The pirate's life is brought to the modern day with Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, wherein the classic installment has been remade to contemporary standards. That includes the combat, which is now more in line with what you'd get in current action games, but it's not just a copy-and-paste from other installments in the series.
"We modernized the combat to be more hitbox-based, as modern combat games tend to be, and a little bit more reactive," Jussi Markkanen, tech director on Resynced, tells GamesRadar+. "So, Edward can still use the hidden blades, but as a takedown action in the combat, so making the combat more fluid."
The goal was always to find balance between how the original Black Flag plays and these modern expectations. After all, we're jumping back into Edward's time on the seven seas in part to revisit the past - literally and figuratively - and that includes the mechanics, even if they may feel a little disjointed now.
"We have a parry system now, so you time your parries, but it's free movement and hitbox, so it's still physically based and built on top of the fight system we had on [Assassin's Creed] Shadows," Markkanen adds. "But instead of doing what Shadows did in the skill-tree based or RPG-style fights, we went more to the action-oriented fights."
The term he uses is "reimagining," a re-molding of Black Flag's structure that keeps the flow and intent but allows for more polish. "Skill-based in a way that it's skills in your hands," he says. "How do you move? How do you position yourself? How do you use your tools that you have?"
These are all pertinent questions to any encounter when you're a roving master of open water. You'll be able to test this all out for yourself when Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced arrives on July 9.
