Do you own Ubisoft games on your Xbox console but wish you could play them on your PC—but not so much that you're willing to pay extra for it? If your answer to that oddly specific question is "yes," and the games in question are one of a list of 13 titles that we'll get to later, then this is your lucky day.

Announced over on the Xbox Wire, Ubisoft is adding a handful of its games to an "Xbox console-to-PC" program that grants access to PC versions of "select games" to people who own them on Xbox. The selection:

• Assassin’s Creed Mirage
• Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
• Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
• Far Cry 6
• Immortals Fenyx Rising
• Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
• Riders Republic
• Skull and Bones
• The Crew 2
• The Crew Motorfest
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege
• Watch Dogs Legion

Beginning today, if you buy a digital version of any of those games on Xbox, you'll get both the Xbox version and the "Xbox on PC" version. If you already own any of those games, you'll also get the emulated version for your PC, but that won't start happening until next week: Xbox said a "progressive rollout period" will begin on August 4.

It's pretty straightforward, but there are a couple caveats. Currencies and consumables in the Xbox version of your game will not be included in any PC game versions, although if the game supports cross-progression then anything you've earned in the Xbox edition will be available on PC too. And it's strictly a one-way street: Purchasing the PC version of any of those games will not get you the Xbox edition. I imagine this will one day cause confusion.

You'll also need the latest version of Ubisoft Connect installed in order to access the PC versions of all these games—pick it up at ubisoft.com.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, a game with a title that feels like it ought to have a colon or an em dash somewhere in there, is finally here and it's selling like whatever the nautical equivalent of hotcakes is. Hardtack, I guess. Not only did it sell 2 million copies in a single day, a recent financial report includes Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot saying "Two weeks in, the title has already exceeded the annual expectations we had."

"The strong launch of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced in early July by Vantage Studios is an encouraging proof point," he said. "The game is the highest-rated Assassin's Creed title since the original Black Flag, and we are very pleased with the praise it received from players … I would like to warmly thank the teams whose talent and dedication brought it to life."

Guillemot's thanks come at an interesting time, given that nearly a third of Ubisoft Barcelona was laid off just weeks ago, triggering a labor strike. This was part of a larger wave of layoffs which affected hundreds of workers. As it has done with a variety of Ubisoft games, Ubisoft Barcelona supported the development of Black Flag Resynced and "did all the underwater levels" as tech and gameplay animator Manel Cota posted on X back then.

Regardless, the ludicrous sales Black Flag Resynced is enjoying seem like a signal that the original game's reputation is strong enough to carry this remake through potential turnoffs for prospective players, such as the day one DLC, simplified swordfights, and in-game shop. In his review, PC Gamer's Morgan Park called the game "a well-made, but inessential remake that loses more than it gains."

If you've been hitting the high seas yourself, check out our guide on how to see all the new stuff—if not, the original is there and as good as ever.

Sony's decision to stop producing game discs in 2028 has caused a real uproar. Some PlayStation owners see a dire future as they become dependent on digital services and lose the ability to trade old games in for new ones, while at least one analyst says we'll all get used to it quickly enough anyway. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has now weighed into the debate, and he's clearly in the "no big deal" camp.

Guillemot was asked during today's quarterly investors call if Sony's decision might create "a demand headwind," because of the loss of the secondary market for PlayStation games.

"What we saw on the PC is that it helped to grow the market," Guillemot said, presumably a reference to the explosive growth of Steam that drove a stake through the heart of physical PC game releases.

"There's also some pressure for the future on the cost of machines, and being able to be only digital will help to have more accessible machines, I would say. There are pluses and minuses, but we think it will not disturb the industry too much."

The impact of Steam on the evolution of PC gaming is obvious and undeniable, and while you might argue that it's not entirely a good thing (I certainly would), PC gamers are absolutely eating well these days—at least as long as you don't need to upgrade your rig. Sure, we can't take our old stuff down to GameStop and trade them in for new releases, but we do get regular, ridiculous deep discounts on Steam (and GOG, Humble, Epic, and numerous others) that pretty nicely balance the scales.

But the implied comparison strikes me as flawed. Consoles are walled gardens, and the PlayStation Store is very tightly controlled in ways that Steam never has been, even before it decided that (just about) anything goes. The likelihood of Sony loosening its grip in the all-digital future does not strike me as particularly good, and without that I think outcomes will also be different.

Expectations are different, too: The end of physical releases on PC was never mandated by any central authority, and the wheels started turning on the process well before gaming became the mainstream at-home entertainment it is now. How much impact will the absence of an optical drive have on costs? I do not know. It will presumably give Sony a little extra flexibility on pricing, but I wouldn't expect it to surrender any more of its bottom line than it has to.

Despite all of that, Guillemot is probably correct. If Sony sticks to its guns—and it surely will—then the only options we have are to either roll with it or go outside and find something else to do. Whether or not it's a good thing for gamers is a whole different question, and maybe it'll be a bumpier ride than I (and Yves) expect—on that one, we'll just have to wait and see.

Less than a week after Ubisoft promised that a new Ghost Recon game is coming but probably not anytime soon, the company says it will mark the series' 25^th anniversary in August with some proper news on what's coming next.

"It’s been a while Ghosts!" the announcement excitedly states. "We know some of you saw some updates, we’ll have more to say on the 6th of August when we celebrate the 25th Anniversary of Ghost Recon. Intel coming soon."

My initial impression was that this is basically a scaled-down version of last week's big Bethesda blowout: A blast of the hype machine intended, at least in part, to help you forget about all the bad stuff going on, specifically the sweeping layoffs at Xbox that are putting thousands of people out of work.

Obviously an update on the Ghost Recon franchise, whose most recent game is now seven years old and was decidedly not great (although it has gotten better in the years since), doesn't have the hype heft of Fallout 5. But Ubisoft's condition is dire, and sometimes the best gun is the one you can reach.

My second and more lasting impression, however, is one of annoyance, and I'll tell you why. After a few seconds of pondering this Ghost Recon update, I thought to myself, perhaps there will also be news on Splinter Cell! After all, Tom Clancy is Tom Clancy, right? Hard men doing unpleasant things for freedom and stuff. The Ghosts, the Rainbows, the Echelons—it's all Clancyverse underneath, right? And if anyone in that gang is overdue for some attention, it's Team Splinter Cell.

Ah, but they are not all the same, at least not in the way that matters at the moment. I popped around to the Splinter Cell X account and found a Ubisoft 40^th anniversary retweet from earlier in July, a half-dozen 2025 posts (mostly about the Splinter Cell animated series on Netflix), one retweet from 2023, and a relative flurry activity from 2022. I thought for a second that would correspond to the announcement of the Splinter Cell remake, but no: That was actually announced in 2021, believe it or not. (Hint: Believe it.)

The 2022 activity marked the 20^th anniversary of the first Splinter Cell game; it was also the year that remake director David Grivel left Ubisoft for "a new adventure." He's had enough time since then to work on Battlefield 6, then return to Ubisoft and resume directorship on the Splinter Cell remake.

In that same stretch we've also seen Netflix make its Splinter Cell cartoon without Michael Ironside, the Splinter Cell movie starring Tom Hardy get cancelled, and Ubisoft making everyone mad by posting the wrong picture of Sam Fisher, which I genuinely think was intentional because at this point it's clear that Ubisoft just gets off on screwing with us.

Of course, this isn't a problem unique to Splinter Cell. Consider the Sands of Time remake, which was cancelled after six years of futility, or Skull and Bones, which came out six years late, or Beyond Good and Evil 2, which will soon celebrate 20 years of non-existence. Timeliness just isn't Ubisoft's strong suit, which is how we got here—"here" being the recent announcement of a "quieter year" in Ubisoft releases before things start happening in 2027-28—in the first place.

One possible spot of good news, relatively anyway: The 25^th anniversary of the first Splinter Cell game lands on November 18, 2027, about a year and a half from now. Maybe Ubisoft just really digs big anniversaries and has decided that at this point it might as well hold out for a good one before it drops any more Splinter Cell news. So there's something to look forward to. In the meantime, we'll let you know what's cooking in the world of Ghost Recon when it happens.

Getting lost in history in Assassin's Creed Origins

By Andy Kelly

In Assassin’s Creed we usually visit civilisations at their peak, whether it’s Renaissance Italy or London at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Ubisoft could have done this for Origins too, taking us to the golden age of Ancient Egypt. But instead we visit this period of history in its twilight years. The pharaonic line is coming to an end and the Greeks have dramatically transformed the landscape, culture and religious practices of this part of the world.

This makes for a fascinating architectural contrast. In the largest cities you see statues of Egyptian gods crumbling and forgotten, outnumbered by pristine, polished marble statues of Greek legends. And even monuments, like the pyramids of Giza and the Great Sphinx, are already falling apart. There’s a tragedy to seeing this grand civilisation fade away as foreign invaders erect gleaming temples and acropolises across the desert.

It might be the best open world Ubisoft has ever created. While riding through the barren Green Mountains region on horseback, idly exploring with no specific goal in mind, I crested a hill and saw a sprawling Roman city resting in a misty valley below. It stopped me in my tracks. The scale is breathtaking, making even the vast cities of previous Assassin’s Creed games seem small in comparison.

Size isn’t everything when it comes to open worlds, of course. Just look at something like Just Cause, which is enormous but consists of little more than large swathes of dull, featureless countryside and a few unconvincing cities. Origins keeps things interesting by splitting its world up into distinct regions, from the oasis town of Siwa and the rocky canyons of the Black Desert, to the ruin-littered sands of Giza and the cultural epicentre that is Alexandria.

Crocodile tears

Faiyum is one of the prettiest and most interesting locations in the game. Founded to worship Sobek, who takes the form of a crocodile, this city is built around a network of canals and dominated by a beautiful, ornate temple dedicated to the god.

Inside, the priests worship a giant crocodile adorned with gold and jewels who they believe is the embodiment of Sobek, and one quest involves hero Bayek trying to find out why the sacred creature has mysteriously started weeping blood.

It took me a hefty 27 hours to finish Origins and there are still areas on the map cloaked in black, indicating that I haven’t travelled there yet. It’s obscenely huge, although the length is artificially extended somewhat by forcing you to reach a certain level before attempting the next story quest.

Exploring Egypt isn’t as thrilling as sailing the Caribbean in Black Flag, which remains my favourite entry in the series. But it’s a much richer, more convincing world overall, and a precious chance to step into history and experience it firsthand.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is, naturally, a modern Ubisoft game—and as modern Ubisoft games are wont to do, it had some really annoying DLC wrapped up into it alongside an in-game cash shop. One point of contention was a day-one map pack DLC for five bucks, which reveals the location of every collectible in game, thus defeating the purpose of… y'know, looking for and collecting them.

What did Ubisoft reap as a reward for this chicanery? Well, aside from a brief dent to its overall Steam review score—one that's evened out to a respectable "very positive" 80% at the time of writing—not all that much.

