One of the major character arcs for Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag protagonist Edward Kenway revolves around him only doing things for money at the beginning, before slowly becoming more and more like a true assassin. In an interview with GamesRadar, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced game director Richard Knight has spoken about this character arc, noting that he’s “a really bad assassin.”
He went on to discuss how Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced will stick to the same arc, since not starting out with a straightforward, heroic protagonist is one of the many things that made the original Black Flag so interesting.
“He’s taking deals with Templars, he’s taking deals for money, he’s doing all these bad things to eventually become this heroic, larger-than-life character,” said Knight. “And the original game nailed that, and we don’t want to change that.”
Knight further explained that the team wants to make sure that Edward doesn’t lose his “spirit and flavor” and that his core story doesn’t see changes aside from an increase in visual fidelity and more modernized gameplay.
“It’s important for us to have that same spirit and flavor of Edward, to tell that same core story, just in greater fidelity, but in a modern gameplay experience too,” he said.
Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is being developed for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, and slated for a July 9th release. Recently, creative director Paul Fu spoke about the nature of remakes and remasters, and how, while Black Flag Resynced will have many new things, like gameplay systems and art assets created from the ground up, most of the game won’t really change.
“Most of it doesn’t change. We simply added onto it. We asked ourselves questions like ‘Should there be a dialogue choice?’ The obvious answer would be no. ‘Should it be an RPG?’ No. So we kept it as an action-adventure game.”
Design director Julian Koch spoke about some of these changes, which include the ability to crouch, which necessitates larger changes to the stealth system and level design, as well as the parkour system and collision detection for the in-game world.
“For the barrel, the metrics need to change because of the crouch, the new level of detail we’re adding,” he explained. “The parkour needs to follow; we’re redoing the collision as well. The base of the gameplay is the same, all of the design, but we have more tools to play with. But it needed to be rebuilt from the ground up.”
Among the biggest changes made in Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced over the original is the fact that it won’t include the modern-day gameplay segments that explore the story of Desmond’s crew in the aftermath of Assassin’s Creed 3. Knight had spoken about how interest in this plotline had essentially gone away in more recent times.
“Back then, it was very important to know what happened to Desmond’s friends,” he said. “But what we want to do is take Black Flag and update it and modernize it for today. So we knew we needed to change certain things – you can still play the original Black Flag – but this one, to me, is the latest Assassin’s Creed. It’s the post-Shadows AC. It’s still an authentic retelling, but it’s also a new retelling.”
