Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag (& Freedom Cry)

My playthrough of Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag coincided with the release of Skull and Bones. The latter's development was troubled and costly -- and the end result was not something people thought worth the time it took for the game to come out. A common sentiment I saw: Ubisoft had already made one good pirate game; all they had to do was to build upon it. However, I'm not certain if Black Flag's single player campaign would have lent itself into a multiplayer live service format that easily. There's a multiplayer mode too in Black Flag but it doesn't involve naval combat, which is what Skull and Bones is about.

A pirate-assassin adventure in early 1700s' Caribbean

Like in AC Liberation before it, is "Abstergo Entertainment" involved in AC4 Black Flag as well. The game is not similarly an in-universe consumer product, though. Instead the imaginary company is using the genetic memories of an 18th century pirate Edward Kenway (among others) to build various pieces of entertainment -- like Liberation. Abstergo had figured out how to relive memories of people who were not one's own ancestors.

In the game's present day, you play as one of Abstergo's employees reliving those memories. You're nameless and voiceless, a floating tablet that can scan QR codes and hack computers via a Frogger-like minigame.

When you first get guided to your work station, there's some tech support guy under your desk fixing something. You can't see his face but I was certain it was an undercover Shaun Hastings trying not to sound like himself. While the person turned out to be essential for the plot, he wasn't Shaun. The present time has a Precursor continuity element from Assassin's Creed III but I guess because Desmond is no longer around, Ubisoft decided to drop the running number from the titles after this one.

Actual Shaun did show up too with Rebecca soon enough. I found it rather reckless how they had walked into a Templar-owned building just like that, not even using aliases. To my understanding, only few Abstergo Entertainment employees are actual Templars -- and maybe same for the parent company Abstergo Industries -- but I reckon any of the key people would have recognized Shaun and Rebecca by sight (even though they do look slightly different in this game) if they had walked down to the lobby when the Assassin duo was casually hanging around there.

AC4 Black Flag turned out to be more of a pirate-focused adventure than I had expected. I had heard the Assassin stuff was like a side thing but I hadn't guessed to what extent. I think in the canon Edward does later become a leader of London Assassins or something but in this game he doesn't yet officially vow to follow the Creed. Him initially donning the robes is coincidental -- merely a way to possible riches -- and then, later on his character arc, his avidity for freedom continues being aligned with the Brotherhood's goals.

The Assassins are suddenly quite numerous compared to AC3 and Liberation. Apparently, when coming from the old world, the Brotherhood found that many locals in the Caribbean were already following a similar ideology. Recruits were plentiful. Their ranks do thin quite a bit over Black Flag, though.

As mentioned, Edward is chasing wealth. His life with his wife Caroline back in Bristol was filled with trouble. Their parents had disowned them and they were facing a humble farmer's lowly income. Edward saw privateering as a solution to that despite Caroline objecting. Following the sequence of events Edward kind of stumbles through before and at the start of this game, he soon acquires a brig, whom he dubs Jackdaw, and hoists the colors.

Easy to enjoy

You do get the usual Assassin activities, Edward even takes assassination contracts -- because coin -- but there is quite a lot of pirate-related stuff, more than I thought even, in addition to ship combat. There are treasure maps, blundering of warehouses, tavern brawls, hunting various whales and sharks from a boat with thrown harpoons, and even diving for sunken cargo with the aid of a diving bell. The last activity is not the best "dungeon crawl" feature in the series but it could have been way more frustrating. Because the game saves chest and collectible progress immediately, it doesn't matter that much if the many sharks kill you once in a while.

Synchronization points are fast travel locations for the first time in the series. That change alone made the game feel a lot closer to the later entries. In general, Black Flag felt to me like it avoided dead space between activities more than the previous games, which is ironic, considering the wide ocean map. The game was also surprisingly easy to get 100% sync in; the additional mission restrictions are far easier to meet. And they are only found in the main memories, too.

