I liked AC IV: Black Flag, but I wish it was not an Assassin's Creed game

I had a complex experience with Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.

Last year I played through the first 5 console Assassin’s Creed games and the console port of Liberation. I liked AC1 despite its age and flaws, really enjoyed AC2, and then liked each subsequent game a little bit less until I hit the nadir of AC III, a game that has its moments and its defenders but was just a little bit too self serious for me to say I actually enjoyed it; especially when you throw in the modern parts (which I think are a weakness throughout the first part of the series.) At that point I was unsurprisingly burned out on Assassin’s Creed games and I decided to take a short break from the series, maybe a month or two at most.

Cut to January of this year and I finally decide to play Assassin’s Creed IV. Popular Youtuber Videogamedunkey has made a video detailing the game’s slow start, full of boring trailing missions and present day stuff (if you’ve ever wanted to play a virtual version of being onboarded to a new job by a chipper but phony superior then this is the game for you!) and he’s not wrong, but I still found the game entertaining enough and I could see why many consider it the high point of the series and one of the best pirate games ever made. I started settling in to the game after the intro, exploring the various islands and collecting things in the open world, including the sea shanties that probably introduced a lot of young people to the art form and helped spark last year’s viral sea shanty Tiktok, and more boring things like the animus fragments that have never served any worthwhile purpose in any Assassin’s Creed game.

Black Flag does a lot of things well. It has a pleasant tropical setting that’s very different from that of the prior games in the series (except Liberation, though that had tiny environments), it refines a lot of the mechanics that the previous games had and is probably the smoothest playing of the early Assassin’s Creed games, and it greatly expands the ship combat from Assassin’s Creed III to make one of the better pirate ship raiding mechanics ever made. Ship combat is still pretty shallow, pun intended, but there are enough tactical options and upgrades to make it entertaining, and there’s a real empowerment factor to sailing main character Edward Kenway’s ship, called the Jackdaw, around the sea, looking for targets to attack and raid. You can even capture ships and create a whole pirate fleet that you can use to play a trading minigame and earn money. Sea combat is considered the highlight of the game, and for good reason.

The land parts of Assassin’s Creed IV are more traditional Assassin’s Creed for better or for worse. Swordplay, which is also used during ship raids, is still the shallow counter-based combat that the series has only moderately tweaked and improved from the first game. Climbing is the same “hold right trigger and point at wall” method used since AC II, but while it worked in that game’s built up vertical cities it’s just not well suited to the much smaller and less built up maps of Black Flag. There are a fair number of cities and settlements in Black Flag and some of them are relatively large, but they lack the huge towers and buildings that the first couple games had. It seems like the Assassin’s Creed games have gotten progressively more horizontal over time, until they arrived at the natural conclusion of Assassin’s Creed IV where most of the world is just flat open sea, and the rest consists of island wilderness and towns with one to three story buildings. The climbing mechanics don’t really match well with these maps and climbing to synchronization points is often especially boring since they’re often on single large structures with ladders or just rings of handholds and involve no finding of a path or careful jumps or anything. I think back to the giant towers of AC II or the challenge areas of AC Brotherhood and Revelations and it just seems like the map design evolved but the game play did not. It’s not that the climbing is terrible it just often feels vestigial, and something more active or interesting might have worked in these less vertical maps.

If the map design in Assassin’s Creed has changed the mission design, outside the naval engagements, have not. Sailing and running around in Black Flag is a lot of fun, but most of the story missions just grind things to a halt. It’s partially my fault for playing so much Assassin’s Creed recently and kind of burning out on the series, but damn am I sick of Assassin’s Creed mission design at this point. It’s not just the famously awful trailing missions and eavesdropping stuff at this point. It’s pretty much everything. Assassin’s Creed used to try to mix things up at least somewhat, such as with the Leonardo’s Machines missions in Brotherhood or the Borgia Towers, which I loved, but AC IV doesn’t do any of that. There’s just so many missions where you sneak into an area, spot someone, trail them to some random location and kill them there. Or you have to sneak into some fort and become anonymous to interact with some random item. Or you just follow someone from the rooftops. It’s beyond played out, and while the naval missions can be better, and there are a few missions that change things up at least a little, I have to say that AC IV is at its worst when you’re trying to advance the plot and actually follow the game’s path instead of plundering booty on the high seas.