According to the analysis work of Alinea Insight, the remaster made a whopping $35.1 million on Steam alone over the first four days. Its day-one DLC, which totals at an eye-watering $85 of cosmetics (and the aforementioned map pack), is responsible for around 2.8% of that number.

Which doesn't sound like a lot, but that's still $1 million that Ubisoft otherwise wouldn't have snagged—and still a tremendous amount of purchases on aggregate. And while my inner gamer naturally balks at the prospect of this DLC, it's almost hard to blame Ubisoft for the move when this is how it's rewarded.

Like, looking at these cosmetic packs—yes, the concept art, modelling, and implementation probably costs quite a bit, but certainly nowhere approaching $1 million. And the map pack, though it galls me, is likely just a few lines of code.

I still think it's deeply cynical, but just like that $90 World of Warcraft dinosaur that made Blizzard $15-$17 million, gamers are not great at actually voting with their wallets in a way that would dissuade companies like Ubisoft, which have no obligation to operate on principle, from basically printing a bunch of free money.

Have you ever thought to yourself, I bet Steve Buscemi would make a good Far Cry villain? I think he would. He's charismatic, superficially good-natured, kind of odd looking, extremely high-strung, and prone to sudden, sometimes random outbursts of extreme violence. And I'm not the only one who thinks so—the people making the live-action Far Cry series for FX do, too.

Word of Buscemi's big role was delivered by the official Far Cry account on X: "Welcome Steve Buscemi to the world of FX's Far Cry. Hope you’re ready to get thrown into the deep end, lose your mind, and make a few catastrophically bad decisions along the way."

There's actually no indication as to what role Buscemi will be playing in the Far Cry show, good guy or bad. At first blush, the announcement might seem to be warning Buscemi of bad things to come during his time in the cast, but I think it's also quite possible to read it as a warning to viewers of all the bad things he's going to do to other people. "Lose your mind and make bad decisions," that's kind of his whole vibe, right?

Buscemi is too old to play Pagan Min or Vaas, and there's obviously only one person who could fill the shoes of Antón Castillo. But he does have kind of a natural Joseph Seed vibe going on—I could definitely see Buscemi as a guy who psychologically breaks someone so completely that they never speak again and won't go outside without a mask on.

Others on Team PCG feel differently. Chris Livingston thinks he's going to be "a weird helpful NPC," maybe like Hurk—Buscemi doesn't really have a Hurk-like physical presence but I can definitely see him firing rockets at random passers-by from the back seat of a busted-up hatchback.

Wes Fenlon, on the other hand, thinks Buscemi will portray Jason Brody, the barely-out-of-his-teens hero of Far Cry 3. They're de-aging actors for the upcoming Lord of the Rings flick The Hunt for Gollum, but even so I think this scenario is unlikely. I suspect it may even be possible that Wes isn't being entirely serious here.

Issy van der Velde opined that Buscemi would "be a great villain" in Far Cry, which is correct, but then went on to imply that he doesn't much care because Michael Mando was "phenomenal" as Vaas and all Issy really wants is to see Mando turn up somewhere.

The press release from FX isn't any help, for the record: It says only that Buscemi has "built a career out of portraying some of the most unique and unforgettable characters" in movies and TV shows ranging from Reservoir Dogs and The Big Lebowski to Boardwalk Empire, The Sopranos, and Wednesday. 'Odd' might be Buscemi's signature move but the man has range, and he could fill either role with equal ease.

Here's his big entrance as weird psycho killer Garland Greene in the 1997 Nicolas Cage classic Con Air:

And here's his big moment as weird sidekick Buscemi (Robert Rodriguez isn't really a details guy, I guess) in the 1995 Antonio Banderas classic Desperado:

(Yes, I have seen some of Buscemi's more recent work, but I like what I like.)

The truth is that Buscemi almost certainly won't play any of the characters we've encountered in the previous Far Cry games. Executive producer Noah Hawley said in April that he's "not specifically adapting any of the games," but will instead build the series around the broader concept of "civilized people thrown into situations where they have to become increasingly uncivilized," and his own take on what a Far Cry story is. But even with that more open-ended approach to the series, if we take it as a hard-and-fast rule that bizarre, flamboyant characters are an essential part of the formula—and I do—then I reckon Buscemi will fit right in.

Have you noticed that things have been kind of quiet on the Ubisoft front lately? Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is doing quite well, but what else has it done for us lately? Where's the new Far Cry? What's going on with Ghost Recon, The Division, Prince of Persia? Where is my Splinter Cell?

In its 2025-26 Universal Registration Document and Annual Financial Report (via GamesRadar), Ubisoft shared a bit of bad news: All of that good stuff is coming, yes, but, well, we're going to be waiting a bit. The company said its 2026-27 fiscal year, which began on April 1, will include Black Flag Resynced and "other targeted premium games" that will be announced later, but that overall the year will have a "lighter new release slate" than it's put up in the past.

But then, good news! A "significantly bigger content pipeline" is expected in the 2027-28 and 2028-29 fiscal years, with new games from Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Ghost Recon, as well as an "acceleration of [Ubisoft's] live services," which—before you write that off as the opposite of good news—includes Rainbow Six Siege, which remains one of Ubi's bona fide hits.

I always read documents like this with a bit of a jaundiced eye. A major videogame publisher is going to publish new games in its best-known and most lucrative franchises at some undetermined point in the future? Not exactly a stop-the-presses moment. Nor is this anything especially new: Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot confirmed in March that new Assassin's Creed and Far Cry games are in the works, and of course they are: We all dutifully play the will they/won't they game, but a new Far Cry and Assassin's Creed is 100% a question of 'when,' not 'if.'

But that's what makes this financial doc a little more interesting for me than it otherwise might have been—because the 'when' part of the equation has proven so vexing for Ubisoft over the years. Beyond Good and Evil 2, which will not be born and refuses to die, is the obvious exemplar, but Ubisoft has been plagued by cancellations, delays, and long, awkward, silences for years.

The company tapped the brakes on annualized Assassin's Creed and Far Cry releases in 2016, which seemed wise at the time. But in the years since, that's come to feel less like 'taking the time to get it right' and more like a simple lack of focus and direction, and an inability to get games finished and released with any kind of timeliness.

That sensation is exacerbated by Ubisoft's highly publicized troubles over the past few years, which have seen multiple rounds of layoffs, studio closures, high-profile creative departures, and underperforming releases; a major restructuring announced in January has only seen more of the same, leading to scenarios like Ubisoft Barcelona laying off employees amidst the success of Black Flag Resynced.

So this, basically, is Ubisoft asking for more time: Not from you, the gamer, so much, but from its shareholders, who may be getting a bit jittery about the company's chances for a comeback and may therefore be more likely to entertain offers from outsiders—like, say, Tencent, a major backer of its new "creative house" structure. Tencent didn't make a move on Ubisoft in 2025 as some had speculated, but it did take a run at it in 2022, and while some Chinese companies, like NetEase, seem to be disentangling themselves from the Western game biz somewhat, Tencent's significant backing of Ubisoft's new "creative house" structure suggests to me that if it sees a clear shot, it's going to take it.

Assassin's Creed Unity, it hardly needs to be said, had its share of problems. At launch, the game which was intended to be Ubisoft's big technical showcase on the then-new PS4 and Xbox One was rife with sometimes-hilarious bugs, filled with map barf, crammed with microtransactions, had a rather odd emphasis on co-op gameplay in a historically singleplayer series, and was—a little garnish—venomously reactionary about its setting: the French Revolution.

And yet, and yet, I maintain it was actually one of the best Assassin's Creed games, and represented a much more interesting avenue the series could have gone down had Ubisoft not embraced full Witcher 3-ification in games like Odyssey, Origins, Shadows, and Valhalla.

I would like to call Jean Guesdon, former AC brand content director, as witness to Unity's defence. In a chat with the most recent Retro Gamer magazine (via GamesRadar), he came to the game's defence, hailing it as an overlooked entry in the series that fell victim to its own ambition.

Unity is "one of the most underestimated games in the series," says Guesdon. That's not to say it's unfairly underestimated—Guesdon is clear that the game had its troubles: "Sadly, Unity’s launch was a huge challenge because of several reasons," he says.

"Like Assassin’s Creed 3 with AnvilNext, Unity’s development was impacted by the incredible new tech allowing for 1:1 scale, interiors, massive crowds, a brand-new parkour system and an integrated multiplayer component."

All that whizzbang tech gave the devs a lot of plates to spin: "Pushing content and tech at the same time is always very demanding, and this opus maybe pushed too many things at once," says Guesdon. But dammit, it had ideas—"Unity’s team decided that the key component would be Paris, one city only. Hence all decisions were made in order to make the setting shine and ensure players would experience the French Revolution like never before.

"This is why all mechanics and systems were more dense and focussed," says Guesdon. "Maybe we could have done better in terms of progressive introduction but overall I don’t think the experience was too complicated."

I adore Unity's humid Paris streets, thronged with sans-culottes, and I love the fact that it's the only Assassin's Creed game I've ever played where stealth felt like it served a purpose—where combat carried any actual risk. Will Ubi ever try to pick up those ideas, and return to the dense, one-city game format of yore? Well, it sort of tried that with Mirage, and people didn't like it, but I'm holding out hope regardless.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced has been a massive success for Ubisoft, having sold two million copies in a day and breaking the series' concurrent player records on Steam by nearly 40,000. Despite this good news, the company is planning to lay off 51 developers at Ubisoft Barcelona. These layoffs were announced last month, alongside reductions at Ubisoft's teams in Winnipeg and Belgrade.

Ubisoft Barcelona has a long history of supporting the publisher's larger studios, including Assassin's Creed, The Crew, Ghost Recon, and Immortals: Fenyx Rising. Of course, its latest efforts have been on Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, where it was responsible for all the underwater sections. Those beautiful (terrifying) diving bell sites? Brought to life by Ubisoft Barcelona.

"Ubisoft Barcelona did all the underwater levels," explains Manel Cota, a tech and gameplay animator on the team, on social media. "And that same team is being fired right now because Ubisoft thinks that's what we deserve :)"

This frustration from a blow right as you should be celebrating is echoed by quality assurance lead Isabel Codina García. "Today is a bittersweet day," García said on social media. After having worked on the Black Flag remake for over two and a half years, "the whole AC team at Ubisoft Barcelona was informed of a collective redundancy plan."

"After seven years at Ubisoft Barcelona, this is not how I imagined it would end. But I am genuinely grateful for the people I have met and everything I have learned along the way."

Ubisoft Barcelona will ne holding a strike for three days from r/gaming

But the team isn't going quietly. The Spanish union La Confederación General del Trabajo has called for a three-day strike, starting today, over the planned cuts at Ubisoft Barcelona. "After an intense production, the company claims a 'strategic shift' to justify these layoffs," the flyer reads. "After years of dedication to our team, the company has turned its back on us. We will never see the fruits of our labour, and the reward for our hard work will be the loss of our jobs."

I've sunk legendary galleons, sailed across the Caribbean procuring plunder, and I've experienced Edward Kenway's redemption arc from start to finish. But upon rolling credits on Ubisoft's nostalgia-fuelled remake, I came to a realisation: almost everything good in Black Flag Resynced exists in the original game.

