Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced sets quite a precedent for the inevitable incoming wave of Assassin’s Creed remakes. It not only translates most of the original rather well, but it also has its own suite of new features that fit right in and properly update this cherished entry. They fit quite a range, too, as some are small and hard to notice, while others are unmistakable for most people who have even a passing familiarity with the 2013 original.
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While there are plenty to choose from, here are the seven best new features in the Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag remake.
7) Photo Mode
Resynced is an absolutely gorgeous game. The tropical Caribbean setting is quite the sight no matter if you’re in the city, jungle, or sailing across the sea. A saturated color palette and busy streets make this remake the best-looking entry in the series by quite a fair margin in both the technical and artistic departments. Players don’t just have to admire this beauty while playing since Resynced has a fairly robust photo mode to take advantage of.
As was the case with Shadows, Resynced’s photo mode is rather easy to use and ditches the somewhat clunky photo mode layout seen in the past entries. It doesn’t go much beyond that, which holds it back a little, but it gets most of the essentials right. Resynced’s beauty makes this feature even more worth appreciating and will further allow this fan-favorite classic to live on.
6) New Side Missions
Resynced isn’t just a pure translation of the original game; it has its own suite of new missions, too. A few of these missions revolve around the brand-new officers who all upgrade the Jackdaw in various ways. Said upgrades fit in well and yield more depth during naval battles, and the stories attached to them are decent enough. Lucy Baldwin is a particular highlight because of her fiery attitude that makes her a solid addition to the crew. Outside of Adéwalé, the crew in the original game was fairly plain, so these officers help add some personality to Edward’s adventures. The small monkey or cat players can recruit and see wandering around also help make the ship feel a little more homey.
But Resynced, more importantly, has other side missions that help tie up loose ends on other characters. Stede Bonnet, the oafish wannabe pirate players meet in the beginning, gets a more appropriate and emotionally resonant sendoff and even a new shanty in his honor. It’s a brief chain of missions but one that naturally fits within the game and feels like it should have been there in the first place.
Resynced also delves deeper on Blackbeard. The mission revolving around his secret treasure is simple but done well and mostly coasts off its unexpected ending that tries to teach Edward a lesson. The more involved chain revolving around taking revenge in his name has an incredibly despicable villain that hits dangerous levels of arrogance. These missions also try to have their own small arc for Edward and, while that intention is noble, they end up just repeating what the base game already did. Still, this set of missions adds more closure to an important character.
Not every added mission is fantastic or innovative, but the new Rift ones are downright bad. These “what if” scenarios take the place of the modern-day segments from the original, but lack any of the silly satirical elements. Players are just fed jargon from a faceless voice while platforming around the void. They’re bland, filled with too much dense lore, and symbolic of the state of the current-day storyline in Assassin’s Creed.
5) Retooled Rope Dart
The rope dart in the 2013 Black Flag was a solid idea, but faulty in its execution. It was introduced far too late and was tied to a limited resource, both of which hampered its potential.
The remake alleviates these two pain points and lets the rope dart breathe. Players now get it only a few hours in, so there’s more time with it, but, more importantly, it’s a much more useful tool now. Instead of needing to craft, find, or buy new ones, it’s tied to a fast cooldown and can be used more consistently instead of sparingly.
Pulling soldiers toward you during combat helps keep the flow going, but it’s much more useful during stealth. The ability to yank guards into grassy areas or behind a corner for a sneaky kill is satisfying and gives the stealth some more added depth that it didn’t previously have. Having a smoother assassination animation after a stealthy pull would have been nice, but Ubisoft made a great decision in making this weapon a pivotal part of Edward’s kit.
4) Fewer Loading Screens and Speedier Menus
The open sea is a liberating place. It’s a horizon of possibilities. There’s a few islands to explore, schooners to pillage, or maybe a couple nearby forts to destroy. But this openness doesn’t translate to each part of Black Flag, since players had to load in and out of major ports and even wait at a loading screen to enter the shop. When combined with the game’s layered and often laborious user interface, Black Flag was a game that had more holdups than it should have. It was undoubtedly because of its cross-generational status, meaning it also had to work on Xbox 360 and PS3, but it was still unfortunate.