I need to talk about the game’s stealth now. I am not a huge fan of stealth games, though there are some that I enjoy, and Assassin’s Creed stealth in particular is just bad and boring. Guards basically either walk back and forth on short mechanical routes or they just stand in one place staring at something, sometimes another guard. You can be pretty easily spotted and it seems somewhat inconsistent when they can see you, especially if you’re above or below them. Sometimes guards will respond to you passing into the open from cover for a brief moment and sometimes they’ll ignore a giant sword fight taking place obviously within ear shot. It’s kind of a mess. But AC IV compounds the messiness of the stealth with two issues. The first is shoehorning stealth into everything, including having multiple ship stealth missions (one that takes place in a swamp is particularly horrible) and making diving sections about stealthing past sharks, which doesn’t even make any sense because sharks don’t hunt primarily with their eyes, and turns those segments into awful slogs. The second is instant failing missions if you are discovered. Instant failing in stealth games and it is just the worst. There’s nothing fun about it. In some missions in AC IV you are supposed to use stealth but you are given the option of fighting your way out of a tough spot, or escaping to regroup, and those missions tend to be mostly fine and not particularly frustrating because fighting or escaping in AC IV aren’t too challenging and are mostly viable options. In other missions you only fail if an alarm is raised, which is more annoying but at least gives you a chance to prevent it by sabotaging the alarm ahead of time or shooting the guy who is trying to ring the bell. Then there are a lot of missions where you immediately fail when spotted, and often getting spotted feels random or unfair, and I hated it. In general there are too many missions in AC IV that demand you play a certain way, or restrict you unfairly. In AC IV you have to be “anonymous” to interact with stuff, which means that no guard can be looking for you at the time. This makes sense for some interactions, such as when you have to talk to someone, but makes zero sense when what you’re trying to do is swipe a piece of paper or slash the ringer out of a bell, and is frustrating as heck. Assassin’s Creed IV so often seems to want to keep the player from having fun and playing their own way with these instant fail missions based on faulty stealth mechanics that I sometimes wonder if certain game designers actively despise the player base. Or maybe they think that trailing and escort missions are fun because they’ve never actually touched a video game? I don’t know. It’s not about realism because in many (but not all) assassination missions in AC IV you can kill your target when they are in a large group and then don’t even have to escape the area, you’re just magically transported to the next cut scene somewhere else. In some missions you instantly fail the mission if you assassinate the target before the game wants you too, generally because "you got spotted" even if there was nobody around, but once you are given the green light and assassinate them you get spotted anyway, so it just feels like the designers throwing a temper tantrum that you didn't play the game like they wanted you to. It feels like bad legacy design that should have been jettisoned before the sixth mainline game in the series.

The story of AC IV is also kind of a bummer. Edward Kenway is an appealing enough lead, though it seemed an odd choice to make a game about debauched pirates and saddle the player with a lead who is kind of tortured by his loyalty to his wife back home even though he only thinks about her sporadically, and there are a couple other memorable characters in the form of Adewale, your freed slave quartermaster, Blackbeard, and Mary Read, a pair of infamous historical pirates, but the cast in general is nowhere near as compelling as that of prior games. There’s no villain with the depth of Haytham, or even the Borgias, no companion as fun as Leonardo, and nobody you feel as bonded to as Mario Auditore. You meet a lot of historical figures but they seem more like a checklist than actual characters, and it’s a step back from AC III. The actual plot is not good. It’s trying to be both a pirate story and a story about Assassin’s and Templars and in trying to do both it does neither well. Most of the time, at least mid game, is spent on pirate stuff like the fate of Nassau and the various historical pirates, but the actual focus of Edward’s story is on the Assassins and templars, even though Edward isn’t an Assassin (he just finds some gear) and doesn’t really care about them, being much more into the whole pirating thing and getting rich. It’s a muddled mess and it’s supposed to show character development as Edward learns what really matters in life, but it just ends up being confused about what story it’s telling. The cut scenes themselves aren’t bad because Edward is charming, but the events are boring and they replay beats from prior games.