Sure, it's prettier and quality of life changes do help sand away the rougher edges, but removing all friction from a game isn't necessarily a good thing. Take stealth sequences, for instance—Black Flag Resynced now allows you to crouch anywhere, but it also removes all fail conditions from stealth missions, making the system somewhat redundant.

This give-and-take is something I experienced frequently with the remake. Resynced makes climbing far faster, but this means you no longer have to think about movement as you zoom up the side of almost every structure in sight. And don't even get me started on removing hidden blade combat, fisticuffs, and temporary weapons. The new cutlass-only fighting may be slightly harder, but it's ultimately bland thanks to fewer options.

I've now spent 40 hours with Black Flag Resynced, but I find myself unconvinced it ever needed a remake, especially one which more often chooses to change core components over retaining the feel of the original. It'd be a lie to say Resynced isn't good, but almost everything good in it is still good in Black Flag. Better, in fact, if a fond nostalgic adventure be your wish and you'd prefer not to toss a handful of dubloons in the sand for a game you likely own.

Hopping into the original Black Flag after playing Resynced, I was shocked by how remarkably well the game has aged. The combat still feels fluid (albeit easy thanks to chain finishers) but it benefits from the classic high profile, low profile control scheme that came to define the first three Assassin's Creed games—something the remake also does away with.

The movement and climbing also feel far more grounded. Instead of zipping up the sides of cathedrals, you've got to route yourself somewhat, especially since Black Flag includes a bunch of tailing sequences that require you to keep a target in sight at all times. Many players despised these, but after playing Resynced where stealth never mattered and I could murder my way through every situation, the challenge felt positively refreshing.

Alongside the visual upgrade, one of the few unequivocally positive changes is that ship combat feels far more dramatic in Resynced. The Jackdaw (Ed's ship) has new firing modes and officer upgrades, but naval battles are also significantly harder. Where, in the original, you could feasibly defeat a legendary ship without a fully upgraded Jackdaw, that feels almost impossible in the remake—ships fire fast, accurately, and use mortars more.

If you found naval combat in Black Flag too easy, this is definitely a good change. For my part, I found that the tough ship battles came to revolve around Lucy Baldwin (one of the new officers) and her Perfect Brace ability, which all but mitigates damage when you time a brace appropriately.

Even 13 years later, Black Flag's story is still first-rate, exploring, as it does, a man driven by greed and personal ambition, qualities that still make him a breath of fresh air by comparison with Assassin's Creed's usual goody two shoes protagonists. It's so well-written, in fact, that the new quests Resynced adds can't help but come off poorly by comparison.

The same goes for retaining the in-game shop that lets you purchase cosmetics that look like they're right out of Skull and Bones, or even buy the locations of in-game collectibles for real money. And don't forget the inexplicable addition of the weird Animus projects from Assassin Creed Shadows. I'm not sure who thought adding a battlepass mechanic to the remake was a good idea, but honestly, it sucks.

Ubisoft added many of these elements to modernise Black Flag, but ultimately creates a juxtaposition between old and new which really doesn't reflect well on either Ubisoft itself or the state of our industry. Black Flag was a formative game for me, arguably the beginning of open world bloat for the series, but a fun, well-written adventure with some of the best side content around—no wonder it's one of the few Assassin's Creed games I 100%-ed.

But Resynced ultimately doesn't feel like the same game to me. I thought it did, but then I went back and played the original Black Flag and remembered what it was actually like. I suppose it depends why you're playing a remake. If your goal is to revisit your past experiences and nostalgia, the original will serve you far better in that endeavor.

After Traffic and Breaking Bad used it for scenes set there it became know as "the Mexican filter", though it's sometimes used for scenes set in South Asia or anywhere a bit tropical. You may recognize it as "the piss filter" that stained the original incarnation of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It's the yellow gradient that's usually intended to make things look warm, and it's not to everyone's taste. Like piss, I guess.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is the latest videogame to fall under the stream, making Edward Kenway look a bit more tanned and the waters look a bit more green. I didn't think it was particularly excessive until I saw some before and after screenshots with it removed, and yeah, it does seem a bit dehydrated actually.

These images come courtesy of Blu, a modder who has cooked up a reshade called ACBlackFlag Natural Colors: "A simple reshade preset that removes the ugly yellow filter from the game and corrects oversaturated colors."

You'll need the latest version of Reshade to install it. While you're at it, the ACBlackFlagFix will let you uncap the cutscene framerate, set cloth to animate at 60 fps, and remove pillarboxing, while Fast Launch will get you through those annoying startup videos at a rate of knots.

I gotta hand this one to the suits: I thought gamers might find a $60 price tag on a rehash of a 13-year-old Assassin's Creed game to be a bit much, and apparently I was wrong. Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced sold more than two million copies in just one day, and has handily surpassed Steam player counts of newer games in the series, including Assassin's Creed Shadows.

"Dash my Buttons... Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced has already passed 2 million copies sold!" Ubisoft wrote on X the day after the overhauled Black Flag launched. "Whether you're sailing with us again, or stepping aboard the Jackdaw for the first time: THANK YOU from the bottom of ARR hearts."

It's notable here that Ubisoft refers specifically to two million copies sold, as opposed to the "one million players" it used to characterize the success of Assassin's Creed Shadows in its first day of release. As Joshua Wolens noted at the time, it left us uncertain as to how Shadows was really doing compared to Valhalla, although Ubisoft later said Shadows had put up the "second-highest day one sales revenues in Assassin's Creed franchise history."

A more straightforward comparison can be found in the concurrent player numbers on Steam, where Black Flag Resynced stands head and shoulders above the rest. Here too, some differences need to be accounted for: Ubisoft had a years-long no Steam dalliance so Valhalla didn't arrive on that storefront until a couple years after its debut on the Epic Games Store, and Shadows was weighed down by coordinated culture war nonsense over the presence of the Black samurai Yasuke. Shadows also costs $10 more than Black Flag Resynced.

Still, it's about as close to apples-to-apples as we're going to get, and the numbers make it clear: Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

(These are ordered by their all-time peak concurrent player count.)

"Black Flag has always held a special place in the heart of the community, and ours." Assassin's Creed brand boss Martin Schelling said. "Bringing it back with Resynced was a promise to that passion for Edward’s adventures, and to the unique sense of freedom players experienced back then. Seeing two million players set sail on day one, along with the great reviews from critics, is the greatest reward we could have hoped for."

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is here and violently colon-less, despite my deep-rooted ancestral urge to fill every gap between those words with dots and dashes, as our forefathers did in the days of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines.

But it's not Ubisoft's crimes against grammar that prompted the game to hit Mixed Steam reviews at launch (it's picked up since, and at time of writing is at Mostly Positive). It was the fact that, in typical Ubisoft fashion, the game's store page ripples with microtransactions for outfits, weapons, and the obligatory 'Pay $5 to play less of the $60 game you just bought' map-reveal pack.

The reviews were home to a lot of people who felt nickel-and-dimed. "What's the point of getting the deluxe version when, immediately in game, there's $84.91-worth [of] 'DLC' that you don't own" asked one. "I want a single player experience I can enjoy WITHOUT microtransactions," wrote another.

Ubi, perhaps inadvisably, is actually responding to some of these reviews, though. The studio's boilerplate response to a bunch of complaints about the game's microtransactions reads as follows:

We've seen your feedback since launch, and we're reading all of it. Thank you for caring this much about Black Flag Resynced. We want to be clear on one point: the standard edition is the full, complete experience. Every mission, every island, the full story and the complete world are all there, with nothing held back. The additional packs are entirely optional extras for players who want them, never a requirement to enjoy or complete the game.

We'll keep listening as you play!

At least one positive review that mentioned the microtransactions got a differently-worded but similar "We hear you" response. "The frustration around day-one DLC is something we take seriously," Ubi said in that one, while reiterating that the game's DLC isn't a 100% necessary purchase.

Which certainly strikes me as a little odd! I can think of two possible explanations here. Either Ubi genuinely thinks people are going to experience some sort of Damascene conversion upon being confronted with the corporation's unassailable logic—which would be very silly—or it's just coating a fairly catty 'You control the buttons you press' response in anodyne marketing speak. Which would also be silly, but at least in a kind of amusing way.

I've not touched the remake myself, but our Rory wasn't happy with how Ubisoft had tried to relentlessly monetise the Black Flag remake when he was playing it. Somehow, I doubt a copy-paste assurance that the DLC isn't necessary to beat the game will make him feel any better about it.

Our reviewer Morgan actually agrees with Ubi that the DLC is entirely ignorable outfits and weapons, but therein lies the tackiness of the whole affair. What's actually annoying, he reckons, is how easy it is to accidentally end up on the store page during normal play—when you press Start to pause, pressing Start again to unpause will actually take you to the store tab. To leave the pause menu, you actually need to hit B/Circle. Diabolical stuff.

Black Flag Resynced has finally launched, and with it, a reprisal of the eternal debate surrounding the different stripes of Assassin's Creed combat. As Morgan notes in our review, Resynced ultimately "loses more than it gains" thanks to its wide-ranging changes masquerading as quality of life, and I'm inclined to agree.

For me, the most glaring offender here are the fights. Now don't get me wrong, Black Flag's combat was a bit of a joke, an almost cinematic experience of watching an endless array of beautifully brutal finisher animations play out before your eyes, as Edward terminated his fifth ship crew that day. It was cakewalk combat, and it's even easier to see that if you return to Black Flag after playing Resynced.

The counter window is absurdly long and you only have to kill one enemy to chain finisher everyone else around you. But what Black Flag did have was choice. You could whip out your hidden blades and decimate enemies in a more low profile manner, pick up a massive axe and swing it about your head, or even carry and reload a musket, and each weapon had its own bespoke melee animations. I remember being amazed the first time I killed a fella with a musket in Black Flag that they'd even made animations for it.

Resynced, by comparison, only lets you use boring old cutlasses, and I struggle to see how removing a vast swathe of situational weaponry is an upgrade. For my part, I almost exclusively used hidden blades, throwing knives, and the occasional musket in the original—I literally would've unequipped my cutlasses if I could have. So playing through Black Flag Resynced in its entirety with them didn't really feel like the same game to me.

Not to say that Resynced doesn't have some decent ideas combat wise. Its kicks-on-demand are fun, and it's certainly a tad more challenging than Black Flag ever was, but what I struggle to understand is why that increase in difficulty couldn't have combined with the original's weapon choice? All Black Flag's combat really needed to be better was removing the endless chain finishers and reducing the counter window—that alone would've made a huge difference.

I feel like the removal of temporary weapons also fundamentally misunderstands that combat isn't their only use. Having a musket, for instance, lets you take out troublesome sharpshooters in towers or on ship tops—the only way to do that now is get close and hope your pistol has the range, or climb up and kick them off. Throwing knives let you quickly kill enemies that spot you at a distance, so are useful in stealth, but also slick as hell.

