Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is "definitely a remake," but its original director "couldn't feel where the original content ends and the new content begins"

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is really and truly a remake of the classic pirate adventure, but Ubisoft says it's not taking very many liberties. Resynced is seemingly being faithful to the original game rather than following Capcom or Square Enix's remake playbook.

Speaking to GamesRadar+ about where the remake sits in the series' history, Ubisoft Singapore design director Julian Koch says Black Flag Resynced "is a love letter to the original." But it's still "definitely a remake" because the team have, by and large, literally had to make most things again, from the assets to the combat and parkour.

"For the barrel, the metrics need to change because of the crouch, the new level of detail we're adding. The parkour needs to follow, we're re-doing the collision as well. The base of the gameplay is the same, all of the design, but we have more tools to play with. But it needed to be rebuilt from the ground," he explains.

Resynced's creative director Paul Fu says "it's definitely an old-school, classic Assassin's Creed." And despite most systems and assets being rebuilt for the modern era, "most of it doesn't change," according to Fu. "We simply added onto it. We asked ourselves questions like 'should there be dialogue choice?' The obvious answer would be no. 'Should it be an RPG?' No. So we kept it as an action-adventure game."

Whenever the team toyed around with implementing something entirely new that wasn't in the original, Fu says they turned to original creative director and current brand manager Jean Guesdon for advice.

"That was a guiding light for us throughout the entire project," Fu says, "especially during the conception phases. We had to create guidelines for every single department, whether it was level design or art direction, every single department had guidelines on how to keep the game authentic and sincere to its spirit."

Apparently Guesdon himself said "that he almost couldn't feel where the original content ends and the new content begins." That new content includes new scenes and quests that flesh out the swashbuckling story told in 2013.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced hands-on: "Wonderfully sailing on the edge of the series' best classic and modern entries, this feels like a statement of intent for its future"