It also has that famously silly Assassin’s Creed morality. At one point you assault an ancient site guarded by indigenous people (the game’s only nod to the genocide underlying everything else in the game.) You’re incentivized with more synchronization for knocking out the indigenous guardians instead of killing them but you can’t sneak past them, you need to clear them all out, for some dumb reason, even though this is a stealth game. Later on you return to the site and this time it’s been assaulted by a large force and there’s been a massacre. This is apparently supposed to build up the villains as evil, but Edward is basically retracing his own actions just a few months earlier (or hours in real time) and the game seems not to understand or care about this at all. It’s this kind of utterly self-unaware un-nuanced approach to history that undermines storytelling in Assassin’s Creed. Everyone’s awful, the game seems not to understand that everyone’s awful, and there’s a huge schism between the game’s morality and actual, good morality. It’s not quite the quippy murder problem of Uncharted, because nobody’s really quippy in Assassin’s Creed, but it’s the treating of morality as yet another Ubisoft checklist item. Show you’re the good guy because sometimes you don’t kill people even though you kill a ton of people including innocent sailors on merchant vessels over the course of the game. Show the bad guys are bad because when they kill people there’s a lot of smoke and more blood on the ground near the bodies. Check that off, and move on.

If all the story stuff is bad, and it is, at least the out of Animus stuff is thankfully brief and not too intrusive. In this game your 'real world' person has been hired by a slick but shadowy entertainment company so they can explore your memories to use in a new VR entertainment product, though it's obviously a front for the Templars searching for information about the Assassins. I didn’t enjoy walking around Abstergo Entertainment in first person holding a laptop and talking to intentionally inane and disingenuous characters but there’s not too much of it, stuff actually does happen, and there’s a decent payoff at the end of the sequence. The hacking minigames are bad and the material that you uncover is way too wordy and not very interesting but it can be safely ignored, and does include some decent easter eggs for anyone who actually cared about Desmond and the prior real world Assassin’s Creed mythology. And the offices are pretty. Would the game be better without it? I think so. It doesn’t add much and I didn’t miss real world stuff in Liberation. Is it a huge detriment to this particular game? Not really. It took me about 24 hours to make my way through the story and probably 1-2 of that was spent in the “real world” environment, and it could have been less if I’d ignored optional stuff.

But even though the real world material isn’t game ruining for Black Flag, almost every detriment the game has is tied to its being an Assassin’s Creed game. The fact that the gameplay systems aren’t necessarily suited to the maps but rather tied to different kinds of environments. The stale stealth and infuriating instant fails. The shoehorning of stealth into every aspect of the game including exploration of underwater shipwrecks. The unfocused story. Many consider this to be the greatest pirate game ever made, but it can’t commit to being a pirate game because it has to be an Assassin’s Creed game instead. It has cool pirate stuff like treasure maps but mixes that in with stuff that doesn’t really fit, like land-based assassinations. Imagining a version of the game that really fleshed out the pirate parts, with even better ship mechanics and crew recruitment and a true pirate story made me resent the Assassin’s Creed parts. I played Ghost of Tsushima last year, and playing a game that was fully able to commit to its semi-historical Japanese setting and characters, and tailor its gameplay to the environment, made me realize that Assassin’s Creed is just a fast food gaming franchise. It mixes and matches the ingredients it already has on hand to make “new” experiences, but fundamentally they’re all the same and while some versions are better than others it’s easy to get sick of them after a while, just like eating different menu items with the same 10 ingredients at Burger King. I realize they did change this substantially with Origins, but I have 3 more mainline games and 3 Chronicles games to play through before I get there, and none are as well regarded as Black Flag. I don’t know if I’m going to make it.

And I didn’t make it through Black Flag. At least not in one go. At the beginning of this blog I wrote about how I started playing it in January, but you may notice it’s April now. I burned out on the game after like 6 hours and put it away for 3 months. I came back to it this month because I turned on my Xbox and didn’t feel like playing anything so I just turned on this game because I thought I might as well make progress in this unfinished part of my backlog. I was on some dumb mission where you rob a warehouse through bad stealth and get far too little materials to actually use for upgrades (a balance issue throughout the game, which eventually wears out even the good ship combat by making you do so much of it.) For some reason the second time around the game did get its hooks in me and even though I cursed parts of it and yelled “how is this supposed to be fun?” at the screen several times, I did make my way to the end. But the good parts of Black Flag, and there are enough good parts to make me say that I ultimately did like the game, are mixed in with a lot of bad stuff, and that bad stuff is all imported from the larger franchise. Dunkey is right. Assassin’s Creed is too often afraid of letting the player actually have fun. Even when they’re supposed to be a pirate. There’s a character in Black Flag who says his philosophy is to have a short life, but a merry one. Ubisoft clearly doesn’t believe this motto. It would rather make a long game full of cruft and legacy systems than a short and focused one that emphasizes fun.

