When it comes to remakes of popular games, it can be quite hard to tell when one project is going to make meaningful adjustments to capture what made the original special, or which will have aged poorly or are just being given cosmetic upgrades that don\u2019t make a replay worth it. Based on my time playing through some revised missions in Assassin\u2019s Creed Black Flag Resynced, I\u2019m feeling more confident that this second voyage on the high seas of the Caribbean will be the former. After playing through a few missions recently, I now have a better understanding of what to expect from this ambitious remake, which included narrative additions, new options for carrying out my assassinations, and other bits and baubles along the way that have increased my interest in replaying through Kenway\u2019s epic tale of pillaging and unloading flintlocks into the chests of unsuspecting lawmen.<\/p>\n
The missions I played took place during the early part of the story (specifically, during \u201cSequence 3\u201d) as Edward is still settling into his new life as a sorta, kinda assassin and full-blown pirate captain. If you\u2019ve played the original recently, you\u2019ll recall the part where you tail Julien Du Casse\u2019s Spanish galleon, before tracking him through a jungle to assassinate him. But this revised version had a variety of changes, some lesser and some greater, which did a pretty good job of showing off just how much work has been put into bringing this classic up to modern standards. These ranged from narrative additions, side quests, boss fight changes, and even the odd collectible to snap up along the way.<\/p>\n
The biggest update came in the form of tweaks aimed at making the mission more open-ended. For example, the path you take through the jungle in this version is a more scenic route that leads you to a mansion instead of straight to the ship where your quarry hides. Here you can get up to new kinds of mischief, like an optional encounter with some captured pirates you can free to help serve as muscle (or just a distraction) in your pursuit of Du Casse. Doing so causes quite a commotion, as they arm themselves and make a run at their captors and take the fight to the beach where Du Casse\u2019s ship is docked. You can join them in the fight, or use the distraction to slip past the guards and get aboard the galleon undetected more easily. This was only one small example on one short mission, but if it\u2019s indicative of the added opportunities to approach quests in your own style and are allowed to get creative, as seemed to be the case when I played a handful of hours from a different part of the game last month, then that alone could sell me on spending several dozen more hours playing through this adventure in full.<\/p>\n
There were some other, mostly cosmetic changes to the mission that I noticed along the way too, like some new lines of dialogue and story bits from the guards at the mansion, a newly refurbished interior of the mansion itself, and even a collectible portrait of none other than Du Casse himself \u2013 which will be a helpful artifact to remember him by once you\u2019ve gutted him like a fish and thrown his lifeless corpse into the salty waves. Small things like these are probably more along the lines of the standard stuff you\u2019d maybe expect to find in a more traditional remake versus this seemingly extra-as-heck evolution that Ubisoft has planned for Black Flag, but it\u2019s still nice to see little touches like this added alongside stuff like the modernized combat and massively upgraded graphics. Of course, we already know that it\u2019s not just small added lines of dialogue they\u2019ve got in store, since last week the developers shared with IGN one of the new cutscenes being added to flesh out Kenway\u2019s story.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\nAssassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced Screenshots<\/h3>\n