More than a decade after Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag first set sail, Ubisoft is revisiting one of the franchise's most beloved entries with Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced releasing for PC, PS5, and Xbox on July 9.

Rather than fundamentally reinventing the experience, the team approached the project with a clear objective: modernize the technology and gameplay while remaining faithful to what made Edward Kenway's adventure resonate in the first place.

According to the development team, preserving Edward's story always came first, amidst all of the technical modernizations and hardware advancements. We talked with lead producer Justin Ng all about how they revitalized the series classic.

What was the core creative vision for Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, and how did the team define what “modernizing” Black Flag should mean without losing the spirit of the original?

Justin Ng, Lead Producer: Specifically on the creative side, it was about staying faithful to the original game. This meant that preserving Edward Kenway’s story and journey always took priority. With us buffing out the rough edges from the original and adding more content for the fans, both returning and new. 

Black Flag is still one of the most beloved Assassin’s Creed games more than a decade later. Which parts of the original experience did you feel were essential to preserve exactly, and which areas needed to evolve for today’s players?

Justin Ng: The story of Edward Kenway was the priority; he was a well-loved character, and we did not want to change that. Instead, we focused on refining certain aspects of the gameplay, such as addressing frustrating hard-fail quests and limitations like not being able to crouch anywhere.  By evolving these mechanics and enhancing the visuals, we aimed to make the game feel more modern and immersive. 

How did the team approach rebuilding the Caribbean open world for modern hardware,  especially in terms of density, traversal, visual fidelity, and seamless transitions between land and sea?

Justin Ng: We started by building off the latest version of Ubisoft’s proprietary engine, Anvil, which was used on Assassin’s Creed Shadows. With the modern game engine, we were able to fully redefine the quality of graphics and world density without sacrificing performance and loading times.

Right from the beginning of the project, we wanted to change the original Black Flag’s limitation of having loading screens whenever the player docks at a major location. In Resynced, the  Caribbean world is seamless, and players can dock at all key locations without loading screens. To achieve this, we create a huge base world with the separate key locations merged together. Then we configured loading cells in an optimal way for Anvil’s data streaming technology to load the data seamlessly while the player is sailing towards the location.

Naval gameplay was one of Black Flag’s defining features. What were the biggest design and technical challenges in updating sailing, ship combat, ocean simulation, and exploration for  Resynced?

Justin Ng: Design-wise, I would say it’s the reworking of the minimap to a less intrusive compass system. In the process, we lost some of the UI information like enemy ship view cones and wind direction, but the team was able to solve that very elegantly by using wind streaks and fully simulated sails/streamers to communicate the wind direction and moving the enemy ships’ awareness state to their “Spyglass Glare”. To me, it results in a more diegetic experience for the player.

From a technical standpoint, one of the main goals was to fully modernize the realization of the Naval Experience. This included completely reworking the water visuals and ocean simulation, as well as fully rebuilding ship models. In Resynced, ships are presented in great detail with a lot of dynamic elements like moving ropes, simulated sails, and, of course, the crew. When we add the intense naval combat effects on top of this, with explosions, cannon fire, water splashes, and so on, the load on the GPU and CPU is quite heavy. It required significant effort from the team to achieve the right balance and optimization to hit the framerate targets. 

The original game had a very specific sense of freedom, atmosphere, and adventure. How did you ensure the remake still captures that pirate fantasy while introducing new systems and quality-of-life improvements?

Justin Ng: Much of the process came down to the team deeply analyzing the original game and preserving what made it special by building around Edward’s story and the overall game flow. For example, we reworked the tailing missions to reduce the frustration. Now players won’t be desynchronized if they fail. We also introduced new recruitable Officers, each with their own quest line, to deepen the Pirate fantasy.  

We also worked with original developers Jean Guesdon and Darby McDevitt to make sure new content was in line with their vision of Black Flag.

Could you walk us through the art production pipeline for refreshing iconic locations, ships,  characters, and Caribbean environments while staying faithful to the visual identity of the 2013  game?

Justin Ng: In Resynced, we embraced modern rendering techniques, such as Micropolygon, PBR (Physically Based Rendering), and Ray Traced Global Illumination (RTGI) with ray traced reflections. To get the most out of the new technology, assets required specific data/setup to fully utilize, work that did not exist in the original.  

However, having the original as a reference proved incredibly valuable throughout development. Allowing us to rebuild assets to meet modern standards, while carefully tweaking textures and shaders to match the player’s memories.

A fun detail: We intentionally pushed the turquoise color tone of the water beyond reality because it matched how players remembered it, rather than how it was. 

How did the team approach lighting, weather, water rendering, and environmental effects to make the world feel more dynamic and cinematic on current-generation hardware?

Justin Ng: By adopting the latest Anvil Engine, we inherited a lot of the latest cutting-edge core technology. Working closely with the Anvil engine development team, we further improved features that were important for Resynced, with having impressive Water Visuals and Simulation being one of the top priorities.

With that in mind, the Engine Water Tech Team provided low-level engine support for new  Water Tech features, which allowed our Technical Art team to focus on creating new innovations to the realization of Water. Improving Transparency and Caustics with more realistic Foam and Bigger, more Menacing Waves.  

The Water on Resynced is a representation of the Singapore studios’ experience and expertise in Water Tech.

What tools, engine upgrades, or pipeline changes were most important in bringing Black Flag into the latest version of Anvil, especially for a project that had to respect an existing game while rebuilding so much of the experience?

Justin Ng: There’s so many! But I’ll pick 3 of my favorites (outside of Water of course).

Micropolygon, which is Anvil’s virtual geometry implementation. It removed the constraints of polygon complexity, allowing us to recreate the Caribbean Sea in the fidelity it deserves. It also eliminated visible transitions between assets’ different levels of detail.

Dynamism and Destructibility make the game and world feel more alive. Cloth, ship sails, and leaves on the trees react to the dynamically changing weather realistically.  Crates that create Takedown Opportunities when enemies are kicked/pulled into them. It’s almost as if the World was “another character”.

Raytraced lighting makes the world really shine. A sun that sears your eyeballs, lights that refract through cloth/leaves, small shimmers and reflections on the water waves. Tiny details that improve visual quality and immersion.

In Resynced, Anvil’s Raytraced Global Illumination tech was further optimized, and we are supporting RTGI even in the 60 FPS performance mode on PS5 and Xbox Series X. We also provide an efficient software raytracing implementation to ensure high-quality lighting is accessible even for PC players with older GPUs that don’t support hardware-accelerated ray tracing.

Looking at the broader Assassin’s Creed series today, what do you hope Black Flag Resynced reminds players about this particular era of the franchise and the unique appeal of Edward’s pirate-assassin journey?

Justin Ng: Personally, I see it as a transition point for the Franchise, expanding beyond its action-adventure roots and embracing open-world exploration.

And by doing so, it achieved a sense of Freedom on so many fronts:

• Freedom to explore the Caribbean,
• A Pirate in search of Freedom through gold,
• An Assassin fighting for Freedom.

It is what makes Black Flag special to me, and I hope we recaptured it in Resynced.

Justin Ng, Lead Producer on Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced at Ubisoft

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