This is one of the very few AC games that I didn't beat! I remember liking it well enough but, yes, it just got to be a Bit Much after the 30th hour or so.

As someone who has played every Assassin's Creed except for IV, Unity, Odyssey, and Valhalla, I have to say, it's the mission structure that tires me, every time.

Personally, 1 is my favorite, and when everyone back in 2009 said 2 was such an improvement, I was really jazzed! And then I actually played it and realized they hadn't actually fixed the problems, they had just built up more fluff around the trailing missions so you didn't have to engage with them as often. And as much as AC has "changed," as late as Origins, I'm still having a blast exploring the world and then having no fun at all when a story mission starts. "Oh look, let's slowly follow this guy through the streets as he talks to us. Oh no, a fight! And back to following this character." Ad infinitum.

@rorie: I think my final playtime was just shy of 24 hours. I guess @lapsariangiraff and @imunbeatable80 are right, I do an unusually small amount of the side stuff. I am feeling like the odd person out.

Don't worry, as far as I can tell you never get to unlock any puppy-themed sails or ship figureheads. If they wanted people to finish the game they should have added proper incentives. Like a carving of a golden retriever you could mount on your prow, or some pettable office dogs in the modern day segments. Why even have modern day segments if you're not going to put in pettable office dogs? Everyone knows that nothing complements a few hours on the high seas chasing the ships of some very bad men like a couple minutes back in an office rubbing the heads of some very good boys. That's game design 101.

@lapsariangiraff: Assassin's Creed 1 appeals to a very specific breed of gamer and I am unsurprised that you are of that breed. I liked the game when I played it last year, don't get me wrong, but for me 2 was a big improvement. I think the maps were better, the characters much more compelling, and the controls were refined. There's a purity to AC 1, though, that the series never matched again. It has an efficiency and an austerity that creates, as the kids say, a whole mood.

I almost admire the AC teams for their commitment to the bit when it comes to all the horrible mission types that they endlessly repeat. Open world games were still evolving rapidly when AC 1 came out, only like half a decade after GTA III, and it was still an experimental time. But things evolved and by the time you get to something like Black Flag you've already had games like Red Dead Redemption, Infamous 2 and Saints Row 3 that really stretched what an open world could be like and what you could do in it.

Did the AC team try to incorporate this knowledge and these design advances into their story missions? No! They were like "everyone says they hate the trailing missions but we know they secretly love them so let's make a whole bunch only this time the towns are much smaller so the roof tops are less interesting. Teehee." And then they added ship-based trailing missions to the mix.

Absolute legends.

@bigsocrates: oh man.. im getting mentioned on other articles now, i have truly arrived!

There is nothing wrong with only do a small amount of side stuff, you might actually be doing things correctly, because i remember playing this game when it came out (well before "whats the g") and i ended up putting it down because i felt everything was too easy (dont know if there is a diff slider, will check when i play for the series). I loved ship combat and would basically spend hours just crushing every ship i came across until i had a whole fleet and like max resources, but then the luster fell off because i didn't really feel engaged in the story and other side stuff was less interesting.

I think most of the AC games (and ubisoft open worlds) suffer from extreme bloat. Its almost like they read somewhere that the longer it takes to 100% a game, the better it is, so they just threw garbage around the whole map to stretch out playtime. Sadly it doesnt work, and like you, i think 2 was their best attempt at making AC enjoyable all the way through.

@imunbeatable80: Hey, man. There I was just innocently trying to talk about how context matters for games like Zelda and you were all like "what? you DIDN'T burn every bush in Zelda as a 6 year old? Listen to you, man, you sound like a total n00b. Give me your gamer card, I'm ripping it up!"

That stings. It stings like a 10 hour train ride with only a copy of Mahjong Huntress to keep you company.

All the Assassin's Creed games tend to be easy except for the insta-fail stealth missions where they're infuriating and boring (there's probably where my impatience is a real weakness because instead of methodically killing everyone I try to run past and get spotted and sent back to the beginning of the mission, like a kid whose parents catch him trying to sneak out after curfew.)

