When it comes to remakes of popular games, it can be quite hard to tell when one project is going to make meaningful adjustments to capture what made the original special, or which will have aged poorly or are just being given cosmetic upgrades that don’t make a replay worth it. Based on my time playing through some revised missions in Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, I’m feeling more confident that this second voyage on the high seas of the Caribbean will be the former. After playing through a few missions recently, I now have a better understanding of what to expect from this ambitious remake, which included narrative additions, new options for carrying out my assassinations, and other bits and baubles along the way that have increased my interest in replaying through Kenway’s epic tale of pillaging and unloading flintlocks into the chests of unsuspecting lawmen.
The missions I played took place during the early part of the story (specifically, during “Sequence 3”) as Edward is still settling into his new life as a sorta, kinda assassin and full-blown pirate captain. If you’ve played the original recently, you’ll recall the part where you tail Julien Du Casse’s Spanish galleon, before tracking him through a jungle to assassinate him. But this revised version had a variety of changes, some lesser and some greater, which did a pretty good job of showing off just how much work has been put into bringing this classic up to modern standards. These ranged from narrative additions, side quests, boss fight changes, and even the odd collectible to snap up along the way.
The biggest update came in the form of tweaks aimed at making the mission more open-ended. For example, the path you take through the jungle in this version is a more scenic route that leads you to a mansion instead of straight to the ship where your quarry hides. Here you can get up to new kinds of mischief, like an optional encounter with some captured pirates you can free to help serve as muscle (or just a distraction) in your pursuit of Du Casse. Doing so causes quite a commotion, as they arm themselves and make a run at their captors and take the fight to the beach where Du Casse’s ship is docked. You can join them in the fight, or use the distraction to slip past the guards and get aboard the galleon undetected more easily. This was only one small example on one short mission, but if it’s indicative of the added opportunities to approach quests in your own style and are allowed to get creative, as seemed to be the case when I played a handful of hours from a different part of the game last month, then that alone could sell me on spending several dozen more hours playing through this adventure in full.
There were some other, mostly cosmetic changes to the mission that I noticed along the way too, like some new lines of dialogue and story bits from the guards at the mansion, a newly refurbished interior of the mansion itself, and even a collectible portrait of none other than Du Casse himself – which will be a helpful artifact to remember him by once you’ve gutted him like a fish and thrown his lifeless corpse into the salty waves. Small things like these are probably more along the lines of the standard stuff you’d maybe expect to find in a more traditional remake versus this seemingly extra-as-heck evolution that Ubisoft has planned for Black Flag, but it’s still nice to see little touches like this added alongside stuff like the modernized combat and massively upgraded graphics. Of course, we already know that it’s not just small added lines of dialogue they’ve got in store, since last week the developers shared with IGN one of the new cutscenes being added to flesh out Kenway’s story.
Another fairly big change to the Du Casse mission was the boss fight against Du Casse himself. There are a bunch of changes to this fight versus the original, including a proper boss fight health bar and a significantly longer battle against a now-beefy Du Casse versus the original’s wimpy version who goes down in a few hits. Du Casse also has some interesting tricks up his sleeve, as he whips out pistols and just starts blastin’ at you with reckless abandon – pretty much what you’d expect from an arms-dealing Templar who taught Kenway how to fire a gun in the first place! Though, if you’re like me and prefer stealth, you probably just want to slip in unnoticed and kill off good ol’ Du Casse without any fight at all – I did this during my playthrough as well and can confirm that it’s still a completely viable option, though it does mean you miss out on a pretty neat fight sequence.
One interesting note is that in the original, when you engage in this encounter against Du Casse, there’s nothing preventing you from just leaving in the middle of the fight to go catch your breath or continue exploring the island, but in this version the developers have disabled the ability to flee until the encounter is ended. It’s an interesting change, because it feels a bit weird to remove some of the freedom available in the original (removing freedom is a Templar thing, after all, and we’re assassins, dammit), but at the same time it’s a pretty small adjustment that mostly serves to up the challenge of the combat encounter and prevent the silly option to just goof around with the boss by taking off and coming back for no reason. To be honest, I doubt this change or others like it are likely to have any impact on my playthrough at all, but it does make me wonder what other things they’ve reined in as they’ve streamlined encounters and tightened up missions. Here’s hoping there aren’t any areas where they’ve made decisions like that which might take away some of the creativity and freedom offered in the original. If anything, I’d like to see them expand upon the options available to me, as they did with the Du Casse mansion examples.
Every time I’ve played Black Flag Resynced leading up to its launch, I’ve felt more heartened about this remake, and this time was certainly no exception. I look forward to diving even deeper into its deep, blue seas when it comes out next month.
Travis Northup is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @TieGuyTravis and read his games coverage here.
