Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag

Finally playing Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag in 2023 was a strange experience for me. Assassin’s Creed was the series I bought my first console for (a PS3 in 2011); I transitioned from Altair’s Chronicles on iOS to the series proper with II. I played Revelations shortly thereafter, skipping the middle chapter of Ezio's trilogy. After patches had smoothed a few of its roughest edges, I played Assassin’s Creed III, but the release of eighth generation consoles saw me take a little break from the series, one that ultimately marked the end of my engagement with it. I wasn’t too interested in risking the PS3 version of Black Flag - I’m generally a little leery of cross-gen titles, although I did play Rogue at some point after its release and I’m pretty sure I played Black Flag’s DLC/spinoff Freedom Cry twice. I haven’t played any later games in the series yet. It wasn’t just weird because I was stepping back to the series that drew me to video games when I was younger, it was weird because of the trends that sprung up atop the foundations established by Assassin’s Creed and its contemporaries. My tastes have changed. The industry has changed. In that light, Black Flag was both refreshing and yet even more disappointing for it. The game lacks many of the (irritating) conventions that would define game design in the years that followed, yet even without RPG elements and loot and all that, all it gave me was a shallow world, one where I pressed buttons to tick off completion boxes rather than to genuinely play. It’s not just mechanics that make progression so torturous in modern game design. Structure plays its role too. I hated it, and gave up a quarter of the way through.

 

I recently read this piece deriding Assassin’s Creed II. It’s a solid, contemporary evisceration of a well-liked game, perhaps the least controversial of the series outside Black Flag. I think it’s good when people take a critical eye to broadly popular media, and it’s often hard to accomplish it soon after release. Many of Breault’s criticisms reflect those that would plague the series as it continued, and that I’m about to make about Black Flag. Poor design, poor pacing, unbearable narratives, simplistic gameplay, scripted worlds, abundant collectibles. I loved Assassin’s Creed II when I played it myself, twelve years ago. I don’t think I’d enjoy replaying it, or Revelations, or III. I know that such criticisms of the series are too accurate, that my tastes have changed too much. The strengths I once enjoyed would be buried under the flaws I now focus on. That’s certainly what happened when I tried Black Flag. There just wasn’t enough promise in the package to keep playing. I was bored by the story almost from the off. Trying to find aspects worth enjoying, I dragged myself through a bit more open world exploration, hoping to find the old Assassin’s Creed spark, or a new spark somewhere on the high seas. I couldn’t find one in either.

 

*****

 

Stepping into Edward’s shoes felt so familiar, largely because of the time I’d spent as Connor and Shay. Unfortunately, I enjoyed my time as those two a lot more, clouded as it now is by the passage of time and keenness of youth. I was no longer able to tolerate the controls or mechanics, and even the sense of historical tourism that drew me to the series in the first place was played out. The underwhelming cities and focus on the high seas covered up this former strength. Don’t get me started on the complete downgrade in terms of wilderness that the islands are compared to III’s frontier. On the surface, the appeal should remain. The parkour gameplay and viewpoint loop continues to be a great fit for this hook. You get to go hands-on with ancient architecture, scaling iconic structures and taking in the sights. But the cities of Black Flag, these recreations of Havana and Nassau and Kingston, lack the character and flair of Florence and Venice and Forli. Each of the Italian cities had real character, distinctive appearances and architecture that structured the way you navigated through them. The cities of the Caribbean are cluttered, uninspired. From a gameplay perspective, they at least allow for denser parkour than the wide streets of Boston and New York in Assassin’s Creed III. Connor’s rooftop dances were constantly halted by the sheer space between buildings. But I never felt visually or emotionally engaged by Black Flag’s urban areas, whereas even when the gameplay of earlier entries grated I could find enjoyment in the playground of their urban sprawl. This historical tourism aspect was legitimately cool, and it’s something that works better in a video game than most mediums. You get to play in cities lost to time. What better fantasy can there be? It’s surely not bested by the fantastical or sci-fi elements of the series, with both the Precursor and Animus myth-arcs having overstayed their welcome by this point. Every time I was forced into first-person, I balked. Did I really want to force myself through this talking tax to get back to the mediocre experience I was actually here for? Ultimately, the answer should have been no.

