THE ASSASSIN’S Creed series has been running for over 15 years, with a dozen main series games having been released between 2007 and now.
The next game in the series, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, is set to be released on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC later this year, but rumours have been swirling around another potential release.
Fans love Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, but it can be a frustrating game to play
Industry insiders and reports have suggested that a remake or remaster of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag is in the works.
Black Flag is a fan favourite game, refocusing the story on 18th century pirate Edward Kenway, who would later go on to join the assassins during the golden age of piracy.
The game introduced a number of features that would go on to become series staples, most notably naval battles, which have featured in almost every game released since Black Flag.
It’s often held up as the best game in the series, with many praising its storytelling, setting, and gameplay mechanics, so players are understandably excited for the idea of a remake.
Unfortunately, if players were to go back and play the 2013 game today, they might find it hasn’t held up particularly well in the last decade.
Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag is filled with frustrating mechanics, has poor story pacing, and despite the fan favouritism for the game, might actually be one of the most frustrating to play.
The first major issue is with its storytelling, which takes a long time to get into anything interesting and spends a lot of time on unimportant storylines.
Seeing Edward Kenway go from rough-and-tumble pirate to trained assassin should be an exciting journey, but the player barely interacts with assassins in the first half of the game.
Even when the assassins take full focus in the story about halfway through, little of note happens to progress the story, with much of the action back-ended in the last few hours of the game.
Another frustrating aspect of the game is naval combat, which is slow, unwieldy, and unfortunately mandatory.
Naval combat was actually introduced in Assassin’s Creed 3, but was an optional activity that was not required to progress through the game.
In Black Flag, however, due to the pirate theme, there are many sections in which naval combat is outright required.
On its face, that’s not quite so bad, but the game does a terrible job of telegraphing how important ship upgrades are, and when you need to be upgrading your ship.
There are certain parts of the story that require you to take down legendary ships, essentially acting as boss battles for the naval combat aspect of the game.
Prior to these boss fights, it’s actually possible to avoid most naval combat, only getting into small skirmishes here and there as you explore the Caribbean.
Because of this, if a player doesn’t care much for naval combat, they won’t collect and upgrade materials for their ship, and could end up being prevented from progressing in the story at all.
This can lead to frustrating situations where players have to spend hours grinding out smaller encounters to build up enough resources to take on the legendary ships.
The naval sections get worse too, with the introduction of ship stealth, where players have to navigate their ship within a certain distance of another ship while trailing it.
Players aren’t allowed to let their ship get too close to the ship they’re tailing, but they also can’t drift too far behind.
Often the ship players are meant to be tailing stops and starts again during the chase too, so players have to constantly be changing the speed of their unwieldy vehicle to stay within the perfect range.
The game’s follow-up, Assassin’s Creed Rogue, addressed some of these issues, making the ship a little more agile and doing away with most of the stealth sections.
It also gave new weapons for the ship, letting players mix things up a bit, and interspersed naval missions into the main story more often so players would always be ready for major battles.
If the rumoured Black Flag remake is real, it presents a good opportunity for Ubisoft to address some of these issues, and make some changes to streamline the experience.
Recent games that included naval combat, like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, had much more enjoyable seafaring, and Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones has been working on a similar type of combat for years..
It’s unlikely that Ubisoft would change the story issues in Black Flag, but they could add additional context and content that would make it more enjoyable in the first half, too.
Whether or not Ubisoft does any of these things is anyone’s guess, but if these problems persist in a remake, it’s likely that a lot of players will be giving it a pass.
Written by Oliver Brandt on behalf of GLHF.