These were never only weapons for pure combat, but tools that changed how you approached situations, which is the core premise of Assassin's Creed, and something you kind of needed before Resynced removed fail conditions for stealth missions. The saddest part is that we have a new enemy with a blunderbuss. I feel like that would have been an incredible temporary weapon to pick up and use. What did we get instead? A rope dart.

Resynced's combat is certainly passable, it just isn't Black Flag combat. You can't remove viable playstyles from a game and then claim it's a true remake. If I can't play a remake the same way I played the original, it's something else entirely. But that's ultimately my issue with Black Flag Resynced—it may be beautiful and have better ship combat, but its myriad changes mean it doesn't retain the feel of the original, something I realised when I went back and played Black Flag after finishing Resynced.

Finding Blackbeard's Treasure in Black Flag Resynced is actually a lot tougher than the game's other treasure maps, mainly because it doesn't give you any coordinates, forcing you to rely on your knowledge of the Caribbean. This is a new quest that was added in Resynced, but you won't get it until after you complete the Do Not Go Gently main quest.

Edward finds the treasure map hidden in Blackbeard's hat, which starts the hunt, so you can't miss it. Below I'll explain where the map points to, and how to navigate the area it's contained within.

Where to find Blackbeard's Treasure in Black Flag Resynced

The location Blackbeard's Map points to is Anotto Bay (coordinates 590,245) to the north of Kingston on the north coast of the island, in the Charlotte region. When you arrive, you'll find a bunch of pirate ships also laying claim to the treasure, who you'll have to sink before landing the Jackdaw.

Finding the treasure is relatively straightforward. From where you land, hop across the boats to your left and dive down, looking for the sunken mineshaft. You'll have to navigate these tunnels, dodging sharks and sea anemones until you reach an area with wooden platforms, gunpowder barrels, and a bunch of enemies. Pick up one of the kegs and take it over to the far side of the room where the rubble is (this will glow green when you hold LT on controller).

Place the barrel down and shoot it to blow up the rubble. Continue on until you reach the cave where you have to confront Blackbeard's former sailing master, and then grab another gunpowder barrel and carry it up the path to the right of the waterfall, where you'll find a second pile of rubble to destroy.

Inside, you'll find the treasure, though you'll have to head back to Great Inagua afterwards to actually complete the quest. As a reward, you'll get Blackbeard's portrait, which you can hang in the loot cave area of the manor.

Completing the Art Lover quest in Black Flag Resynced sees you finding art pieces from Great Inagua's scattered collection to return them to the manor. This is one of the new quests that was added in Resynced, alongside a new character, Bernard. This aged butler served the previous owner of the house before Du Casse took it over.

There are lots of different ways to gather the Great Inagua art collection and the reward is one of Ezio's outfits, so I'll run through the easiest ways to gather what you need.

Black Flag Resynced art collection locations

To complete the Art Lover quest, you'll need to find 30 art pieces across the Caribbean, though you'll have to return to talk to Bernard once you've found 15 and then 25, before completing the quest at 30, earning yourself the Master Assassin outfit (One of Ezio's outfits) and the Obsidian Hull ornament.

There are many ways to gather art, but it's worth noting the Templar and pirate portraits you hang in the manor don't count towards this quest. Here's how to gather the art collection:

1. Collecting ship models

Every time you board a ship for the first time after defeating it, you'll earn its model, and these models count as part of the Inagua art collection since you can display them on a shelf in the main room. Since there's a British and Spanish variant for each ship type, that's ten art pieces you can easily earn, not to mention that you'll unlock extra ship models as you complete the main story.

2. Buying art pieces

You can buy six art pieces from any General Store, though since these cost Reales, you might want to hold onto your money and leave these as a last resort. It depends how quickly you want to complete the quest and get Ezio's Revelations outfit.

3. Looting plantation warehouses

The first time you loot a plantation warehouse, you'll get a painting you can hang in the manor, which counts towards the Great Inagua art collection. Plantations are easy to find; simply look for the island symbols that have three plants growing out of some soil. You'll have to head inside, find the key, and unlock the warehouse door. These can also contain treasure maps.

4. Kenway's fleet missions

Some of Kenway's fleet missions (the ones you organise via the map in the manor or Jackdaw's cabin) provide art pieces as rewards, specifically, the Piracy and Trade missions. They also have a scale and skull symbol on the map and list their type below their title.

You'll need a brig for Piracy and a schooner for Trade. Simply look for the missions that have a little furniture or art piece image in their listed rewards—they're usually pretty easy to recognise as, besides map pieces, they're the only rewards that have "1x" next to them.

5. Treasure maps

While not all do, some buried treasure maps contain art pieces as their rewards. Specifically:

• New Bone treasure map (722,607)
• Abaco Island treasure map (543,694)
• Jiquey treasure map (812,114)
• Principe treasure map (605,132)

That last one is locked by the main story until you go to the island of Principe, since it's not on the main map. If you're struggling with any of these, check out our treasure map guide linked above.

With all of these, you should easily be able to cobble together the 30 pieces you need, just make sure to return to Bernard when the quest marker reappears in Great Inagua. If you want to know your progress, open the world map, press X to open the quest list via the prompt in the top right, and cycle through sidequests to find and toggle it active.

I'm not sure who asked for daily quests and what is essentially a battle pass in Black Flag Resynced, but here we are. Similar to Shadows, you can earn Data Fragments to spend on unlocking special cosmetics and keys in your Animus projects.

First off, make sure that you have the Eyes in the Dark project active, as this one gives you rewards in Black Flag itself versus AC Shadows. Otherwise, here's how to earn Data Fragments so you can spend them on new cosmetics and keys, which you can use to unlock further items in the exchange.

How to get Data Fragments in Black Flag Resynced

The main way you get Data Fragments is by completing anomalies located around the Caribbean. These activities first unlocked for me after I completed Sequence 4: This Old Cove, where you take over Great Inagua. If you open your map and press tab (X on controller) to open your quest log, you can cycle down to anomalies and look at all the different ones available.

The range of activities depends on which project you have active in the Animus, but generally they are quite straightforward, and either involve sinking corrupted ships and convoys, or completing short puzzle sections, such as the rifts. Once done, you'll earn the amount of Data Fragments listed, which you can then spend to unlock rewards on your active project track.

These rewards include cosmetics, weapons, but also keys, which you can spend in the exchange to purchase items themed around other Assassins Creed games, too. You'll get new anomalies to complete based on the timer above each one. So, if you complete one, you'll have to wait a while for another to replace it.

Though it makes a variety of changes to the original, Black Flag Resynced adds quite a lot of new content to the much-beloved Assassin's Creed instalment. There's a boatload of new sidequests, including a whole new chapter you unlock later in the game. There are also tweaks to combat, stealth, the Jackdaw, and legendary ships.

The point of this guide is to walk you through the new content as you play, so you know what unlocks when, and don't miss anything along the way.

How to access all new content in Black Flag Resynced

Before I run through how to access all of the new stuff in order (so you can use this guide while playing), there are a few more general changes to the game.

First off, combat and stealth:

• A new blunderbuss-wielding enemy
• The ability to crouch anywhere by pressing X and a visibility meter
• You can perform Heavy Strikes by holding the attack button
• There are now Trinkets you can equip with unique buffs. For example, finding all Mayan Stones now also gives you a Trinket that absorbs gunfire as well are the Mayan Armor it used to
• You can't pick up enemy weapons anymore
• No more hidden blade combat beyond finishers
• No more fail conditions for stealth missions if you are found

And in terms of the Jackdaw and ship combat:

• Three new officer quests that provide upgrades, such as firing double broadsides, enhanced brace, and the ram ability you used to get by defeating all legendary ships
• New secondary firing modes for ship weapons, including:
  • Continuous Heated Shots for broadside cannons
  • Double shot for the bowchasers
  • Shrapnel barrels for the barrels
  • Deadman's Cohort for the mortar (unlocked via his officer quest)
  • Swivel guns can now be manually aimed AC Rogue-style
• Legendary ships are tougher and respawn over time
• New sea shanties, some of which you unlock via sidequests (like Captain Stede Bonnet)

The way you get many of Black Flag's outfits has also changed, the Jackdaw's Ship Plans are now called Ultimate Plans, and the Treasure Maps have changed somewhat, too. All that said, here's everything new in order of when it unlocks during the game.

1. Rope Dart (Sequence 3: Sugarcane and Its Yields)

This is Black Flag's new combat tool, a rope dart you can hang enemies with, or throw at them to pull them towards you, though it has a cooldown.

2. A bunch of quests, Rifts, and two new pets (Sequence 4: This Old Cove)

This is the first major set of unlocks once you take the cove at Great Inagua. This includes:

• Art Lover quest: You'll meet the butler, Bernard, during This Old Cove, and he tasks you with collecting art pieces to restore the manor's lost collection.
• Two new officer quests: A Second Chance and A Proper Shipwright will appear to the southeast and west respectively. These quests see you recruit two officers to the Jackdaw who provide special abilities and a nice pair of pistols if you complete their questlines fully.
• Rifts and Animus Projects: Rifts are new narrative activities that explore Edward Kenway's choices. The first one appeared for me on the south coast of Great Inagua after I finished This Old Cove. From this point on you can also earn Data Fragments for Animus Projects, unlocking cosmetics and gear. As you progress the story, you'll unlock more Rifts, so keep an eye out.
• Two new pets: The first new pet is Soot the Cat in the town of Great Inagua, marked by the Cat Distribution System local event. The second is Albert the Monkey, who you can find at the Monkey Business local event marker in southeast Havana, off the shore on a ship. Your equipped pet in your loadout will sit on the railing as you sail.

3. Blackbeard's Treasure sidequest (Sequence 8: Do Not Go Gently)

This sidequest unlocks after Do Not Go Gently in Sequence 8 and sees you tracking down Blackbeard's treasure via a special map. This quest automatically starts through the main story, so you don't need to worry about activating it yourself. This acts as an epilogue for Ed Thatch's character.

4. Captain Stede Bonnet sidequest (Sequence 8: Marooned)

Once you complete Marooned, you'll find the Captain Stede Bonnet sidequest marker in the manor in Great Inagua. As with Blackbeard's Treasure, this quest is about the merchant-turned-pirate, Stede Bonnet, who you encounter throughout the game.

5. A World Without Gold chapter and one more officer quest (Sequence 11: Everything is Permitted)

Though this is a very late unlock, it's actually most significant for my money, adding an entirely new chapter to the game. Once you complete Everything is Permitted, you'll find the That Bastard Maynard quest marker by the tavern in Great Inagua, after you leave the Assassin's Compound with Anne. As you might have guessed, this quest is about Maynard, the pirate-hunter you briefly met in the original game.

You'll unlock the officer, Tobias Smith, via this questline when you complete I Just Want to Talk as well as his upgrade. His quest then continues separately to A World Without Gold. If you then complete No Box Dark Enough (which you'll find in Great Inagua) and then his subsequent quests, you'll unlock a new mortar type for the Jackdaw which fires a continuous stream. This is the final major new unlock in Black Flag Resynced.