 

The narrative hooks of Black Flag pale in comparison to its predecessors. I don’t remember Shay’s too well, but the promise of getting to join the Templars (for real this time!) certainly helped carry me through the opening hours. Assassin’s Creed III has an incredibly strong opening, with several sequences dedicated to the arrival of Haytham Kenway in America before the revelation that he is a Templar. While some would have preferred the game to continue following his life, instead of switching to his son’s perspective, I generally enjoyed Ratonhnaké:ton’s stoic fish out of water act, his burning for revenge well-balanced by more endearing character moments during his development of the homestead. Ezio’s character was well-loved, one of the most important crutches of his trilogy, and even without the middle chapter I always enjoyed his path from a noble scoundrel to Assassin Mentor. His introduction is stronger than Connor’s, from his squabbles on the streets of Florence to the execution of his family members, which provide a more immediate narrative hook to players than “hey, I sure hope I get to see that Haytham guy again”. Sure, the first sequences as Connor are very similar to our first hours as Ezio - the introduction to a relatively peaceful life, the shattering of this world at the hands of the templars, the beginning of another young Assassin’s career. But the “third” game failed in terms of pacing, taking so long to establish its characters that those who were there for an open world experience got frustrated. I actually like that structure. It works really well for the game, except there’s all these progression mechanics (weapons, crafting, money, etc.) that you don’t get to play around with until Connor grows up. III was the closest the series got to a Mafia-style open world, where the play area is a backdrop for a lifelong evolution of landscape alongside the characters within it, structuring linear play. Assassin’s Creed is too mainstream to more fully commit, and even the partial committal of III inspired enough backlash to streamline the opening of IV. 

 

Edward’s earlier life is told through flashbacks inserted into other cutscenes, not played through like his son’s backstory in the opening hours of III. As soon as Edward arrives in Havana, the player is given the freedom to explore the city, although it is not until he takes control of his own ship a few missions later that the Black Flag experience proper begins. In quickly allowing the player to dabble in the side activities a rather curious choice was made, one which made my first hours in Edward’s boots silly, almost farcical. One of the only mission types available in this Havana section are assassination side missions with templar targets. At this point, Edward is pretending to be an assassin who has decided to defect to the local Templars, and yet he’s allowed to risk suspicion by targeting their lower ranks while not yet having a reason to do so? It’s just wrong. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any particularly worthwhile story even as I tried to overlook such hiccups. Ezio and Connor were stories about men growing up, driven to the Assassin cause in pursuit of revenge. Edward’s introduction is… not so compelling. He doesn’t feel like a singular force of death in the same way, but he also lacks the strong community ties of the others. Ezio lost a family. Connor lost a village. Edward left behind a wife but has a lively gang of pirates (both crew and captains) who remain around him. I imagine there would be more there, if I’d chosen to stick it out. But whereas the previous characters were wounded and hurt, Edward just stuck his nose into the affairs of others. He’s not a young firebrand but starts as an older, more defined rapscallion. Players take Ezio and Connor through revenge fantasies. With Edward, we go on a trip in our little pirate ship. After a few hours, I didn’t care about the problems he was involved him and I wasn’t interested in him as a person. I remember people at the time touting Edward as a triumphant return to the lovable rogue type of character that the series had flourished with in Renaissance Italy. Naturally, as an avowed Connor fan, I can’t quite agree, but the more forward expressions of personality do help… a little. Edward’s charms didn’t endear him to me at all compared to Ezio’s, and Black Flag really needed a narrative or emotional hook to draw players through, because the game itself is a whole lot of… uh… stuff. Just stuff.

 

*****

 

A quarter of the way through, Black Flag felt like a terrible game. Pretty much every major gameplay system is boring at best. At any given moment the controls threaten to throw you off, launching Edward in the wrong direction or contextual moves and objects not quite lining up as you expect. Combat is dull, where the best strategy is to wait for attacks to counter (and counters are easier than in the Ezio trilogy, taking out most of the timing challenge that had been there). The little complexity it adds is that some enemies require specific methods to break their defences, a system that is too rigid to engage. It becomes a game much like those block puzzles for children, where you put the piece in the hole of the same shape. In Black Flag, you have the “x” enemies that need one specific move to open them up, every time. There’s no need to worry about timing, or positioning, or anything but which move is definitively the right one. Push the button, kill the man. Too easy. If, somehow, the different combinations of enemies should trouble (or more likely, bore) one too much, consumable smoke bombs and pistols help Edward dispatch foes with even more ease than usual. You can carry a decent amount of these - and loot the corpses of your enemies to refill them, should you have the time. Early game fights were neither challenging nor long enough to ever make me worry about using them. I pulled them out to skip fights when I wasn’t in the mood. I didn’t use them to circumvent interesting challenges, because there were no interesting challenges.

