Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced proves open-world games were already the perfect size 13 years ago

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced has been a massive (and much-needed) success for Ubisoft, even if that hasn't stopped the publisher from laying off a number of its devs. Looking at the player reactions, it's evident longtime fans of the series were ready for a return to the series' pre-RPG roots.

Understanding where open-world games are right now is impossible without studying what happened in the early 2010s. Skyrim proved density trumps raw size and that immersive sim elements are the key to immortality. GTA 5 became a new gold standard for modern-day sandboxes that many studios still haven't reached before GTA 6 arrives. Assassin's Creed, meanwhile, toyed with a bit of everything and began rowing towards beautiful worlds of deceptive depth and excess.

Even as someone who loves to get lost even in the largest of Ubisoft's sprawling maps, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced feels like the most satisfying and leanest the series has been in a very long time. Mind you, clearing its upgrade of a pirate-infested Caribbean still takes tens and tens of hours, but coming from behemoths like Crimson Desert – which are obsessed with stuffing as many mechanics and systems as possible into a disjointed package – Edward Kenway's seafaring adventure hits a sweet spot I think we didn't fully appreciate back in 2013.

Land ahead

Assassin's Creed Black Flag's biggest trick when it came to its scope was – and still is, despite Resynced's notable additions – that most of its Caribbean map is just water. It sounds obvious, but even with points of interest emerging from time to time and entire fleets of Spaniards and Englishmen hunting down pirates, the vast majority of the map isn't the icon-filled nightmare we started getting with Assassin's Creed Unity. Even clearing Black Flag's biggest towns, such as Havana, doesn't take too long.

By building the game around the core premise of a pirate simulator and raiding forts and small outposts in remote isles during most secondary tasks, "cities" (they aren't big) are more of a fancy set dressing for a handful of shops and key locations. Of course, they're still fun to traverse and are put to good use by scripted story missions, yet they were far from becoming "black holes" surrounded by even more content grind. I must underline Black Flag Resynced isn't a small or mid-sized game, but I recommend booting up one of its later relatives, such as Odyssey, and comparing how each of them uses its square kilometers.

Less obvious (at least at first) is the fact you can't really fully explore any chunk of land bigger than an islet with a hidden treasure and two turtles. Assassin's Creed hadn't yet reached the "you can climb anything and walk in any direction" approach that made the rebooted saga so sprawling. Dense walls of vegetation and rocky formations are used to "enclose" handcrafted areas that are rarely bigger than they need to be. Stunning vistas abound, but they're no more than that: pretty backgrounds to look at. You can't climb every mountain. Sorry, Todd Howard.

True freedom

Even rebuilt in 2026, Black Flag avoids becoming an endless expanse as gargantuan and playful as Tears of the Kingdom or a Bethesda-style simulation like the upcoming Fable. It also escapes the gravitational pull of last year's Assassin's Creed Shadows, a lovely but eventually tiring Japan-set action RPG that feels like the end of an era. It's an interesting result, and with some remaining traits – such as the lingering deluge of cosmetics – still around, it almost feels like both developers and executives fighting against their worst impulses in an attempt to chart the series' future.

There's a way to make ridiculously detailed open worlds engaging – Rockstar Games and Bethesda Game Studios figured that out ages ago – but Ubisoft isn't interested in following those schools of design. As gorgeous and well-researched as these historical romps are, Assassin's Creed exists in a different sphere, one that's concerned with more immediate thrills and "snackable" stealth action. At some point, probably influenced by entirely different mainstream hits, it moved away from that in an attempt to produce massive games for everyone. As a proud Origins truther, I've been okay with those, but like many others, I've had my fill and would like to go back.

Of course, we still don't know how Assassin's Creed Codename Hexe will implement these learnings while also serving as the next big blockbuster for Ubisoft. Success aside, Black Flag Resynced is more of an experiment – but it's safe to say we'll be getting more remakes that could be more transformative. In any case, the larger message is clear: We still like to get lost in open worlds, we just don't want them to become second lives.