Black Flag Resynced Creative Director Say They Had A Book Of Things They Absolutely Couldn't Change From The Original Assassin's Creed IV

Given the popularity of Assassin's Creed IV, Ubisoft had to make sure their remake Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced kept as much of the charm of the original as possible- a decision so important they made sure to write it down. 

Creative Director Paul Fu explained that, having worked on both the original Black Flag and now Resynced, there were parts of the game that simply couldn't be changed. That's not to say it's a 1:1 remake, though- there's still plenty big and small that the game does change. 

"I think for the most part we kept what we wanted from the game— almost all of it, I would say, except for the modern day, because we had to modernize the modern day in a similar vein to Shadows", Paul says. "But what happened in the beginning year, the first year of the project, was that I reviewed the original game again after so many years, and I made this hundred-page document with detailed notes on all the missions—things that I would change, things that I would not change. And honestly, we really didn't change; we added upon most of it because as a team, we really liked John and Darby's stories from the original. So we kept it as faithful as we could while expanding on the lore of Black Flag".

Part of this love meant not changing the core story. If fans both playing and working on the game wanted a Black Flag remake, this wasn't the time to suddenly send Edward Kenway into space or something. 

"I would say it was quite easy for us to decide that we didn't want to change the story because, for us, personally for me, I love Edward Kenway", Paul says. "The fact that he threw away the hidden blade and the words that he spoke to his wife, Caroline, in the flashback of the first mission were very moving to me. And I think a lot of fans feel for his story and his growth, so we didn't want to touch the main story; that was like precious to us".

But given Resynced isn't simply a 1:1 redux of the game, the team was still adding content. So how do they do that without shifting the direction of the original Black Flag? 

"What we did was to expand on it. So we had this certain philosophy where we knew the core themes of the original Black Flag were about a pirate's growth, freedom, liberty, his chase for gold versus his love for his family and friend", Paul says. 

"So for each of the new characters that we added to Resynced, we tried to build on those existing pillars of his greed, his love for his friends—there's always a bit polarizing because he has to sometimes make that choice. And that worked its way into the stories that we added for Resynced", he explains.

According to Paul, the team was enraptured by the original game's cinematic feel. Despite adding new content, he says that the core ideas from the original absolutely had to be maintained. 

"So one of the things that we realized that the original did very well was the cinematic direction. I had a lot of discussions with John and Darby back in the day, and I still remember some of these discussions", Paul explains. "I met John again to validate the cinematic direction from Black Flag, and to sum it up, John's vision for Black Flag was that he didn't want two characters standing in place talking to each other like RPG games. So he wanted characters to be able to move around".

"If you remember in the first mission of the game, Stede would open the box to see if Edward touched anything. Little things like that give a certain "show, don't tell" format to the story, which made Black Flag very charming and more engaging to watch. So we made sure we kept that as much as possible, even with the new content", Paul explains. "And in addition, because this content is more than ten years old by now, we actually had to hand-key a lot of the facial animations in Resynced to make sure that it matches up to the fidelity of modern games".

"[New players can] expect a really moving story because I was honestly super moved when I played it 13 years ago", he shares.  "I still feel pretty moved by it when I watch the cutscenes. And as I mentioned before, we really wanted to keep that theme, that strong narrative-driven direction of the original Black Flag in the game, and I really hope that fans will love it. It's very different from the modern ACs, and yeah, I can't be more proud that we are working on this project here in Singapore".

Under The Hood Of The Pirate Assassin

Paul did actually share some of what goes on under the hood in these games- particularly comparing the game's E3 demo to the work they've done in Resynced:

So with modern tech also comes certain restrictions. If you have played the latest AC RPGs, they are very open-world focused; the world is vast, there's dialogue choice, there's a lot of freedom and autonomy. 

However, the old-school Assassin's Creed games are quite different. We had what we call "linear gameplay sequences," and an example would be the E3 demo where the player goes on a more or less straight path, but it's an extremely scripted heavy experience. So the amount of scripted events and dialogue lines or explosions per minute is very dense compared to the modern ACs. 

That [style] is more of the signature of the older Assassin's Creed games, which, when we go back to look at the original Black Flag, we realize that it's something that brought a lot of value to the old games. And it's still surprising how much it holds up today. Personally, I also worked on the AC demo, and to recreate the same E3 demo with a few additional takes was really not easy in the modern engine. We lost a lot of tools over the years, and we had to recreate those tools for ground, for naval, for underwater, from scratch
 

While you may think that the comment about rebuilding naval tools from scratch is weird in a post-Skull-and-Bones world, Paul explained that from an iterative perspective, Black Flag Resynced was much further off from Skull and Bones than you'd expect. 

"So I worked on the naval gameplay and ocean tech from Assassin's Creed III with a bunch of my colleagues. At the time, there was no naval gameplay, so we had to essentially build everything from scratch, including the buoyancy spheres that make a ship float. Many generations later—after that, there was Black Flag, and after Black Flag, a few years later, there was Skull and Bones. But it was a branch from the code; the branch was from AC Valhalla, actually", Paul says.

"So when you think about Resynced, the branch is actually from Shadows, which means the tech that we have on Resynced and the tech that we have on Skull and Bones is vastly different. So we are technically closer to Shadows than we are to Skull and Bones. That's from a tech point of view. But from a creative point of view, the inspiration that we drew from for Resynced is essentially Black Flag and AC III, but mostly Black Flag", he adds.

"So, if you have played Skull and Bones, you will notice that the aiming is [360 degrees], there's a railing that goes around—an invisible railing for the camera. But in Resynced, we have quadrant-based aiming, which is the same as Black Flag", Paul explains. 

"We actively chose to keep that from the original to make sure it's authentic. There are blind spots on the diagonals which force the player to turn, and that's a unique signature of the Black Flag naval gameplay, which is why we chose to keep it. So long story short, the branch that we have is closer to Shadows, and the gameplay, creatively speaking, is inspired by Black Flag itself".

It's always nice to have the guts of a game explained in detail like that, especially from people passionate about the games they work on. With Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced launching July 10th, it'll be an interesting chance to see older fans introduced to a new spin on a classic in Ubisoft's long-running historic stealth series, while new fans possibly check out one of the first major big shakeups of the series formula.