The single 100% goal that caused me serious trouble was having to assassinate a captain from a rope-swing. I had performed the action previously during boarding few times but never with consistent success. Failing to accomplish it in this case meant reloading a checkpoint that is before a stealth section of sneaking across a beach to take out scouts first.

The goals themselves are not challenging but failing to notice they exist in the first place caused me a lot of frustration. It is incredibly easy to miss an extra goal popping up briefly in the opposite corner of the screen from the main goal when you're focused on what's happening. Why couldn't they put the goals in the same place and just keep them visible all the time like in the later games? I would have avoided many mission replays.

The game's way of not capitalizing UI texts bothered me as well. Past time subtitles and lore texts in turn capitalize common nouns like in German. Some olde English thing, I've heard. Those made me initially confused; I thought there was an oddly numerous amount of proper nouns thrown around.

The famous naval combat

Black Flag is more seamless with its ship than AC3 was -- and it must have been quite novel at the time of the game's release -- but it is not as much so as AC Odyssey later (which I had already played). You can get off and on the ship freely to start sailing. However, bigger settlements, like Kingston and Havana, are on separate maps from the open world, behind loading screens. You can't properly go underwater outside the diving bell locations either. Boarding is a seamless action but it always ends in a cutscene where you decide if you want to have the defeated ship added to your fleet in the game's minigame, lower your wanted level, or salvage the ship for repairs. In Odyssey, boarding ended seamlessly by you and your crew hopping back onto the Adrestia.

The ship repair option from a successful boarding is particularly immersion breaking when done in the middle of a still raging naval battle. Odyssey's repair-from-cleaving-a-ship was an arcadey thing but it didn't break the flow: there was no cutscene. Even though Black Flag's naval combat has more meat on it, I enjoyed Odyssey's more -- and even the latter's got old once you had done so much of it.

In Black Flag's boarding I liked that you can soften up (or even annihilate) the enemy opposition with a swivel gun while your crew is towing the ships closer. But once you run out of cannon balls and actually do board, things become a mess. The combat system is simply not made for both sides having so many combatants in such a restricted area. You see an enemy with an attack indicator but one of your guys interrupts them: you block for nothing. Then you try to attack an enemy but there's someone suddenly in the way. Multiple times I lost the track of Edward due to the camera not following him properly.

Edward often sheaths his weapons during a boarding battle if you have to move to engage more enemies. Unsheathing takes a bit too long when someone is already swinging at you. It's especially tiresome when you use a lift to get up a mast to take down scouts and/or the ship's flag. If the scout there is looking at your direction, you sometimes don't have enough time to draw weapons to block the coming attack. Failing at it, will knock you off the platform and is likely to kill you too.

Funnily enough, even though the game's past is further back in time than previously and gun technology shouldn't be any better, I had far less trouble with lengthy reload animations. I guess it's because Edward gets many pistol holsters so early. There was rarely if ever a time Edward went into a reloading animation that needed to be interrupted. Combat has an ever-so-slight different feel to it but largely it's the same as in AC3. Smoke bombs were nerfed, though: you can't take out half a dozen guys in the smoke with quick hidden blade animations like you used to.

The kind of ultimate challenge of the game, in terms of ship combat, is taking on the four legendary ship encounters. Even with a fully upgraded Jackdaw, they can be very close calls. I had most trouble with the double ship fight against the HMS Fearless and Royal Sovereign. The legendary ships seem to go berserk (at low durability?), moving at high enough speeds to take off the waves to literally land on top of you. It's pretty ridiculous.

Functionality getting deprecated

"Who is this <...>?" (mies -- 'man'?)

Ubisoft's lack of effort to maintain their older games surfaced to cause issues with Black Flag. The game actually got a surprise update last summer -- which broke its fullscreen. I'm not sure what their agenda exactly was with the sudden update, but they seem to have fixed that one introduced issue since then. I did read that they had added the small Aveline DLC on the PC version finally -- I guess for the Season Pass because my game lacked it. It would be kind of odd if that broke fullscreen, though.

