7 Reasons Why the AC Black Flag Remake Could be Amazing (and 3 Concerns)

If there was ever a consensus on Assassin’s Creed it’s this: Black Flag is the best one. It just is. Who doesn’t love swashing their buckle as a Caribbean pirate? This specific setting is key to the game’s mass appeal, one that allowed it to break containment from franchise fans and win over legions of filthy casuals determined to enjoy it as a straight up piracy simulator while begrudgingly sitting through all that dreary Templars and Assassins stuff. The ingrates.

Checkers pieces on the table: I love Assassin’s Creed religiously. Even the crap ones. And so while I’m excited about getting a new and updated version of a game so close to my heart, I’m almost nervous to even acknowledge it’s happening. It’s a daunting task to remake something so beloved, and by Ubisoft’s admission Black Flag hasn’t survived its 2026 modernisation without some pretty glaring alterations. So, based on everything we know from the recent showcase, the Reddit AMA and IGN’s own hands-on preview, here’s a bunch of stuff I’m excited about… and a few things I’m dreading like Queen Anne’s Revenge on the horizon.

You can never have too much of a good thing, right? The prospect of more Black Flag is a big draw here, with a slew of brand-spanking new quest content integrated into the original story that looks to be substantial and transformative. This isn’t an afterthought: these new sequences necessitated the return of Edward Kenway’s original actor Matt Ryan for voice and mocap duties. And frankly, any excuse to spend more time with the lovable Welsh rogue is a blessing.

The freshest of these new quests are tied to Resynced’s three original companion characters: Lucy Baldwin, “The Padre”, and Dead Man Smith, all of whom will provide certain buffs and bonuses during naval combat.

Which brings us to:

Kenway’s ride, The Jackdaw, is arguably the most important part of Black Flag. It is, after all, where you spend most of your time.

And so it’s good to see this iconic ship getting a lot of love in the remake. Not only does it look absolutely stunning with its new retina-searing textures and rigging, but its various upgrade paths have been expanded so you can spend more hours on one of Black Flag’s most compelling pastimes: putting in the work to make your ship the unsinkable, dirty-fighting beast that she’s supposed to be, ready to take on the Caribbean’s legendary boss-level ships which are confirmed to be present in the remake.

Also, you can have a cat now. Life is better with a cat.

All this talk of a bigger ensemble with more and expanded stories to tell makes the omission of Black Flag’s original DLC expansion seem all the more glaring. Freedom Cry is a substantial six-hour spin-off that documents the further adventures of Kenway’s first mate Adéwalé, now a pirate captain in his own right, and his determination to end the slave trade in and around Haiti. It came with a new city to explore, Port-au-Prince, and though it released to mixed reviews it is an important part of the Colonial Brotherhood’s story and coda to the events of Black Flag.

But real ones know that the Abstergo segments are, firstly, a vanishingly small percentage of the total experience, and secondly, vitally important to the plot, and its wider connection to the rest of the Assassin’s Creed saga which is, let’s not forget, about an ideological battle that bestrides the entirely of human history like a four-dimensional Stretch Armstrong.

I won’t spoil the particulars here but quite how the developers plan to plug the big hole this blows in the story is a source of genuine bewilderment, and their vague explanation so far has been the opposite of illuminating.

Don’t get me wrong, of course it’s possible to replace these bits with some other means of narrative delivery, or perhaps relegate them to short cutscenes. The prevailing theory right now is that there’ll be a Final Fantasy 7 Remake style meta-layer to the story that makes it a quasi-sequel as well as a do-over, that we’ll be entering the animus as a yet another observer from even further in the future.

There’s lots of ways to cut out the modern-day element, and some of them might even be clever. But that’s not Black Flag. It’s a fundamental change that glosses over the significance of where Assassin’s Creed 4 sits in the timeline, both in-universe and out. This was the first Assassin’s Creed to take us beyond Desmond’s character arc and into the ongoing ramifications of his sacrifice, as well as exploring the world beyond his narrow perspective.

It’s good that there are no plans to make the original game unavailable, so it’s not like these segments will be lost to time, but I do think that their removal from the remake is a shame and frankly, pandering to a lot of voices that don’t really have much investment in this story in the first place.



One of the first questions I had when we first heard about Black Flag Resynced was whether it would still include the Kenway’s Fleet minigame. This moreish autobattler was originally a piece of the game you could take with you in the form of a smartphone app: this sort of interconnected experience was all the rage at the time, so much so that the South Park guys saw fit to mock the trend at E3 once upon a time.