Black Flag Resynced, the much-anticipated remake of the classic pirate-themed Assassin's Creed installment, is set to release shortly, letting us revisit Edward Kenway, kill a million British soldiers, and sink a navy's worth of ships. It's all in the name of plunder, though.

The remake is visually quite impressive, but there's also a bunch of new content, such as quests, pets, improved ship battles, and all sorts. Below, I'll run through when you can play, but also explain about preloading so you can hop right in on launch.

Assassins Creed Black Flag Resynced release times for each region

Black Flag Resynced releases on July 9 with the exception of just a few regions. The console release times are slightly different, since it comes out midnight local time on those platforms, but as for PC, here's when you can play the game:

• West Coast US: 7 am PDT
• East Coast US: 10 am EDT
• UK: 3 pm BST
• Europe: 4 pm CEST
• Australia: 12 am AEST (July 10)
• New Zealand: 2 pm NZDT (July 10)

For any other regions, the image above lists most locations. You can find Black Flag Resynced's technical requirements on the Steam page.

Does Assassins Creed Black Flag Resynced have a preload?

Yes, Black Flag Resynced does have a preload option available and it's active right now, having started on July 7, meaning you can download it in advance on both PC and console. A good thing, too, since the game is reasonably large, requiring 65 GB available space.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced might go down as one of the more puzzling remakes ever conceived. Not only is it bizarre that Ubisoft decided to kick off a likely streak of remakes with the sixth game of the series, but it also chose a game so recently and universally enjoyed that the only way to "remake" it is to simply put out the same game again.

A cleaned-up remaster might have been better than what Ubisoft has done here. Resynced is tirelessly faithful to the qualities that set Black Flag apart in this series—sailing the Jackdaw is as great as ever, now distinguished by a newer Anvil engine that enables dynamic weather, time-of-day, and a truly seamless open world—but fundamental changes to combat, stealth, and encounter design reveal that this is essentially Black Flag stuffed inside Assassin's Creed Shadows.

Resynced is good. It's slick, ridiculously beautiful, and improves on the original Black Flag in several ways. I'm impressed by Ubisoft's Singapore's obvious love for the source material—every story beat and cutscene has been recreated shot-for-shot with original performances intact. If you've never played the second-best Assassin's Creed game ever made, Resynced will get the job done.

For a while, I even believed it would outshine the original Black Flag—I was wooed by Resynced's breathtaking Caribbean vistas that stretched further than my PS3 could be asked, taken by its swashbuckling ship-to-ship showdowns, and impressed by the return of "advanced parkour" mechanics like back and side ejects. Ubisoft spent a generation transforming Assassin's Creed from a stealth-action power fantasy into a loot-driven RPG with spammy combat, and only now is it trying to make amends. Resynced feels like Ubisoft teaching itself how to make a proper Assassin's Creed again, and graded on that curve, it's quite good.

But then, after rolling credits, I reinstalled that original game. Even though I was retreading missions that I'd literally just played newer versions of, I had so much more fun in Black Flag 2013 that I just kept playing… and playing, and playing, until I'd completed both games front-to-back in the same week.

This turned out to be a useful exercise (I told my fiancé, puzzled by a second round of sea shanties emanating from my Steam Deck), because it took a return to old Assassin's Creed to properly appreciate mechanics, design choices, and an entire storyline that, according to internet consensus and Ubisoft, weren't worth preserving. Now having braved Black Flag's dreaded tailing missions, indulged in Ezio-era chain killing, and hacked the computers of my Abstergo coworkers, I reckon this 13-year-old game has aged quite gracefully.

I'm glad Resynced is here, but honestly? The original is better.

Jumper

Take parkour and climbing. Ubisoft is making a big deal about Resynced's parkour being a step up from Shadows, Mirage, and Valhalla, and while that's true, that's setting the bar on the floor. Compared to the original, Edward's updated movement is stilted and floaty. Classic maneuvers are there, but they don't flow very well, resulting in freerunning that looks like bespoke animations playing on a timeline rather than a fluid sequence. Whatever black magic Ubi used to hide these animation seams in the 2010s was lost in the remake process.

Perhaps Ubi is satisfied with less convincing parkour as long as it's faster. Resynced's locomotion is designed as if Black Flag's meticulous animations were a nuisance. Remake Edward wallruns straight up single-story buildings like he's Spider-Man, then proceeds to expedite larger climbs through silly-looking vertical leaps that have more in common with Sly Cooper than Ezio Auditore. When I should be punished for chancing an unwise jump, Edward suddenly gains springs in his boots to clear the gap.

For as much guff as the old AC games get for finicky climbing, Black Flag represented six games of refinements—steering Edward over rooftops, through branches, and across highwires in 2026 is still expressive, and less prone to accidents than the first few games. Climbs are smooth, but weighty and methodical. It takes some time and a little brainpower to crest a church tower or fort. In my unscientific test using the same building in 2013 vs 2026, remake Edward flew up this church twice as fast:

I find the part where original Edward carefully climbs around a window overhang, followed by remake Edward phasing straight through it, to be illustrative.

Resynced is functional and quick, but it's not cool or (dare I say) immersive. And man, that used to be a core appeal of this series. Neither system is complex, but the old climbing at least feels intentional—like we're meant to experience the effort and time it takes to scale a structure that was never meant to be climbed.

That pace has a grounding effect that extends beyond walls. Remake Edward no longer runs with any simulated momentum, meaning he can instantly change direction or flip a u-turn like he's a Dark Souls protagonist. It's a very artificial, videogame-y feel that I ended up resenting the more I played the weightier original.

Blade dance

Even when Resynced's systems are objectively better, Ubi has failed to respect the rule of cool. Black Flag's reimagined combat carries over Shadows' dodge/parry and light/heavy attacks, with the addition of Edward's signature chain kills. It's more engaging than the original's simplistic "counter and instakill everybody" approach, but confusingly, the remake actually reduces Edward's combat options by a lot.

Hidden blades are no longer a primary weapon, now relegated to finisher animations. You can't steal enemy muskets, sabers or heavy axes—temporary pickups that carried their own advantages, drawbacks, and cool finisher animations in the original.

No, remake Edward is strictly a cutlass man, except now he can kick enemies. I don't think the tradeoff was worth it, because Black Flag was never lacking challenging combat. I remember liking Edward as a terrifying pirate terminator soloing the crews of rival brigs, and that impression was backed up by my replay. It's not cerebral stuff, but the weapon pickups gave me more ways to play with my food, and fluid chainkills are gratifying for the same reasons the Batman Arkham games still kick ass.

With respect to some new, freshly gruesome Edward finishers, the remake combat is too mushy and spammy to accomplish the same fantasy. Old AC is about messing dudes up and looking awesome doing it, but new AC is about cleaving away at a health bar.

This is especially true in Resynced's occasional forced boss fights, which replace moments where you're meant to stealthily assassinate targets. You know, like assassins do.

The chase

At least Resynced wins in the sneaking department. The arrival of Shadows' crouch button instantly elevates both the complexity and fantasy of stalking targets from rooftops. The majority of Black Flag's missions involve infiltration and neck-stabbing, so this is a significant upgrade. I felt empowered to explore compounds and avoid guards more often than I killed them, which I attribute to a gracious window between guards seeing Edward and actually pursuing him. Stealth within compounds was the highlight of Shadows, so this is no surprise, but I'm disappointed that Ubi has also repeated that game's mistakes with the cities surrounding those compounds.

The remakes of Kingston, Havana, and Nassau are faithful and, in some cases, even expanded, but Ubi has rendered them less dynamic by nerfing the British and Spanish troops that patrol them. Rooftop guards are completely absent in neutral areas, which kills all the tension of freerunning from A to B. If you do manage to piss off guards, they won't even try to chase you outside of their immediate station. Caught trying to steal booty in a restricted zone? Just run outside and they'll forget you exist.

Ubi has lost the art of the chase, and it sucks. Chases were once a fun, unique feature of Assassin's Creed that forced you to take paths that guards could not easily follow, break line-of-sight to avoid gunshots, and keep your cool long enough to lose a tail in a haystack, bench, or closet. Ubi had already started to deemphasize notoriety systems by the time Black Flag came around—guards will quickly forget about Edward once he loses them, and you don't have to tear down posters of your face—but chases themselves persisted. Resynced lovingly recreated all of those benches, wells, and closets, then gave me exactly zero reasons to use them.

It's one of many ways that Resynced subtly changes the original Black Flag in the name of "quality of life," but ends up blander for it. The series' infamous tailing missions are now much easier. Thanks to no rooftop guards, you can just follow from above with zero worries, and if you do get spotted, just skip to the end of the mission by killing your target and looting the relevant info instead. I know these missions were unpopular with the impatient, but the occasional round of enforced stealth gave AC's repetitive infiltrations some variety while utilizing city space that was otherwise just there.

They also reinforced that, occasionally, stealth is the entire point. These games aren't as fun when every problem can be solved by a hidden blade.

Ship combat has been grazed by the easy beam, too. The Jackdaw is significantly more maneuverable in the remake, a small but consequential player buff that makes follow-up cannon volleys easier while in motion. I also noticed that enemy ships were generally less aggressive on normal difficulty—when I returned to 2013 Black Flag after 25 hours with the remake, I got my ass handed to me by a level one pirate hunter.

The Abstergo of it all

And, oh yeah, Resynced also surgically removes a huge chunk of Black Flag's story. The entire conceit of the original game is that you're an Abstergo Entertainment employee rummaging through Desmond's DNA so that a fictional Ubisoft can turn Edward's memories into a videogame while the Templars covertly seek the precursor technology at the heart of the story. Those sequences are just totally gone, replaced by an Animus interface only used for battle pass unlocks. What a downgrade.

I'm surprised that the removal of all Abstergo business was universally cheered upon announcement. The present day stuff was never my favorite part of these games, but I've always considered Black Flag's a net positive. The interludes were short, semi-optional, and rewarded fans with a mountain of worldbuilding through emails, voice logs, and hidden videos. My recent playthrough reminded me that the ending of these episodes is pretty terrible, but so reveals a lost opportunity. Ubisoft could have directed resources at making this integral part of the original game better, but they just deleted it and replaced it with nothing at all.

It's revisionist history that nobody liked this part of the game—I did, for one, and plenty of reviewers did too. Are we meant to take this as Ubi retconning this series as nothing more than historical action games? Assassin's Creed is a sci-fi world, damn it!

Back-to-back

50 hours across two back-to-back Black Flag playthroughs left me with a lot to chew on. It's a testament to Black Flag's triumphant sailing that it was fun enough to do twice with minimal changes. Time has not been as kind to Edward Kenway, who I'm now convinced is a dull character with an unearned hero arc I was not smart enough to see through at 17 years old.

But the long gap between playthroughs was also long enough to miss a version of these games that was getting a bit tiresome by 2013. There's a comfort to the original's plodding pace, myriad collectibles, and simplistic swordplay that actually stands out more in 2026 than Resynced's "break yet another posture meter" combat and entirely optional stealth.