I think pretty much everyone feels like the ship parts were the best in this game. I do, except for the ship stealth (and even there I'm really thinking of a couple specific missions.) I wish they'd gotten rid of other stuff and really fleshed those systems out, with ideas like specific crewmen you could recruit who would have special bonuses like being better at canon fire or stronger in boarding and whatever, more upgrades and customization, and a more robust trading system than just getting rum and sugar to sell (give me multiple resources I can trade at different ports for profit and the like...games have been doing that stuff since the 90s at least.)

Ubisoft are the kings of bloat, but fortunately they figured out an incredible mechanical innovation in the later games that solved the problem. You can just pay to get XP and money accelerators and skip parts of the game you purchased. Don't you love modern gaming where you get to buy the game and THEN pay for the privilege of not playing the boring parts?

Imagine if you could have spent $5 to buy an in game marker for all the burnable bushes in Zelda. It would have made #1 greatest game of all time for sure!

@bigsocrates: honestly i would have considered buying that $5 map..

I really like your idea about the boat upgrade path, and you are right games like port royale and sid's pirates have done more with trading then just one bulk resource. Its weird that they made such a big ocean world and then crammed most of the activities on land.

As for side quests.. im not saying my way is right, quite the opposite, but its hard wired in my brain and i cant fix it.. your way allows you to get through a lot more games then i do in a month/year.

@imunbeatable80: It's not because nobody buys them that they keep offering cheats and maps for real life money. It's just a garbage practice whereby they artificially create scarcity or other issues and then sell you a way to escape the problem they created and I hate it and would never buy it on principle.

The whole point of my longwinded blog was that this game wasn't really developed as the best pirate game it could be. It was too committed to being an Assassin's Creed game, and the marriage between the two parts is pretty rocky.

If they'd spent the time they spent they put into having you walk around an office on pirate stuff like deeper ship customization/combat and some real trading options the game would have been much better, but it's part of the AC franchise so it needs real world hooks. Same with their focus on stealth, and on parkour in a game where most of the maps don't make great use of it.

My brain is pretty hard wired to the way I play too. If I don't have to do something and I'm not enjoying it I'll just skip it. I just get absolutely nothing out of doing side content that's not compelling for me and I feel like I'm wasting my time. If there's some story hook or some cool reward like a new ability you get for completing it that's different, but it has to be compelling. If it's like "Well if you do all these boring shipwreck missions you get plans to upgrade your ship in ways you don't really need because the game's not that hard" I absolutely cannot bring myself to do it.

The flipside of this is that once I roll credits on a game I'm generally done with it, even if there's good side content left. It's not 100% true, and some cool DLC can definitely bring me back, especially if it's either not connected to the main story or is an epilogue, but I rarely pick a game back up again after I've seen the ending.

I've already defeated the evil boss or whatever so what's the point in trying to power my character up or get more currency?

This is a great read, thank you! I completed the first AC game, then dropped off until this one. Gameplay time-wise I played it longer than the first one but had a hard drop off it when a sneaking mission defeated me so many times I just gave up. Often wonder if I should ever go back to it as I did like the ships (at the time), maybe I should finally try AC Rogue.

@stantongrouse: Rogue is very good.

I always liked the present day parts of Assassin's Creed. It's still strange to me that they're so unpopular. I guess people just want to get back to the game.

These screenshots with the captions reminded me of gaming magazines so much that I could smell the paper. I haven't seen that kind of thing in a long time.

I remember the best parts of AC IV being like a less cartoony version of Sid Meier's Pirates! - you just troll along the high seas pillaging everything in sight with a combat system that is just complex enough to get you to think while maintaining a visual style that lets you fulfill all your pirate-movie fantasies. On the other hand, the worst parts of ACIV are basically the worst parts of the Assassin's Creed games - terrible stealth, terrible platforming, lousy story, etc.

@eccentrix said:

I really divide the games into two camps on this one. First are the games where the modern day stuff is kind of set-dressing for everything else and exists largely in the background. I put ACI and the ACIV-Unity sequence into this camp. It's there, but it's mostly used as a change of pace from the main narrative and it isn't asking to be the center of attention.

