I Lost My Black Flag Resynced Hype

I feel like Ubisoft is trying to trick me

Photo taken by the author.

When Black Flag Resynced had its big announcement earlier this year, I got excited. I loved the original, and Ubisoft’s tech is in a better place right now, and a modern version could clean up things about the original that needed polish.

Well, the more I see of it, the less I feel like grabbing it on day one.

As a guy who loves modern sound mixes and classic Assassin’s Creed combat, I don’t think it has enough to offer me. And its changes mean it’s now up against some of the best, more recent open-world action adventures…a standard I’m not sure it can live up to.

Beautiful Visuals, Same Old Audio?

Ubisoft wants us all to believe that they got the entire original cast into the studio to record new stuff for this game. They put out a lengthy overview video with Edward Kenway actor Matt Ryan two months ago, and he carefully dances around the topic of just how much new work he did.

Turns out, he only did a little. While the game does have new quests with new dialogue recordings…most of the game’s voiceover is still the original performances. That’s fine, in theory, but in practice I think it looks and sounds jarring. The game has lavish new graphics made on the same modern tech base as Assassin’s Creed Shadows, but it’s stitched on top of cutscene motion capture and voice work that was done nearly 15 years ago.

The new visuals look gorgeous, and I think the audio deserved the same treatment. This is an almost entirely newly made game, so as an audio nerd I’m bummed that it seems like the audio took last place in the budget. Even if they have the raw voice tracks from the original sessions, digital production has come a long way in the last decade and a half, and I’m almost certain that most of the cutscenes are going to feel off somehow without new audio. I know that it would have been expensive to get all the actors back and give them a fresh take at all the material…but it’s also expensive to rebuild every other aspect of the game. Why not go all-in?

There’s some precedent for re-using old audio in these modern remakes, most notably with the work done by Virtuos on Oblivion Remastered and Metal Gear Delta. The former beefed up everything though, with brand new combat sounds, new mixing for different environments, and hundreds of new lines done by new actors to pad out the original game’s thin cast. It hit the perfect balance of old and new and sounded almost like a new game.

In contrast, Metal Gear Delta takes an approach that’s far more like this Black Flag remake. It has tiny bits of new audio shoved in-between the old stuff. I don’t think it worked put as well.

I’m sure that not everyone will be upset about this, and again, they probably saved quite a few bucks by not bringing everyone in for mo-cap. But once you’re redoing every other aspect of the game, you might as well get some new performances in there, right?

Sound is so important for immersing gamers into these digital worlds, and the re-use of old audio here might stop Black Flag from feeling as new as it otherwise looks.

New Combat

The Assassin’s Creed franchise spent more than ten titles developing its own combat identity, only to throw it all out and start again with 2018’s Assassin’s Creed Origins. That was probably the right call as the newer games are smooth and wonderful to play, with friendly and engaging battles that have a little bit of Dark Souls sprinkled into them.

And yet, I can’t help but miss that old combat style. The earlier AC games were still action-focused, but they relied heavily on a complex animation system where you’d get “locked in” to battle with your adversaries. The original Black Flag had battles that played out like well-choreographed scenes in a movie, with balletic dodging and parrying as you seamlessly and acrobatically knocked out soldier after soldier.

Once you got the timing down for this old system, you were basically unstoppable. The game then became not about pure challenge, but rhythm and style. The newer system is more like a modern video game, with more direct control over every single move and moment, and more challenge for the player. You can develop your own playstyle that mixes ranged and melee moves instead of relying on hundreds of preset animations in a large library.

I somewhat foolishly hoped that Black Flag Resynced would attempt a modernization of the classic AC action mechanics, but instead they’ve just shoved in a variant of the combat from Shadows. I know that it’s perhaps silly to expect that they would have gone “backwards” and tried out a system that they’ve long since abandoned, but I deeply associate that combat style with this game.

There’s nothing else quite like the old Assassin’s Creed combat out there right now. Yes, it had large timing windows and could feel a little bit “canned” as you effortlessly took out all the dudes, but it just looked and felt so cool. Crimson Desert recently tried a hybrid of a modern and old “animation locked” combat style and I don’t think it worked out all that well, so maybe my dream is a silly one. But I would have loved to see them try.

The changes to Black Flag’s combat have also led to the removal of stealth-only missions, which again…just makes this a much different game. I think that’s probably a good change from an accessibility standpoint, but it now means they’re up against some of the best games to ever combine stealth and action.

Ghost of Yotei PS5 Pro screenshot captured by the author.

The Ghost of Yotei Elephant In The Room

This past Saturday I went on a walk with my girlfriend. While looking at a beautiful nature trail, I suddenly announced “hey we should play Ghost of Yotei!” We’d been meaning to tackle it together for months. I loved the original game, but I’d fallen away from the sequel after completing around a third of it due to life stuff.

We put ten hours into the game over the last two days, and it was magical. Ghost of Yotei and its predecessor have some of the best combat and open world design ever made. The action system is precise and impactful, allowing a brilliant sense of connection between each button press and movement on-screen. It’s everything that Crimson Desert isn’t, and honestly it’s also a lot better-feeling than Assassin’s Creed Shadows.

The Ghost of games are the gold standard for modern action combat, and I don’t think that Black Flag Resynced can come even close. I’m sure that, as a smaller scale project, it’s not looking to reinvent any of the designs from Shadows, but after re-immersing myself very suddenly into Yotei it’s going to be really hard for me to accept something less.

Black Flag Resynced will have access to a wider audience. Yotei is sadly trapped on PS5 forever thanks to Sony’s decision to cancel its PC port and move away from that market. Tsushima is out on PS4, PS5, and PC and feels 99% as amazing, and I’d highly recommend it if you never gave it a chance. Once you do it’ll reveal the Ubisoft system for what it is: a solid imitation built from other games.

So Much Nostalgia Bait

In spite of my intense and growing skepticism, these modern high-budget nostalgia-leeching projects are still intellectually interesting to me. Rather than just remastering or re-releasing the classics, more companies are now investing money and work to redesign significant portions of older games to try and capture newer gamers and not just ancient 40-somethings like me who are looking for a hit of the “good stuff.”

The final game has a lot to prove. I’m curious to see how they tackle putting this game back into the larger ongoing AC narrative. I’m curious to see if the gameplay can work in spite of not being designed for this world or set of missions. I’m curious to see just how badly the new audio sticks out.

I’m sure the game will get a huge pass in the critical and fan communities just for being a fun throwback, and that’s totally fine. Sometimes it’s nice to have some gaming comfort food. They’ve made so many changes here that I’m not sure how comforting it’ll actually end up being for those that deeply love the original.

The re-use of ancient audio and the recycled Shadows combat might not matter to you. But to me, they’re tiny weird signs that there’s something off at the center of Black Flag Resynced, and I’m not sure that piles of ray-traced lighting will be enough to cover it all up. Ubisoft has tried to delicately walk the line between a lower production budget and high-end appeal, and they might have missed the mark for my own tastes.