Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag - On this day

There have been several top pirate/pirate titles in the video game world. The cult Sid Meier’s Pirates !, the Monkey Island series, and the 2003 Pirates of the Caribbean, which was supposed to be Sea Dogs II, certainly stand out. But in the last ten years, no other pirate-themed game has been mentioned more often than the fourth part of the Assassin’s Creed series.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag was launched on this day eight years ago for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, while versions for PC, PS4, and XBO followed some twenty days later. It was then the first game in the AC series that chronologically went backward and took place half a century before the events of the third party.

Players take on the role of the brave Captain Edward Kenway, a pirate who finds himself in the middle of a conflict between the Assassins and the Templars in the Caribbean in the golden age of pirates. In this adventure, Kenway sought his place under the sun alongside Captain Blackbeard and other infamous 18th-century outlaws, operating a ship he stole from the Spaniards and named Jackdaw.

Black Flag was a kind of evolution of the Assassin’s Creed series. These games were open before, but Black Flag took the mechanics of navigation from the third part and combined it with the freedom of exploration. In addition to running and jumping on land, the player in Black Flag could dive in the seabed, leave the ship at any time and swim to an island or attack the fort.

It brought Assassin’s Creed freedom that took the series a little away from the hitherto central theme of hidden murders and parkour. Players in Black Flag enjoyed the role of pirate more than the role of Assassin and that was a turning point for the Ubisoft series. Black Flag was one of the best-selling games of 2013 and has long been a game by which future sequels of Assassin’s Creed were measured. As for the numbered ones, Black Flag was the last to carry the number in the name.

Although the game was extremely popular, Ubisoft didn’t have a lot of extras for it if we look at it from today’s perspective. There was one separate extension called Freedom Cry in which we played the role of Adewale, Kenway’s former assistant. The story in modern times first put us off the shoes of longtime protagonist Desmond Miles, but it wasn’t so interesting that Ubisoft would continue to build a story based on it. For the next Assassin’s Creed Unity, it was no longer important to know what was going on in Black Flag.

Until the reboot of the series in 2017, later AC titles failed to replicate what made Black Flag successful. After sailing in the Black Flag was so much fun, it was hard for some to return to exclusively land adventures in Unity and Syndicate. Ubisoft decided to develop a completely new Skull & Bones series from the whole idea of ​​the pirate game, but they did not materialize it even three years after the announcement.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag has yet to experience any remaster, but even that is only a matter of time. In 2019, it received an edition for the Nintendo Switch console, but Ubisoft did not become famous with it.