Resynced's advantages are plain to see. Its world is one of the most gorgeous and realistic depictions of nature ever put to videogame, and its simplifications will likely prove broadly appealing. This is also the better PC port, offering loads of graphical options and features with relatively chill system requirements. It's even Steam Deck verified at launch, though if it's roughly as performant as Shadows, expect a jittery 30 fps target. The original, on the other hand, is finicky in ways that many early 2010s console games were on PC. There's no borderless fullscreen, it doesn't like being alt-tabbed, and will hang for 20 seconds on startup trying to load ancient Uplay stuff unless you cancel it each time. It's also locked at 60 fps by default, but there's a mod for that.

Photoreal graphics are nice (especially on my RTX 5090/9800X3D machine), but man, have you seen the old Black Flag lately? The faces are rough, but that world is still a looker. It's a bit more stylish and grimy than Resynced's polished look, and I prefer it for a pirate adventure.

I just don't think Resynced's marquee features are all that important to me. I kept going through this exercise with Resynced where a new feature would be introduced and I'd assume it was new to the remake—"Oh wow, a home I can customize and improve over time! Neat, they added more ship ammo types! I don't remember these Mayan statue puzzles. Naval contracts? That's definitely new"—only to realize all of them existed in the original, untouched by the remake process.

Resynced is decent, but it takes away more than it adds, as if Ubisoft wasn't confident in the hit game it made 13 years ago. It's a conflicted remake that's worth a look, but is ultimately inessential.

Amazon Game Studios boss Christoph Hartmann left the company earlier this year amidst its move away from big-budget game development and embrace of AI-powered slop. There was no indication at the time as to what he'd get up to next (in fact, I don't think his departure was ever publicly confirmed by Amazon), but now we know: He's signed up with Ubisoft.

Hartmann, who prior to joining Amazon had a long run at Take-Two including 14 years as president of its 2K Games publishing label, will head up Ubisoft's still-needs-a-proper-name Creative House 2, one of five "creative houses" that emerged from the company's recent restructuring.

That will put him in charge of Tom Clancy franchises The Division, Ghost Recon, and Splinter Cell—although the premier Tom Clancy game, Rainbow Six Siege, will remain with Vantage Studios, formerly known as Creative House One—as well as the March of Giants MOBA Ubisoft acquired from Amazon in 2025.

"Christoph is exactly the kind of leader we needed for Creative House 2—a passionate gamer with a proven ability to bring out the best in creative teams and build franchises that last," Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said.

"His experience across development and publishing as well as his management style give him a rare understanding of what it takes to make great games. I am confident Christoph will elevate our teams and brands to new heights and deepen their connection with the dedicated players who love these franchises."

In his own message on LinkedIn, Hartmann said he's "excited to get started" with his new gig.

"For nearly four decades, Ubisoft has created some of the industry’s most iconic franchises and earned a reputation for building ambitious AAA experiences that have entertained millions of players around the world," Hartmann wrote. "It has long been a company I’ve admired for its creativity, the strength of its franchises, and, above all, the talented people behind them.

"My goal is simple: create an environment where talented teams can do their best work and continue building games that players love."

While Hartmann is a significant addition to Ubisoft's executive lineup, the company's seemingly endless thrashing in the water has also cost it some notable names with serious institutional knowledge, including former Assassin's Creed franchise boss Marc-Alexis Côté, former Assassin's Creed Hexe creative director Clint Hocking, and former Assassin's Creed Hexe game director Benoit Richer, all of whom have departed the company in recent months. In June, Ubisoft closed two studios, in Winnipeg and Belgrade, and laid off hundreds of employees; a report at the time by French site LesEchos claimed that further cuts at Ubisoft's American operations are expected, although those cuts have not yet materialized.

Claude Guillemot, one of the five Guillemot brothers who co-founded French publisher Ubisoft, has died in a plane crash.

Reported by Oest-France (via Kotaku), a Cessna 421 light aircraft crashed in the French commune of La Baule-Escoublac, within the Northwestern department of Loire-Atlantique, on Friday afternoon.

According to reports from Loire-Atlantique's SDIS 44 fire and rescue service, Guillemot was one of two people killed after the aircraft crashed near the La-Baule aerodrome, alongside the aircraft's owner and operator.

The mayor of La Baule, Franck Louvrier, issued a statement following the crash. "It was a Cessna 421, a twin-engine propeller, with eight seats," Louvrier said. "The plane was on approach for the landing phase, when, according to witnesses, it made a turn and crashed."

Guillemot co-founded Ubisoft in 1986 along with his brothers, Michel, Christian, Gerard, and the publisher's current chairman CEO Yves. From its origins as a software distribution business, Ubisoft grew into one of the biggest videogame publishers, and has developed numerous world-renowned series including Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six.

Claude Guillemot sat on Ubisoft's board and was executive vice president in charge of operations. Since 1997, he was also chairman and CEO of the Guillemot Corporation, which owns the Hercules digital audio brand and the Thrustmaster accessories label, and through which the Guillemot brothers maintain their stake in Ubisoft.

Ubisoft confirmed Guillemot's death in a press release, stating that it had learned "with deep sadness of the death of Claude Guillemot, co-founder of the Group and President of Guillemot Corporation, in an accident. Our thoughts are with his family and loved ones during this difficult time. No further statements will be made at this time"

Claude Guillemot was 69. The cause of the crash is not currently known, but French aviation authorities are expected to open a formal investigation.

Ubisoft is closing two more studios, in Winnipeg and Belgrade, and making more layoffs throughout the company as part of its ongoing effort to reduce costs and keep the lights on. A source familiar with the matter said the cuts will see up to 380 people put out of work.

The layoffs appear to have landed particularly heavily on Ubisoft's Barcelona studio, which an Insider Gaming report says will see 51 people let go. Mataoui Chakib Souleyman, a programmer at Ubisoft Paris, said on LinkedIn that the number represents 28% of Ubisoft Barcelona's workforce. As part of the restructuring, the studio, which had previously worked on a wide range of Ubisoft properties including Assassin's Creed, The Crew, Ghost Recon, and Immortals: Fenyx Rising, will also shift its focus exclusively to the Rainbow Six franchise.

The closures and layoffs are the latest bad news for Ubisoft employees, coming amidst an ongoing restructuring in which the founding Guillemot family is struggling furiously to retain control of the company while hundreds, and probably thousands, of rank-and-file employees lose their jobs. At the same time, Ubisoft is leaning ever-harder into AI, and investing heavily into generative AI in particular, despite continued pushback against the adoption of the technology in videogames.

The reorganization has Ubisoft divided internally into five "creative houses," each responsible for a portion of the company's properties; the largest creative house (and the only one with a proper name), Vantage Studios, is headed by Charlie Guillemot, son of Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot.

The shakeup has also seen the departure of a number of high-level creatives, including former Assassin's Creed franchise boss Marc-Alexis Côté, former Assassin's Creed Hexe creative director Clint Hocking, and former Assassin's Creed Hexe game director Benoit Richer. Côté later sued Ubisoft for nearly $1 million, alleging that he was fired improperly.

A report by French site LesEchos claims that further cuts at Ubisoft's American operations are expected. We'll update with any further developments as they happen.

The free-to-play shooter The Division Resurgence has taken another step on its strange journey, as Ubisoft announced today that it's set to launch on Steam later this year.

The Division Resurgence was announced in 2022, with a release target of 2024, but in typical Ubisoft fashion there were delays, and it didn't actually go live until March 2026. Just a month later, with pretty much zero warning, it quietly dropped onto PC as well, in early access, to enable "technical testing ahead of its official launch in August."

It was something of a surprise: As PC Gamer's Shaun Prescott noted at the time, there was no hint that Ubisoft had any plans for it beyond mobile platforms, and had in fact emphasized its mobile-focused nature: "Our objective in bringing the Division universe to mobile, is to enable more people worldwide to enjoy this open world experience whenever and wherever they want. We feel very lucky that the mobile market has evolved to the point where we can develop such an ambitious game."

But just as Blizzard opted to bring Diablo Immortal to PC, Ubisoft decided to broaden The Division Resurgence's base as well. And after a little over a month of being available on Ubisoft's own storefront, it's now up for wishlisting on Steam.

"Over the next few weeks we will be hard at work polishing the last elements of the game for a truly seamless experience, whatever your preferred platform may be," The Division dev team wrote. "The game is fully cross-platform and cross-play, meaning you can continue your journey in The Division at any time."

The announcement doesn't get into why Ubisoft decided to make the move to Steam just a month after dropping it on its own storefront, but we can make a pretty good guess: Despite everyone's best effort, Steam is where it's at. Just like everyone else, Ubisoft came crawlin' back in 2024, and whether it wanted to take one last kick at the flying solo can with Resurgence, or just needed a little more time to get its ducks in order, it's not really surprising that if it wants the game on PC, it wants to do it on Steam.

Rayman Legends, an extremely solid platformer from 2013, is getting a fully-fledged remake with 3D graphics—as announced during tonight's Playstation State of Play—dubbed Rayman Legends Retold. And, more to the point, a whole new soundtrack composed by both Rayman OG Christophe Héral, but also industry veteran Grant Kirkhope.

You might know him from his work on Banjo Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64, but he's continued working until the present day on games like A Hat in Time, Yooka-Laylee, and more. I had the pleasure of speaking to production director Alessandro Arndt Mucchi and animation director Marco Renso about the game itself—but also what it was like working with such seasoned talent.

"I think [Kirkhope] is very in line with the humorous tone that we have in Rayman," says Mucchi, "He really gets that. If you look at the past history of his previous compositions and games he worked on, I think he has that feeling.

"He also managed to work very, very well with Christophe Héral, the original composer of the Rayman soundtrack … We have a lot of new compositions, and having these new compositions made by those two super talented musicians, it's brilliant."

Mucchi, who has worked with Kirkhope before on the Rabbids games, seemed glad to have him on board again—but for Renso it's his first time working with the man, and he had some effusive words to say about his quickdraw composition speed:

"Grant is insanely fast as a composer. It's crazy, like just in so little time he comes up with something amazing, it's outstanding honestly, it's very surprising.

"He comes in one day later with something unbelievable, like he's super fast to react, and it's crazy. I mean—I guess it's talent, of course. But I'm constantly amazed by the quality achieved, how fast he can create the music, it's just outstanding."

Rayman Legends, the original 2013 game, is a beloved platformer for a reason—it's very good. We gave it a stonking 90 in our Rayman Legends review, which puts it up there as an all-timer. In fact, it's so good that Ubisoft has decided to remake it in its entirety, swapping out 2D graphics for 3D worlds and throwing on some extra sauce.

I was invited to sit down and play the thing with Ubisoft for a few hours—progressing through several levels—and while I wouldn't say 3D is inherently prettier than 2D on principle (especially with a game that has such a distinct art style as Legends), Retold is still a deeply gorgeous game.