Resynced is much more streamlined. Loading screens only pop up every now and again when fast traveling, but docking and undocking is completely seamless, as it should be. Shops are now just always open, too. Assassin’s Creed used to have lengthy load times, so cutting the most annoying and prevalent ones out makes the whole game much smoother to play.
Slicing out load times also complements the snappier menus. Resynced’s menu borrows the interface of the newer titles (sans all the gear that cluttered those games up), so finding what you want is much faster. This can mean everything from sifting through various icons on the map to find the desired one or crafting a new pouch for Edward’s blow darts. Just about everything is faster, and it all adds up. Sadly, Resynced’s new battle pass-like Animus menus are quite sluggish because they connect to the internet, but those are easy to overlook in the grand scheme of things.
3) Crouching
It took Assassin’s Creed, a series founded on stealth, seven years to get a dedicated crouch button. Black Flag was before that cutoff, and it showed. Sneaking was fairly limited because players couldn’t hide behind as many objects. Tall vegetation was an attempt to address this shortcoming, but it never made players feel truly sneaky because of how there isn’t always tall grass to hide in. With such rigid hiding spots and little in between full running and being invisible, stealth never felt great.
Resynced’s new crouch button solves most of Black Flag’s original problems in this regard. Being able to play Resynced like a normal stealth game unsurprisingly makes sneaking more engaging. Edward can crouch behind all kinds of cover now, and this flexibility means tiptoeing around has greater tension and variety. There’s still a lot of grass to hide in because it is both a modern video game and there was a ton in the original, but the game doesn’t purely depend on it now. Resynced is still a rather basic stealth game, but this is an upgrade when compared to the original and so much of this is because of the crouch button.
2) Overhauled Controls
It’s easy to look back at Black Flag with rose-tinted glasses, but replaying it points out its many flaws that have only grown more pronounced as time ticks away. The controls are one of these pain points that has made the original a little harder to go back to. Edward tends to — like every Assassin before him and many after him — climb up the wrong walls, leap off to his death, or clamber over something he shouldn’t be clambering over. Moving around can be awfully annoying as you try to get to grips with the controls. It’s partially why all the strict fail states were so frustrating; they were often a result of losing a battle with the controls.
Edward in Resynced is not as clumsy as he once was. The new control scheme makes these accidental bits of parkour much more rare and means it isn’t nearly as frustrating to simply get around. He just moves more fluidly and doesn’t act like he’s had too many bottles of rum.
These new controls also extend to combat. Players no longer have to fiddle with a menu during battle to switch weapons since everything is on a hotkey. This gives players more easy access to Edward’s various tools and means combat has more variety, even though Ubisoft has removed some options like being able to equip different weapon types. Its melee mechanics have their own issues, particularly around the limited nature of execution chains, but having more streamlined controls only lets players take better advantage of what Resynced has to offer.
1) No Fail States
Black Flag is often regaled for its sailing and ability to execute on the fantasy of being a pirate during its golden age, but the negative part of its legacy is often defined by its tedious mission design. So many of the objectives revolved around tailing a target or having to eavesdrop on one and were rarely anything other than painful. Getting caught always caused an immediate desynchronization and were overly strict punishments for a pirate who is supposed to be as free a bird. Having to wrangle with these limitations and fight its clunky controls made these missions quite a chore.
Resynced, thankfully, overhauls all of these sections. Slipping up and causing an alert doesn’t end the mission; it just transforms it. Players just have to get the information they would have gotten from tailing a target elsewhere, be it by looting their corpse or finding some note lying around. Being able to skip one of the notoriously long and boring naval stealth part in “Sugarcane and Its Yields” just by stabbing the agent in the neck is reason enough to respect this overall reorientation. New bits of dialogue contextualize these changes, too, so they don’t feel completely random.
Eavesdropping has been completely retooled, as well. Dialogue from these scenes has been sliced up and placed in other spots, and the eavesdropping itself has been cut down and made impossible to fail. Instead of walking behind a pair of characters conversing, these conversations usually happen behind closed doors with Edward outside. Technically, all of these changes remove gameplay or resistance since players can often just do whatever and aren’t punished for failure, but they benefit the experience by making it less frustrating and, as was previously mentioned, mesh more cleanly with the fantasy of being a liberated pirate.
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