Assassin's Creed has slowly been peeling the modern day elements out of the series' recent games, so much so that Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is stripping the original of its Abstergo sections entirely. Why? Well, the remake's game director says Desmond's story is less of an urgent topic in 2026 than it was in 2013,.
Speaking to GamesRadar+ about the forthcoming pirate adventure, game director Richard Knight says that from the beginning of production, the team "knew we wanted to remake Black Flag," but didn't want to create a one-to-one version.
"Back then, it was very important to know what happened to Desmond's friends," he explains. "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."
Straight after Desmond's bitter finale in Assassin's Creed 3, Knight says people "really wanted to know what happened to [Desmond's] friends and Abstergo." Over a decade and a bajillion AC games later, that thread's not quite as enticing to follow. "That's not really the question that's being asked today, in the face of Shadows and Mirage and so on."
I suspect that Resynced scrubs those original modern day sections - the ones that had your iPad-wielding protagonist walking around the Abstergo offices, now posing as a game dev studio - because a lot of those storylines fizzled out or went nowhere, and would probably be very confusing for anyone who jumped into the series post-Origins.
"We knew that what we wanted to do was continue what's been starting to be told with Shadows, but we also wanted something that ties directly to the game you're playing, so something to Edward's experience," Knight explains. "What we came up with is these four rifts that you can find if you so choose, or you can choose to ignore them and just be Edward, the pirate and the assassin, and stick to that.
"They tell these 'what if' scenarios so that it still feels tied to that game, so even if you do go find this modern day experience, you're still playing Black Flag Resynced - you're still playing Edward's adventure, and you don't feel like you've taken a break for hours."
Instead, Resynced is fleshing out the swashbuckling side of the story that still makes sense divorced from the Animus, Abstergo, or Demond. "With Resynced, it's important for us to have that same spirit and flavor of Edward, to tell that same core story, just in greater fidelity," Knight adds. "I think they achieved the core of what they did with the original game, but this gives us the opportunity to add a bit more - not just to modernize it and add features that just feel more comfortable today, but also to add a little bit more content, to follow-up on a few plot lines that maybe they ran out of time for."
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