Developed by Ubisoft Milan and Montpellier, the level of work here is more comparable to something like the Spyro remakes from Toys for Bob—we're talking a top-to-bottom recreation.

It almost seems billed as a soft reboot for the franchise writ large. At least that's the impression I get from production director Alessandro Arndt Mucchi, who says "In terms of story and world building, we felt like there was room for tying everything together, because there's a lot in it but it's a bit all over the place—and we wanted to set the starting point for the future of Rayman."

That tying together includes added voice acting, cutscenes, and overworld maps to connect the levels.

"If you remember, in the original Legends, you were jumping into paintings from an art gallery," Mucchi said, "so you didn't have the feeling of being really in the Glade of Dreams, but now the hubs from which you enter into the portals leading you to the levels are set in the actual world of Rayman."

It all certainly seems more cohesive. Even through the slight latency of a remote preview (that is, having the game streamed to me through the Ubisoft client), Rayman Legends Retold feels like it carries the same solid foundation of Rayman Legends without compromising on the platforming.

And the visual upgrade is deeply charming. Retold is a vivid reimagining—not just putting 3D assets over a 2D landscape, but recreating, re-scoring, and tweaking old levels to bring them up to snuff. The game's justifying its existence with a few new features, too.

Retold will have an entirely fresh sixth world dubbed The Land of the Livid Dead with a new platforming power to mess with, as well as rehashed musical levels that, I'm told, will take advantage of the 3D perspective to do some delightful nonsense. There are also dragon riding segments, because why not.

I got to play one of these, and while it was emphasised that they're a huge work in progress, I'm of two minds: They're gorgeously-made and spectacle-filled rail shooter romps where you get to bob and weave a fat little dragon, doubtless a delightful addition if you're looking at the game as a fun little couch co-op time for the family.

Where I felt a little worried was the fact that the health system on these levels are the Teensies themselves—each time you get hit, a Teensie gets flung into the void. Which is all well and good, but it's so easy to get struck by a stray bit of level geometry or bullet that I can imagine completionists are gonna tear their hair out trying to score a no-hit run.

Still, they're a huge work in progress, and there's every chance Ubisoft might make them less obnoxious for 100% gamers before release. Rayman Legends Retold plans to release October 1.

Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era's strategy of building on the series' peak—the 1999 classic HoMM 3—has paid off. In a single day it broke even, shifting 250,000 copies. And in less than a month it managed to climb up to 1 million.

That's a heck of an achievement for the new game in a series that largely seemed to have been forgotten by owner Ubisoft—HoMM 5 came out in 2006, and since then it's been left alone. And nobody can tell me otherwise.

It's definitely earned its popularity. As I said in my Olden Era early access impressions, it's not some wild reinvention, it's simply riffing on the best version of HoMM, giving the vets what they've always wanted: a return to the good old days of HoMM 3. But at the same time, this isn't a remaster or remake—there are new ideas here, with big changes introduced to the magic system and the addition of some fancy new modes.

Speaking of new modes, there are more coming. To celebrate the 1 million sales milestone, Unfrozen and publisher Hooded Horse have shown off a roadmap detailing what's to come as the game makes its way through early access.

There's some good stuff coming this year, like teamplay and observer modes, along with replays, class reworks and a hero skill rebalance, but the meaty parts will be coming closer to the end of early access and beyond. That's when we'll get things like a thieves guild, underground terrain and, perhaps not that surprisingly, a roguelike mode.

This new PvE mode is still a bit of a mystery, unfortunately, with Unfrozen promising "more information later". But it's an exciting prospect all the same. The only issue with Olden Era hewing so close to HoMM 3 is that the veterans have done it all before. But the last time we got a good HoMM, roguelikes weren't really a thing (yes I know Rogue came out in 1980).

So I'm genuinely excited to see this very '90s game get a very '26 mode.

The good news is that if you can't wait for it to hit 1.0, the early access version is already brilliant—and pretty full-featured too. The campaign only has a single act at the moment, and higher-tier magic and monsters are yet to come, but none of that has stopped it from feeling like a return to greatness for the series.

I love a good game about skulking through the shadows, but it isn't an activity I get to do much in virtual worlds anymore. Even within the already sparse genre of stealth games, most modern sneak 'em ups are based around lines of sight rather than levels of light.

I always figured this was because such an approach is simpler for players to parse—especially given most games that feature stealth are not exclusively stealth games. But according to Clint Hocking, director of the second-best stealth game ever made—Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory—it might have something to do with the nature of virtual shadows themselves.

Speaking to FRVR, Hocking explained that the shift from baked lighting and dynamic lights with hard edges, to softer shadows and ray-tracing lighting models, may have had an impact on players' ability to assess their own stealthiness.

"I actually think one of the difficulties with modern stealth games is the sophistication in the rendering has made lighting so much more realistic," Hocking told FRVR. While this sophistication results in a more authentic-looking scene, it makes the play space for a stealth game "so much harder to read" than in the days of Chaos Theory and the Thief series.

"When you think about those old school stealth games because of their baked lighting, the lighting is very clean and readable and very understandable for the player," Hocking elaborates. "But once you get into this diffuse and ambient occlusion and all of the stuff that comes with it, it gets very hard to tell what's light, what's shadow, what's dark, what's safe, what's dangerous and all of that stuff."

I can certainly see why this added nuance would make a light-based stealth game more challenging to make. But it's also fair to say that nobody has really tried. As I mentioned, stealth generally forms part of a broader experience rather than the fundamental core of games these days, and those stealth mechanics tend to be very simple so players can shift in and out of stealth easily.

Because of this, Hocking reckons that making a fully-fledged stealth game with modern graphics techniques would involve some challenges. "I think there would be some learning if we wanted to really use these modern lighting techniques to have a really pure stealth experience," he added. "And people who go ahead and make that game, I think, need to do some really deep thinking."

While I'd certainly be interested to see a modern stealth game that went all in on shadow tech (and brought back noisy floors, while we're at it), the smattering of stealth games we've seen recently have been more interested in other forms of experimentation. Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow—the first game in the series in over a decade—sought to bring the venerable larceny simulator into true 3D with fair to middling results. And only this week saw the launch of Thick as Thieves, which has some promise as a cooperative stealth game despite launching in a stripped down package.

Ubisoft has been having a bad time of late. At the beginning of this year, it announced an enormous "restructuring" effort featuring cancellations, layoffs and, yes, generative AI, and all that following some rather dire preceding years. Via "voluntary" reductions and less-voluntary layoffs, Ubisoft has reduced its total number of staff by around 1,200 people over the past year, leaving it with an overall headcount of around 16,600.

Which is, of course, still a lot of people, as noted by Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1 and 2 director Daniel Vávra in comments on X. Vávra, who is currently working on a Kingdom Come film and who has been replaced as creative director on Warhorse's upcoming videogame projects by Prokop Jirsa and Viktor Bocan, wrote that "Ubisoft has 16,600 employees after layoffs. Ooops.

"That's about 70 Warhorse-sized studios. That could be 10 KCD2 sized games, each developed for seven years, released every year!" Vávra—who mentioned owning Ubisoft stock in March—jokingly asked readers if he should "buy the current dip?"

Vávra is habitually pugnacious, and I doubt anyone reading this needs reminding of the controversy he courted by aligning himself with the far-right Gamergate movement, nor of the polar-opposite controversy he ignited among his erstwhile allies in that movement by writing a (genuinely excellent) gay relationship and a prominent black Muslim character into Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. It's not uncommon for him to make fun of studios that seem to be doing worse than Warhorse at producing well-liked videogames despite having greater resources, as when he compared player counts between KCD1 and the then-recent Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

So it's some classic Vávra posting, but it's hard to disagree that Ubisoft has been catastrophically mismanaging its vast resources for a long time now. Is it completely fair to compare Ubi with Warhorse? Not quite. Ubisoft is an enormous, multinational corporation with offices across Europe, North America, and Asia, while Warhorse currently only maintains studios in Czechia.

Indeed, when I spoke to both Warhorse co-founder Martin Klima and Prokop Jirsa, both mentioned that operating in Czechia was far cheaper than working in other parts of the world. It's also, simply, less of a logistical challenge to coordinate work across studios in one country than to coordinate the great shambling behemoth of Ubisoft across continents.

But even with those caveats, Ubisoft has not been run well lately, whether you're talking about its NFT gambit, myriad layoffs, the rolling circus that was the development of Skull & Bones, or whatever the hell is going on with Beyond Good and Evil 2: the company has not seemed like it has any clue as to what it's doing for a while. Vávra's jabs might not be wholly fair but I can't say Ubi's leaders haven't earned them.

On top of a major graphical update, a new sword fighting system, and three new officers to recruit, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is touching up countless little things about the 2013 pirate game. Alas, it's not adding the one thing I really hoped to see more of—the coolest, and to my memory most challenging diversions to be found in the Caribbean. Those cursed legendary ships.

The video above, taken from the original game, shows a player fighting the apex predators of Black Flag. The level 75 vessels are far greater threats than most of the ships you'll fight throughout the campaign. There's El Impoluto, with its ramming attack; La Dama Negra with heavy side armor and dual mortars; the HMS Fearless and the HMS Royal Sovereign, who fought side-by-side; and the HMS Prince, which lurked in a fog so thick sailors took it for a ghost ship.

In later games, Ubisoft built on these legendary duels to spin up more creative, ultimately even mythological boss fights—like Assassin's Creed Valhalla's legendary animals. They're some of the coolest bits of these games anytime they show up. I'd take three more legendary ships to battle over Resynced's three new crew members in a heartbeat—but game director Richard Knight told me that Black Flag's five legendary ships remains a quintet.

"We still have the same originals," Knight said. "There's another really tough ship in the game that I won't mention, but we still have those guys back."

I also asked Knight about the decision for Resynced to skip over Freedom Cry, the acclaimed DLC focused on Kenway's former quartermaster Adéwalé, and the freeing of enslaved Africans. Ubisoft has said it decided to focus purely on Edward's story for Resynced, but could Freedom Cry end up as DLC once again?

"With Assassin's Creed as a whole, it's got all these compelling stories and characters, so I don't think you can ever rule anything out," Knight said. "But we really hope for now we can give you everything you wanted out of Edward's experience, and we'll see what the future holds."

There's no sign of the gleaming Abstergo Industries office that once served as the modern day framing for Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, but playing this game for the first time in 12 years feels a bit like time travel anyway. Before Ubisoft dropped Assassin's Creed's sci-fi conceit, each game was meant to be a strikingly immersive VR recreation of some past place and time, just as your character's ancestor would remember it.

Except, well, this time the ancestor is me circa 2014, and Black Flag Resynced has recreated the best Assassin's Creed just as I remember it.

My memory, it turns out, is about as accurate to the original game as Ezio Auditore da Firenze's battle with the Pope was to real 15th century Italian history. Before I sit down to play Black Flag, Ubisoft highlights everything that it's upgraded. Combat is totally reworked, with much punchier animations and perfect parries and dodges. Loading between cities and the open ocean? Gone now. Weather's dynamic, pirate-turned-assassin Edward Kenway has a crouch button, and you better believe that lighting is ray traced now.