 

Stealth is worse. There aren’t many tools (although it’s clear that you will unlock several darts, at a point beyond my tolerance), and it largely relies on use of the environment. The series’ traditional hay bales are no longer the only form of concealment, thanks to the introduction of “stalking zones”, typically bushes, in Assassin’s Creed III. I’m not sure when this concept of extended concealment areas was popularised. It hung around for a little while. You can find it in 2016’s Uncharted 4 and the following year’s Sniper Elite 4, for example. It allows for more aggressive approaches within very simple stealth systems. With such mechanics, you don't have to worry about sightlines or time away from concealment to cover significant ground. Another common challenge is entirely ignored by Black Flag. Unlike a lot of stealth games, two foes standing next to each other means little. Edward wields dual hidden blades and dual cutlasses, allowing him to sneak up on (or rush up to) and instantly take down two enemies at a time, like most other protagonists in the series. He closes gaps so fast compared to enemies’ reaction times, he can easily rush guards down and execute instant takedowns before they can raise alarms. The direction each of the pair faces means little, as long as he has the opportunity to initiate the dual takedown. Instead, the challenge now comes from when THREE guards linger in the same spot, a true innovation in sneak-em-up gaming. The limited stealth is made more annoying by the shoddy performance of the movement mechanics. Like his predecessors, Edward will get stuck on bits of scenery, sometimes in very odd ways. This could lead to him suddenly coming to a halt, or perhaps scampering up a building that a player intended to run by. Without the manual saves of a Dishonored or Hitman, there's plenty of incentive not to engage in the sort of casual dabbling that amateurs like me enjoy. Unlike the tighter stealth sequences of Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, games touted as a model for Assassin’s Creed III's combat, stealth arenas aren’t specific, reloadable challenge rooms. The result is a series of "challenges" best suited for casual stealth players, which is also uncomfortable for this audience to engage with compared to contemporaries. At least Black Flag has some checkpoints within missions, a noteworthy improvement on earlier entries. But I never felt particularly engaged or incentivised to sneak skilfully, and even when I tried the systems weren’t robust enough to play that way. 

 

One final point on stealth to make: the tailing missions. Criticism of these has been done to death. I’d say it’s one of the defining parts of Black Flag’s reception, that even those that loved most of what it did needed to warn others of its weakest part. I don’t actually mind the on foot tailing missions (every now and then). They help bring a Hitman type feeling of observing enemies at rest, not just gathering intel but soaking in those little meaningless details about your enemies’ lives that are so important to the stealth genre. That level of detail and flavour can easily be lost or made rote when taking something traditionally linear and focussed within sandbox levels to the open worlds on the scale Assassin’s Creed helped popularise. Unfortunately, tailing isn't fun here, and Black Flag uses its bombastic ship mechanics to make them even less fun and even dumber than ever. There’s no reason that a ship shouldn’t see the Jackdaw a few hundred metres behind in open waters on a clear day – Edward himself uses a spyglass that can see much further, and one of his ships weapons is selected by looking directly backwards. But you have to tail other ships from time to time, and I felt like an idiot doing it.

 

Despite their clunky implementation and frequent unreliability, I’ve generally liked the idea of Assassin’s Creed controls. The separation between high and low profiles is a generally good idea, and the puppet system isn’t spectacular but is at least an interesting way to conceive of controls that switch button functions between navigation and combat. I do like that the legs button is no longer required to reach top speed, although it means you have less control over Edward’s sprints than you did over Ezio’s. It’s a shame that, like so many aspects of the series, the concept is let down by its execution. Fortunately, the ship gameplay is much better, mostly because it hasn't been done to death. Novelty counts for a lot when it comes to first impressions. Navigation and controls are simple, with two buttons increasing and decreasing speed, and it often feels like the Jackdaw is nimbler than its captain (certainly so relative to how nimble a real ship would be). Unfortunately, I think I enjoyed my time onboard III’s Aquila and Rogue’s Morrigan more, and not just because they had cooler names – something Edward’s fellow pirates tease him for. Perhaps it was because they were fresher, more novel. It’s now my third time doing it, and despite the long break the limitations have overwhelmed the uniqueness. III naturally had the most rudimentary form, but I think restricting it to linear missions might have helped, whether through allowing tighter design or merely by making it so special. The pace doesn’t help either. Ship combat is so much slower paced than combat. With the time it takes to sail into position and ready your cannons after shots, you have more time to realise that there’s not really much going on. It’s all just whittling down health bars, without much pressure to force strategic or skilled play. There’s not much flexibility in the way you upgrade the Jackdaw. While you can choose which guns to prioritise upgrading, you don’t make any sacrifices in one department to excel in another. It’s just the usual slow build towards the top of the power curve. The high seas took a little longer to bore me than the islands and cities they contain. They’re a better but blander playground, largely lacking obstacles - both a blessing and a curse. THe water becomes repetitive, monotonous, and the occasional sandbar or tornado does little to shake it up. That brings us to my biggest problem with Black Flag: it’s built around a gameplay loop that seems to breed disengagement far, far more than it ever encourages engagement. 

