With the Black Flag remake reportedly in the works as the worst-kept secret of all time, I have been wondering about how Ubisoft will handle it. The past few years, we’ve seen some great examples of remakes, with the most recent one being Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, which kept the original intact to the smallest detail, only “cutting” mechanics and designs that have aged less than poorly over the past couple of decades.
Black Flag isn’t that old, though, nor does it contain any design philosophies that have aged badly. It’s a run-of-the-mill third-person Assassin’s Creed game, and no matter which title in the series you fire up, you’ll tend not to notice its age, except maybe the graphics. Therefore, titles of this ilk can be easily remade, as their fundamentals are not subpar or “too old.” Put a fresh coat of paint on them, slap some quality-of-life changes, add ray tracing and voilà—you’ve successfully remade your old masterpiece and made millions once again.
But what Ubisoft is reportedly doing with Black Flag (thanks IGN) goes a step beyond just remakes or remasters. No, the company wishes to outright cut parts of the game, seemingly to make it more appealing and familiar to series newcomers, who have never experienced what it means to hop in and out of an Animus, simultaneously being in the 17th and then in the 21st century.
AC4 is one of the last games in the franchise to have that functionality, with simple but fascinating gameplay bits set in our times and within Abstergo’s HQ, where we learn of the fate of Desmond Miles, the protagonist of every single AC game prior to it.
Cutting this part of the game out and removing any modern-day content is a ludicrous idea, one that’ll actively make the game worse. I understand that AC4 is made great by its Edward Kenway, Blackbeard, and pirates, and not modern-day rummaging through Abstergo offices. Even so, I think it’s an important bit of lore and story; an interesting and fundamental part of Assassin’s Creed legacy that is entirely absent from its contemporary entries.
It’s also an infringement on the original developers’ vision and idea, a compromise of another’s art done for no good reason. Even Konami, who I never expected to remain faithful to Kojima, did not cut out any bits of the game and decided to implement full-blown, striking remakes of the most minute cutscenes and Easter eggs, which were themselves made out of cut content in the original Snake Eater.
AC4‘s modern levels are something that calls back to the days of when the series was at its peak, as I wholeheartedly believe the story of Desmond is one of the best ever told in games. It gave Abstergo, and by extension the Templars, an oppressive omniscient presence, one that, no matter what our heroes did throughout the entire history of the game’s world, never waned.
They remain the rulers of the world, owners of the biggest corporations, and we have fleeting moments of experiencing that directly and first-hand, rather than seeing them from a distance, in centuries-old iterations, where they are neither as powerful nor as controlling as they are in the modern day.
Abstergo and its Animus are characters themselves, and core parts of Assassin’s Creed lore, and cutting them out of any game, even if only those simpler, slower levels, actively makes the best Assassin’s Creed game worse and proves Ubisoft no longer believes in what made AC such an amazing overarching story in the first place.
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