Where the series runs into trouble is when it demands that the modern day stuff be shoved in your face constantly, which was ACIII and the newer RPG based games. This doesn't work because while Ubi is capable of writing good characters, they seem incapable of identifying which ones are actually good. AC: Origins is a perfect example. Bayek is a really likeable, sympathetic character. The modern-day Layla is the most unlikeable, focused-grouped, written-by-committee character on Earth. I cared about Bayek. I didn't care about Layla. But the game is constantly treating her and what she's doing like I should care.

@therealturk: There definitely is that divide. It also probably helps to identify why I enjoy the present day stuff. I care about the story more than most people playing AC games, like the overall story with the gods and the Pieces of Eden and the Sage and stuff. Having that connection to what's happening in the past and context for why is really important to me for these games. When there's not as much, like in Black Flag where you're just some employee, it's not as interesting.

@eccentrix: I always enjoyed the potential of the real world stuff in Assassin's Creed more than what actually happened. At least in 1 I could daydream about what cool stuff could come next rather than what really did. After that, it got roooough.

In isolation, I really like the real world missions in III, but the story they were telling with them were just gobbledygook.

@stantongrouse: Thanks for the nice words!

It depends on why you would want to go back. The ship stuff doesn't evolve much (assuming you got deep enough to unlock all the mechanics) and I don't think the story is any great shakes. On the other hand I do think that the worst missions in the game are in the middle, so you might find that if you pushed through the one you got stuck on you'd be over the hump, though that depends on what mission you're talking about, of course.

@eccentrix: I have a lot of issues with the modern day stuff in Assassin's Creed. For one, the stories are often bad and incoherent and the gameplay is also generally bad and they feel like filler in a game that's already got enough goddamned filler. In Revelations, for example, it's a first person 3D platformer. You can skip it but...why? Why does Assassin's Creed need a first person 3D platformer bolted on to it?

In AC IV:

This is a bad version of Frogger and there's no reason to shove it into a pirate game. It just interrupts the flow and it's not good, with annoying characters (I hope Shaun dies at some point) and not a lot there. AC IV does pay it off in the end, but like...I'm playing a pirate game. I don't want to take an elevator down to the lobby to hand off a data stick to a guy I loathe from previous games before I can go back to the piracy. One of the activities is literally picking up post it notes scattered over the office.

@therealturk: Ubisoft is not one entity, of course, and these games are made by a bunch of studios. I don't know the exact division of labor, but I'd bet the modern day stuff and the Animus stuff are often made by separate teams. There's a director overseeing it all, of course, and I'm sure the scripts are either written as a unit and merged, but I think the disparity in quality might relate to how spread out and huge these teams are.

@bigsocrates: Great read!

I also have gone on a giant classic AC Adventure over the last year and have drawn similar conclusions.

Its kind of funny that my feelings years later almost matched my initial assessment as a a younger man.

I hit an unbelievable high playing AC2 (With the exception of the Bonfire of the Vanities which is now mandatory with the remaster) and I was very excited to play Brotherhood, my remembered peak only to find that while the gameplay was at its peak, everything else was starting to wear out its welcome all the way down to AC3 which I just find to be joyless despite having so much I should be eating right up.

On to Blackflag - I've tried to play this game so many times. I got it for PS3... I borrowed a friends copy for PS4 years later - and most recently I've finally beaten it on the Nintendo Switch on many of my long work trips away from home.

I cant think of a better way to say it then how you've already described it but the worst parts of Black Flag are the parts where its an Assassin's Creed Game and man does this game double down on the horrible 'stealth' action. And this is coming from a passionate Splinter Cell fan (not to suggest Black Flag's rote stealth sequences have anything to do with classic Splinter Cell).

Despite all this time spent trying to play Black Flag I never once got tired of sailing, upgrading my ship and blowing things up with my ship. Its just a damn shame you spend so little time doing any of that.

@junkerman: Thanks for the read. Your consistent opinion (which happens to match mine) just shows that even in your youth you were a man of sophistication and keen perception.

Brotherhood does have great gameplay, but it really drains a lot of the pep and enthusiasm from Ezio in order to build up "stakes" and I don't know why everyone loves that Rome map when I think it's way less interesting than the cities in AC 2. You're right that AC III is joyless. People defend it by saying that it's some kind of subtle writing given Connor's background but Haytham is if anything even more joyless (to the point where his having a child seems totally out of left field) and Desmond's parts mostly take place in this dark dank temple, so I really don't think that's it.

I'm glad you finally got through Black Flag. That's a lot of attempts.

