Amid the great teal sea of the Caribbean, where the dolphins bound beside the ship named the Jackdaw; where the sails and the rigging twang and flap in a calming rhythm; where the men carry a song on the wind, “It is time to go now, haul away your anchor”; and where there is nothing else but a horizon, I know I am home. Assassin’s Creed is returning to its series high point, and it’s made me realize how much we’ve missed from games we played 13 years ago, both technically and emotionally.
There are many ways that Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced reminds me that games today have become too bloated. Rysynced’s world is sprawling, with the same 16 x 16-kilometer map as the original Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag. However, the developers at Ubisoft Singapore (and many other Ubisoft studios besides it) have added more islands and off-the-path locations to explore on this slice of the Caribbean. You can dive practically anywhere (though only areas close to shore will have any treasure of note). And not to put too fine a point on things, but it all looks absolutely gorgeous in 4K with all the ray-traced lighting settings turned up to near max. The light reflecting off the sea alone had me floored.
And yet, Black Flag Resynced demands only 65GB from your drive. The rest of the game’s PC requirements are relatively modest by today’s standards. Publisher Ubisoft claims you’ll need an Nvidia RTX 4090 or AMD Radeon 7900XTX (both cards with quite a lot of VRAM) to play on Ultra settings with all the ray tracing options and to rely less on upscaling. I had the chance to play through nearly three hours of the game on a system with an RTX 5080, and it was full of wonderful lighting, particle, and sea effects.
While I won’t be able to tell how well the game scales for less-performant systems until closer to release, the game should also make use of the PlayStation 5 Pro’s PSSR upscaling for enhanced lighting. But the fact that I can get it on my PC without having to delete two other games is already a plus in my book. Ubisoft has not revealed if it reused any assets from the original Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag from 2013, but that game rounded up to around 30GB. For comparison, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Ubisoft’s previous game in the franchise, takes up 115GB in your dwindling drive.
And what do we get for those enormous file sizes? Assassin’s Creed Shadows was a sprawling game that beautifully realized Sengoku-era Japan like no other. Its world was suffused in light that filters down through trees, with wind that blows the dust on trails that swirl around the character’s legs. And despite that, I could not remember a single location that stood out from the rest. The major cities featured in the game, like Kyoto, are shrunken towns with no discernable character to differentiate them from any other location.
The chunk of Black Flag Resynced I played felt large, but not pointlessly so. Compared to Kyoto in Shadows, the port town of Havana feels alive, full of characters speaking in Spanish (or Spanish-inflected English). The scale allows you to traverse the town relatively quickly, but it feels dense enough to get lost among its squat alleyways and open porticos.
As memory prices continue to skyrocket, storage options are all the more expensive. There are few hobbies that demand as much from their fans as gaming does, and it’s only getting worse with time. We don’t need games that are bigger. We need games that excite us and entice us. A decade after release, the Black Flag formula isn’t less janky than it was, but it’s still doing enough to make me want to return to those turquoise waters of the Caribbean, if nothing else, just to hear my sailors sing.
Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag was the pinnacle of the series—at least in terms of telling an effective story with unique gameplay. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t full of the typical jank the series is known for. Those who think back fondly on the game may remember the highlights: the tight naval combat that felt both visceral and rewarding; the evocative sailing where you could sit back and feel your heart swell as your crew picked up a shanty; and a plot that emphasized character and the emotional growth of lead Edward Kenway from a piratical idealist into a man who could cherish both freedom and family.
You don’t remember the awkward combat sequences that eventually revolved around sitting back and waiting to perfect parries or the annoying parkour that would have Kenway leap from a two-story roof instead of the platform right in front of him. Sometimes, a game’s flaws make the title feel more distinct. I would prefer an awkward though endearing piece of art to a perfect but dull romp.
And that’s important to note, since Resynced is still full of odd moments. Once, when clambering across rooftops when the game told me to tail a Spanish captain, I inadvertently jumped down to the street below instead of a nearby tree. The captain spotted me from the other side of the plaza and alerted all nearby guards. He retreated to a fort, and I followed. I clambered along the side of the walls where there was a path I could climb. I tapped the “A” button to jump to another handhold, only for Kenway to dive into the sea below.
Combat is not necessarily better, either. It’s just different. Players have more agency with an emphasis on depleting an opponent’s stamina before being able to cut down their health bars. You also have a few other attacks that can trip up opponents or kick them off buildings and into ship rails. There’s still an option for perfect parries that will help you get one-hit kills on most enemies.
Ubisoft claims players technically have more control of Kenway this time around. You have options to “back eject” from walls. There are now zip lines around certain areas that will help you make a faster escape after you knock some character upside the head to steal their treasure. And, compared to Assassin’s Creed Shadows, enemies will indeed chase you around on rooftops, so you can’t simply slip away from a chase by climbing a shack while your enemies fruitlessly investigate the shrubs below you.
The game has more content, including three new optional officers you can recruit to your ship, each with their own unique storyline. The section I demoed allowed me to sneak onto an English warship to rescue a shipwright and convince her to join my crew.
This was an early preview version of the game, and Ubisoft still has more time to fix things prior to release. But there’s a comfort in knowing that the game isn’t adding so much bloat to what already felt like a full experience. If Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced can keep the momentum going for however many hours of runtime, I will return—if for no other reason than to hear my shipmates sing.
The game will be available July 9 for Xbox Series S/X, PlayStation 5/PS5 Pro, and PC.
