Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is a textbook remaster

There's no sign of the gleaming Abstergo Industries office that once served as the modern day framing for Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, but playing this game for the first time in 12 years feels a bit like time travel anyway. Before Ubisoft dropped Assassin's Creed's sci-fi conceit, each game was meant to be a strikingly immersive VR recreation of some past place and time, just as your character's ancestor would remember it.

Except, well, this time the ancestor is me circa 2014, and Black Flag Resynced has recreated the best Assassin's Creed just as I remember it.

My memory, it turns out, is about as accurate to the original game as Ezio Auditore da Firenze's battle with the Pope was to real 15th century Italian history. Before I sit down to play Black Flag, Ubisoft highlights everything that it's upgraded. Combat is totally reworked, with much punchier animations and perfect parries and dodges. Loading between cities and the open ocean? Gone now. Weather's dynamic, pirate-turned-assassin Edward Kenway has a crouch button, and you better believe that lighting is ray traced now.

But it still feels intimately familiar as I step aboard the Jackdaw or go parkouring across a lush island, climbing into the crook of a Y-shaped tree. The waves always looked this foamy, right? (They didn't). The sky and sea were always such a welcoming iridescent blue, weren't they? (They weren't). Edward always moved this cleanly from leap to roll to run, didn't he? (Of course not).

This is a textbook remaster: all the ways in which it's better graft cleanly onto the old bones like a top-dollar Hollywood facelift.

Anchors away

For the developers at Ubisoft, making Resynced has been less time travel, more archeology. "I like to say we feel like historians, working on this," says game director Richard Knight. "You dream about a bunch of things when you go through a remake. How do I modernize it, what kind of cool visuals and gameplay changes can I get. But the thing that always sticks with me the most is the quality of life features."

He gives a few examples. As introduced in AC Odyssey, there's now a button on the map screen to fast travel to the Jackdaw, so you don't have to spend 10 minutes swimming back to where you left the ship. There's a shanty player, so you can choose what song to ask the crew to sing. But much of the game remains either unchanged, or changed in ways consistent with the series.

"Sometimes we need to reinvent a system, like ground combat, and look back at the brand and go 'okay, what button was this feature on?' How many games had a blowdart, which one makes the most sense for us? Sometimes there are even animations from past games that we've added to combat for takedowns, where it makes sense. While other things we're like, 'nope, this works exactly as it should, and we should keep it.'"

Black Flag was the last AC I played start to finish, before Ubisoft declared them RPGs and slapped XP and skill trees onto an already stuffed open world frame. The subsequent decade of tinkering (or bloat, if we're being less generous) leaves Resynced strangely both throwback and palate cleanser. Ubisoft has only made it more like its RPG descendents in teensy ways, like an equipment screen with more outfit choices, and a dedicated button for manually raising or lowering the assassin cowl.

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"Edward's journey and the gameplay itself is always about rushing forward," says Knight. "He's an action game kind of hero who happens to also be a pirate and an assassin, so it was critical for us to keep that spirit alive and not to change it. I love some of the RPG [Assassin's Creeds] as well, but they go in a different direction, and we want to stay true to Black Flag's direction of always driving forward."

The art of a remaster, in Knight's words, is as much about capturing the emotions of the original game as the facts of it—a perfect analog for tall tales from the Golden Age of Piracy. This one's still waiting to be bettered.