Speaking of attempts, I don't really understand how the developers have made so many stealth games but still can't make good stealth play, but they got ship combat so right immediately in AC III and then AC IV. At this point they'd released 6 games in the series! Why was the stealth still not as good as something like Splinter Cell?

@bigsocrates: Thats a good point about the stealth gameplay. Black Flag really doubled down on those instant fail mission consequences if you're spotted too. If I was too far from a check point my bravery (Or tolerance for frustration?) would decrease dramatically and I spent most of that game hunched in bushes breathing Covid darts at people while waiting for them to kill each other off.

Real exciting gameplay.

When the original AC was getting publicity I remember them pushing really hard on how that game had "social stealth" - very exciting for the times with their large crowd tech. Like a lot of things in Assassin's Creed 1 I felt like it was an amazing Pitch for a new genre of game to be further fleshed out in future iterations... opinions may vary on the other components but the stealth hasnt grown at all in a decade, I'd argue it "peaked" with 2!

Its amazing. Social Stealth, its one unique thing, is pretty much an afterthought now - at least as far as I'm concerned. These days I just move like a violent freight train from cutscene to cutscene and that seems like the best way to play them.

I havent played Unity yet. I picked it up in a bargain bin long ago and have been interested to check it out now that its been Patched (I hope.).

I feel like Black Flag has a real great gameplay loop in there somewhere. A customizable ship crewed with more lovable characters to meet and visit with; and unique and exciting upgrades scattered about a varied and artistically appealing world to sail across. Like Sunless Sea!

@junkerman: I recently tried to go back to unity and despite all the post release patches to to this point (at least on a ps4pro), Unity is still incredibly rough to the point that I gave up on a recent attempt to play through it again.

Big ups on the Sunless Sea plug, I'm eagerly awaiting the console release of sunless sky

@junkerman: Assassin's Creed 1 was a game with some real vision behind it, even if the tech at the time and some of the clunky design choices meant that it wasn't a perfectly executed vision. At least in that game the repetition kind of made sense because you were gathering intel to try and assassinate the enemies and the assassination missions themselves were pretty well designed. AC 2 took the series in another direction (making it less distinct but more accessible and giving it more personality) but after that it just stagnated. I kind of wish that they'd make a new AC styled after AC 1 with modern tech and design implementations. The game has gone far away from that model to the point where it's not really even a stealth series at this point, but maybe a remake? There was just so much that was cool about AC 1 but couldn't be fully realized at the time.

Ubisoft had the idea for a full game based on Black Flag in Skull & Bones but then they decided that instead of making that game (A sort of Immortal: Fenyx Rising one off) they should make some sort of multiplayer focused "Sea of Thieves, but very sooper serious you guys) game and now it's in development hell.

@intradictus: Thanks for the warning on AC Unity, which I'm going to start soon. I'll see how long it takes me to push through.

@intradictus:Thats a real bummer on Unity! I was looking forward to it. LOVE Sunless Sea and I'm eagerly awaiting the Switch Port of Sky. I dabbled with Sky when it first came out but decided to hold off until the Updates were out and its controls seemed much more Console Friendly. Perfect for when I'm away on the road for work.

@bigsocrates: Totally in agreement. A remake of AC1 just sort of makes sense at this point... except I doubt they care to cater to the small crowd of us. I play all the new AC games (Considering they go on sale for 80% months after launch) but cant say I enjoy them too much outside of the first 10 hours. They're just so bloated and dont even really feel completed until years later.

A lot of the creative talent behind AC1 have moved on I'm pretty sure at this point. Jade Raymond's interviews during AC1 development seemed very passionate and of a certain creative vision anyway. I remember one where she was discussing the challenges of essentially having to write everything from scratch and having no railing to lean on to solve problems arriving in development since no one else had really built a game like that before... all that work to see it completely headed off in another direction and never look back.

Random aside: The Egypt Setting of Origins really worked for me and coincided with me nerding out over ancient masonry and architecture in a way Odyssey and Valhalla dont come close. Also the way the damn longboat bounces along on the waves like my kids tiny plastic boats in the inflatable pool filled me with much chagrin. Human history is cool - I want more of it... uh through the funnel of pointed hoods and stabbing I guess!

A world where Black Flag was a sequel to Sid Meier's Pirates! would be a much better one, IMO.