The differences between remakes and remasters have blurred significantly over time. With Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, however, Ubisoft Singapore design director Julian Koch has said that it is “definitely a remake”. In an interview with GamesRadar, he also called it “a love letter to the original” and spoke about changing several gameplay elements.
These include taking the ability to crouch anywhere into account, as well as the higher level of visual fidelity, which brings with it its own gameplay considerations, among other things.
“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.”
Despite most of the in-game assets and gameplay being built from the ground up for the title, creative director Paul Fu still says that “it’s 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.”
Fu also noted that, whenever the team wanted to add something new to the game, they would look to Jean Guesdon, who was the original creative director on Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag and now serves as the franchise’s Head of Content 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 narrative changes is less of an emphasis on the modern-day story. Game director Richard Knight noted earlier this month that, while the Desmond storyline was interesting when it happened back in 2013, there isn’t as much interest in it these days.
“Back then, it was very important to know what happened to Desmond’s friends,” he said. “But what we want to do is take Black Flag and update it and modernize it for today. So we knew we needed to change certain things – you can still play the original Black Flag – but this one, to me, is the latest Assassin’s Creed. It’s the post-Shadows AC. It’s still an authentic retelling, but it’s also a new retelling.”
Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on July 9th. In the meantime, take a look at what Fu, along with Anvil Engine expert Nicolas Lopez, has said about the importance of Edward Kenway to Ubisoft as a whole.
