Assassin’s Creed.”
“Most of it doesn’t change. We simply added onto it. We asked ourselves questions like ‘Should there be a dialogue choice?’ The obvious answer would be no. ‘Should it be an RPG?’ No. So we kept it as an action-adventure game.”
When the team came up with a new idea that it could add to the game, it looked to original creative director on Black Flag, Jean Guesdon, for guidance. Guesdon currently works as the Head of Content for the franchise at Vantage Studios.
“That was a guiding light for us throughout the entire project, especially during the conception phases,” explained Fu. “We had to create guidelines for every single department, whether it was level design or art direction; every single department had guidelines on how to keep the game authentic and sincere to its spirit.”
Among the biggest changes coming to Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced when compared to the original Black Flag is the removal of all the modern-day segments.