 

As expected by this point in the series (and in Ubisoft’s oeuvre more broadly), the map is littered with icons. Things to collect, activities to complete, enemies to fight. A number of resource and achievement systems/checklists reward literally ticking these off (don’t stop reading just yet – I’m not gonna talk about numbers this time, I promise!). Two of the main side activities are harpooning (which is tedious) and wreck dives (which I haven’t unlocked yet). Most of the collectables in the Caribbean (listed as uncharted, compared to those in larger locations like Cape Bonavista) are awful to get. They come up on your map as you approach tiny islands in the middle of nowhere, with literally nothing of interest on them but an icon. To get the chest or animus fragment or what have you, you need to bring your ship to rest, jump off it, swim to shore, collect the shiny thing, and then return to your ship. It’s a much more stilted experience than getting collectibles when you’re already on foot – every previous Assassin’s Creed did it better. What was once a 30 second detour, a little deviation in path along rooftops, is not a minute or more long switch from one gameplay style to another. The change in perspective and controls underlines that you’re halting your flow to chase collectibles. Here’s the biggest problem, though: that little delay only serves to expose how mind-numbing and dull this gameplay loop is. Even when you’re on land and able to tick icons off the map without the back-and-forth swims, there’s nothing really interesting to them. Some animus fragments require slightly interesting navigation of buildings and trees, whereas shanties need the same but move away from the player, which highlights flaws in the movement system more than it poses a fun challenge. Chests are just Edward kicking them open and receiving a few hundred reales – not very many, as the economy now includes upgrading every facet of the Jackdaw – and letters in a bottle are even worse, giving only a text entry as a reward after playing the same unskippable bottle-opening cutscene every time. Treasure maps are interesting, and fit the pirate theme, but they’re basically just “go to one spot, press the interact button to watch a cutscene, go to the next spot, walk 20 metres, press the interact button to watch a cutscene and receive a reward”. Apparently, the core gameplay loop of the big, bombastic pirate game is moving to particular coordinates and kind of touching things? Not even in a tactile sense, as the gameplay is so limp and cutscenes or animations that might as well be cutscenes take control away so often. Now, feel free to call this a facetious analysis: clearly the more involved activities - as well as the actual pirating against ships and forts – are more important to the gameplay loop. But if all these icons are so unimportant, why put them there? Because big Ubisoft open worlds were being built around this false idea of being filled with content, yes – but also because there’s little else to the core mechanics or the open world. Smart world design can improve shoddy mechanics through context, while it should go without saying that excellent mechanics can offer fun even in the most miserable levels. See Resident Evil 6 for examples, far too many examples, of the latter. As for the former, I’d suggest immersive sims as good examples of engaging level design driving engagement despite undercooked mechanics. Most games in the genre don’t excel at combat, or stealth, or other facets of their gameplay. Unlike Black Flag, however, they offer worlds which are interesting to interact with, with real systems and ways to affect them. Black Flag is just so flat and uninteractive, despite how much there is to “do”.

Baggage, baggage everywhere: that’s the problem! The baggage of the Assassin/Templar conflict, of the modern day plot, of feature creep, of an icon-littered map, of publisher and audience expectations. Black Flag would probably have been better as a sort of pirate version of Mount & Blade, emphasising the Jackdaw and open world even more. Assuming you were working with the same gameplay mechanics, I think the ship stuff would hold up. In the context of meaningful progression systems, the simple gameplay loop wouldn’t have to hold the experience together by itself. As it is, it can’t carry the game except in short bursts, a problem made worse by the sheer amount of bloat and boring that surrounds it. The problems with combat and movement as Edward wouldn’t be a major downfall if they were largely confined to ship boarding and fort infiltrations. Taking out most of the traditional land-based maps and reworking it as a naval exploration game could have been killer. There’s already interesting things like weather events and skirmishes between British and Spanish ships. I think Black Flag had a rough foundation for more interesting use of the open seas, but it was squandered, the maps and missions instead stuffed with the Ubisoft formula. Unfortunately, the budget needed to develop these systems likely necessitated being sold in an Assassin’s Creed package, and that comes with Assassin’s Creed expectations. I’m not even saying that the design should have been radically different, just that it should have made smarter use of the open world (and integrated its systems into it better). But everybody knows what happened after Rogue: some sort of deal was made with Singapore, and the fourth iteration of the naval systems is a multiplayer only pirate game scheduled for release in… uh… yeah… It’s a shame that one of the most adored successes of Assassin’s Creed never managed to escape the franchise, never managed to evolve into something legitimately great. It’s one of the best pirate games and yet I couldn’t play a fun pirate fantasy in its world. I think of Matthewmatosis' God of War video, his point about the draw of returning to games built around a perfectly-realised USP. Black Flag has a USP, just not one that was worth spending more time with Black Flag for.