Other problems still remain, at least with my copy which is the base game that Ubisoft had given away for free in the past (though technically I also partially paid for it later when buying the AC American History bundle for the other titles it included).

There was no more store page for the game on Ubisoft Connect. Good thing I had bought the one DLC I wanted when I did: that would have been impossible now. I guess Ubisoft wants people to play only the Gold Edition, possibly on the new Classics option of Ubisoft+. (The old Ubisoft+ became Premium -- and more expensive.)

Black Flag also required me to re-enter password every time it was first started since the launcher was opened. (It's not the only old Ubisoft game that requires that.) The multiplayer portion also wouldn't launch at all. The cause for that turned out to be a conflict with the Nvidia overlay being enabled. The game's servers are still on, though; you can play the multiplayer assuming you can find other people.

The single player campaign has online features as well. The main one is the Kenway's Fleet minigame. And it wouldn't connect at all. That was a big issue for me because it's needed for 100% sync. A solution was found on Nexus Mods: a fixed .exe for the game. It's stated to have been made for the Gold Edition but it worked perfectly for my base game version as well.

The minigame is a returning feature from Liberation (and I guess more distantly from AC3). This time trade route dangers are solved in an auto-battler using the ships you've acquired from boarding. The battles are simple enough but the actual trade missions take a lot longer to complete than in Liberation. Your possible friends on your platform of choice could quicken the timers by aiding in the missions but if that doesn't happen, they can take up to 36 real life hours, which is silly. Too bad there's no mod to skip the timers like there is for Dragon Age: Inquisition's war table. Maybe it's because the timers are on server side -- or no one simply has bothered to figure it out.

A lesser online feature is (automatic) sharing of royal convoys, white whale sightings, and social chests. Having friends encounter them would make the events a more frequent appearance in your game. You need to "share" three of each for the Abstergo challenges, which aren't required for 100% sync but I wanted to be a completionist in every way possible for the single player.

The chests are so rare that many (including me) initially believe you need friends to find them at all but that is not the case. It is merely extremely unlikely to stumble upon them coincidentally: I didn't find a single one over my 100% run when I wasn't specifically looking for them. There's a Youtube playlist with all (or at least most) of the possible spawn locations: you just go through them until you've found three. For the islet locations you don't really need the videos, though; the coordinates are enough because it doesn't take long to check if there's a chest anywhere in such a small area.

A solid Assassin's Creed game

AC4 Black Flag is probably from the better half if I were to put the series' titles into a tier list. Because I had played later entries, particularly Odyssey, I didn't find it as novel of an experience. I think if the game had had more fantasy elements, I would have found it great. Mundane pirate stuff doesn't cut it for me.

Black Flag's story was strong enough, particularly the ending, for me to consider it good. The biggest negative element in the narrative are the tad too many pirates that don't get any depth. For instance, I found the one betrayal incident very odd because I didn't remember the pirates there. Like, who were those two guys? I think most of the Assassin's Creed games suffer from that problem: there are too many characters that don't matter at all.

There have been rumors of a remake of Black Flag being in development. I don't know if such a thing is needed but it might be worth it for Ubisoft, given how fondly many seem to reminiscence this game. I'm sure a lot of people would buy a remake because they had liked the game the first time.

Freedom Cry

I had thought Freedom Cry would be worth a post of its own, considering it got a standalone release after first being DLC to Black Flag. However, it turned out to be short and to add about nothing to Black Flag.

You play as Adéwalé who is Edward's quartermaster in the main game. Towards the end of Black Flag he leaves the Jackdaw to join the Assassins. In Freedom Cry, he gets a ship of his own (the second one really), the Experto Crede, and does about the same stuff Edward does with slightly more freeing of slaves, as per the DLC's name. There's not really much to say beyond that.