Ubisoft developers had to rebuild most of Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag entirely from scratch to make this year's swashbuckling remake, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, because the original 2013 code was largely unusable for a 2026 game.
Black Flag Resynced is a pretty faithful reconstruction of one of the best Assassin's Creed games ever made, but even though the remake sticks to the original's story and open-world structure very closely, the team at Ubisoft were still essentially making a brand new game.
Speaking to JorRaptor about the project's development, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced game director Richard Knight put it in simple terms: "Quite frankly, it's a brand new game."
"We can't use the code from the original," Knight explains. "I mean, it's nice to think about, but what was it built on, you know, Windows 2000? Like, it was a long, long time [ago]. Not that bad, but the codebase and the tech is so completely different that we use the original as reference. Sometimes we can occasionally pull an asset as a placeholder or something to model the new stuff. But mostly we just look into the code to see how things work, to look into the data, to see how certain things worked, to learn some of the secrets. But we effectively have to rebuild."
Some of Black Flag Resynced's more dramatic changes - the revamped combat, the graphical overhaul, the new narrative content - were always going to require more work. But even when the remake stays faithful, the team simply weren't able to lean on archival code.
"There's lots of systems for this game that we just rebuilt, and partly to be the best case version of whatever it was before, but also because we needed to," Knight adds. "So, when you go fresh sometimes that gives you the ability to make changes." (By the way, you can get a deeper look at the differences with our guide on all changes in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced.)
