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.
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