But it still feels intimately familiar as I step aboard the Jackdaw or go parkouring across a lush island, climbing into the crook of a Y-shaped tree. The waves always looked this foamy, right? (They didn't). The sky and sea were always such a welcoming iridescent blue, weren't they? (They weren't). Edward always moved this cleanly from leap to roll to run, didn't he? (Of course not).

This is a textbook remaster: all the ways in which it's better graft cleanly onto the old bones like a top-dollar Hollywood facelift.

Anchors away

For the developers at Ubisoft, making Resynced has been less time travel, more archeology. "I like to say we feel like historians, working on this," says game director Richard Knight. "You dream about a bunch of things when you go through a remake. How do I modernize it, what kind of cool visuals and gameplay changes can I get. But the thing that always sticks with me the most is the quality of life features."

He gives a few examples. As introduced in AC Odyssey, there's now a button on the map screen to fast travel to the Jackdaw, so you don't have to spend 10 minutes swimming back to where you left the ship. There's a shanty player, so you can choose what song to ask the crew to sing. But much of the game remains either unchanged, or changed in ways consistent with the series.

"Sometimes we need to reinvent a system, like ground combat, and look back at the brand and go 'okay, what button was this feature on?' How many games had a blowdart, which one makes the most sense for us? Sometimes there are even animations from past games that we've added to combat for takedowns, where it makes sense. While other things we're like, 'nope, this works exactly as it should, and we should keep it.'"

Black Flag was the last AC I played start to finish, before Ubisoft declared them RPGs and slapped XP and skill trees onto an already stuffed open world frame. The subsequent decade of tinkering (or bloat, if we're being less generous) leaves Resynced strangely both throwback and palate cleanser. Ubisoft has only made it more like its RPG descendents in teensy ways, like an equipment screen with more outfit choices, and a dedicated button for manually raising or lowering the assassin cowl.

"Edward's journey and the gameplay itself is always about rushing forward," says Knight. "He's an action game kind of hero who happens to also be a pirate and an assassin, so it was critical for us to keep that spirit alive and not to change it. I love some of the RPG [Assassin's Creeds] as well, but they go in a different direction, and we want to stay true to Black Flag's direction of always driving forward."

The art of a remaster, in Knight's words, is as much about capturing the emotions of the original game as the facts of it—a perfect analog for tall tales from the Golden Age of Piracy. This one's still waiting to be bettered.

Tom Clancy's The Division, to give it its full name, has a lot more staying power than anyone would have originally credited it with. The gloomy post-apocalyptic shooter spawned a sequel, a mobile spin-off, a third game is still in development, and there's even a movie in the works—though the latter has been in limbo for years.

And now the pandemic-themed live service romp is being adapted for our tables in the form of Tom Clancy's The Division: The Official Tabletop Roleplaying Game.

I found both main entries to be serviceable shooters with a few good ideas slightly elevating them above the deluge of live service games—but they're both a bit forgettable, especially if you're not that enthusiastic about American survivalist porn. Which I'm not.

But there's still a hunger for this kinda thing, apparently. The Division 2 is still hosting new events and cross-promotions with other Ubisoft games (nothing says post-apocalyptic survival like doing some Avatar cosplay), as well as spitting out major updates.

Still! I wouldn't have assumed there'd be much interest in a TTRPG adaptation. The Division's setting is not exactly evocative, and as an RPG it's very by-the-numbers, all the loot and stats and character progression without any meaningful roleplaying systems.

I was wrong, though, because the TTRPG has absolutely demolished its—admittedly humble—pledge target of $58,206/£43,394. With 15 days to go, it's already at $383,572/£285,960. That's from just shy of 1,500 backers. Which, granted, isn't a vast number when you compare it to the most popular tabletop Kickstarters, but combined with the amount pledged this does put it comfortably within the platform's current top 10 for tabletop campaigns.

But having checked out what's on the table, I get it. The TTRPG lets you build agents who get dropped into "hostile territory" for some scraps and misadventures, using skills from the games like automated turrets and experimental technology to achieve their objectives. But more interesting to me are the roleplaying opportunities.

"Beyond the firefights, Agents must navigate fragile communities, deal with desperate survivors, and make hard choices to help rebuild a shattered society," the Kickstarter pitch reads. "This is where the roleplaying experience truly comes to life—every decision matters, not just how you fight, but who you trust, protect, or abandon.

"While the Diplomat excels in forging alliances and defusing tensions, and the Technician helps restore critical infrastructure—from clean water systems to improvised power sources—every Agent can influence the world around them, shaping relationships, securing resources and changing the fate of those they encounter."

Yes to all of this! While The Division's world never felt particularly scintillating, it absolutely still held promise. With the breakdown of society and all the infrastructure that once propped it up, it leaves lots of space for heroics and pragmatic decision making—but the games never seemed interested in delving into that, at least not in a meaningful way that gave players any sense of agency.

So it feels like the TTRPG contains a missing piece, completing the grim fantasy that The Division sets up.

That said, there are already countless post-apocalyptic tabletop settings that do this, so I'm not going to be rushing to grab one based on an Ubisoft game just yet, but I can absolutely see the appeal here.

Tom Clancy's The Division: The Official Tabletop Roleplaying Game is expected to appear in October 2026.

In a not-so-alternate alternate timeline, actor Matt Ryan may well have ended up playing a growling, sweaty pirate on Black Sails, the improbably stellar 2014 TV series prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson's classic novel Treasure Island. He would've been a good fit for it. But in this reality, he instead ended up playing the lead role of a pirate in 2013's Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, his first and so far only videogame credit.

In an interview with PC Gamer, Ryan said he ended up loving the experience of acting for a game—even though when he auditioned for the role, it was actually masquerading as a show to keep the Assassin's Creed sequel a secret.

"It was pitched to me via my agent as a pirate TV show," he remembered. "Amy Hubbard, a great casting director in the UK, got me into the room, and then they liked me. They asked me for a callback, and then they leveled with me. They were like, listen: this is a videogame. They said it was an Assassin's Creed, and I'd played the first one, so I was like 'great, that's a cool game.' But I didn't think it was mocap—so when it was mocap, I was over the moon. I get to be the character, in the body, you know?"

Ryan saw "all the seasons in Montreal" as he traveled back and forth from the UK and the Ubisoft studio where Black Flag was being developed. A year later he landed the role of John Constantine for a short-lived TV adaptation of the DC Comics series, which he's returned to for a number of animated films.

It was early into his run as Constantine that Ryan discovered how beloved a character Edward Kenway had become.

"I did my first Comic-Con, and that's when people would be coming up dressed as Constantine," he said. "And then there'd be all these Edward Kenways in line. I'd be like, oh, this is great. I knew it was a good game, because I played it, but it was around then that I started getting a sense for the fandom of the character, and seeing the amount of work they put into designing those costumes—some would take a year to build the costume, you know? They'd be coming to me and quoting their favorite lines.

"You know, as an actor, if you do a play, it's one performance it's gone, and there is something kind of wonderful about a performance that's fleeting. And with TV and movies, people watch it once, maybe twice if you're lucky, so they spend a bit of time with you. But with a videogame, they spend a lot of time with you… It's been really, really nice after all these years to be invited back to this role, and to feel that this character is as beloved as it is."

Here we are again with a bucket of new info about a Ubisoft game that wasn't supposed to get out. This time, the leaks are about Assassin's Creed Hexe, an upcoming game in the series that has only been vaguely described as a "darker" installment through official channels.

All of the new details come from a well-known Ubisoft leaker who goes by "Rogue" and has been compiled on the GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit. According to Rogue, Hexe will primarily focus on Würzburg, Germany at the time of the witch trials in 1625. Surrounding areas will be available to explore too, but it sounds like the bulk of the game will take place in the city.

Hexe's protagonist will be a woman named Anika who is a descendent of Claudia Auditore, who you might remember from Assassin's Creed 2 as main character Ezio's sister. This is important because Ezio will show up in Hexe as a sort of mentor figure for Anika. Dialogue snippets suggest he'll be around long enough to recite The Creed to her and to say, "Come. Leap with me. One last time for an old man."

Whether or not he sticks around for long is unclear, but other bits of dialogue make it seem like Anika will be alone as she runs from people who want to capture her for supposedly practicing witchcraft. Rogue says Hexe will have "lots of forests", as well as mission objectives like, "find the ritual sites" and "recover the stolen relics". And in case there was any doubt that this would be an Assassin's Creed game with climbing and a leveling system, there's apparently a skill that unlocks "tree-to-tree jumping".

The rest of the leak includes some miscellaneous details, like NPCs reporting suspicious activity immediately and voice lines that sound like pursuers trying to trap Anika before she flees. Rogue doesn't say it themselves, but to me, Hexe seems like it'll lean a bit more into stealth as a necessary survival tactic rather than an alternative to fighting out in the open. That feels like it would fit with the horror-ish tone Ubisoft is going for with it.

Nothing in Rogue's leak narrows down a release date for Hexe. Ubisoft announced the game in 2022 and hasn't really said much about it since then. Technically, the title is still a codename, so for all we know it could be given a new name whenever Ubisoft decides to finally talk about it.

Clint Hocking, a Ubisoft veteran who worked on the original Splinter Cell and Watch Dogs: Legion, was Hexe's creative director until he left earlier this year. At the time, a Ubisoft spokesperson told PC Gamer that Jean Guesdon, head of content for the Assassin's Creed brand, would replace him. Last month, Hexe also lost its game director Benoit Richer. IGN caught that Richer updated his LinkedIn with a new job and didn't hear anything from Ubisoft about who would be replacing him.

While Ubisoft is busy pitching everyone on the Assassin's Creed Black Flag remake coming in July, it hasn't said a word about what's going on with Hexe. You'd think that one of the two upcoming games would have more than a logo going for it, but here we are. The other new game, Invictus, also recently had a leak that Ubisoft claimed was "heavily altered (most probably with AI)," from a private test. If the leaks continue at this rate, Ubisoft is going to have to create a hall of fame for all the Assassin's Creed games that qualify as "gaming's worst-kept secret".

Just a few months after his surprise departure from Ubisoft, where he'd been serving as the creative director on the mysterious Assassin's Creed Hexe, veteran developer Clint Hocking has founded a game studio called Build Machine Games.

Hocking's new outfit is "lean and fast," he wrote on LinkedIn, but also "bold and ambitious."

"We aspire to expand the expressive range and power of the medium with emotionally resonant, socially relevant games that challenge players' perspectives, pre-conceptions and empathy as much as their reasoning and reflexes."

There's a similar aspirational-yet-smacking-of-LinkedIn vibe on the Build Machine Games website, where you'll see a list of "values" that includes things like "Lead From the Front," "Always Attack," and "Challenge to Improve." Of course, there's also a mission statement: "Our mission is to make great games that exceed expectations and elevate the form by empowering passionate developers with autonomy and accountability, and supporting them with inspiring vision, agile practices and cutting edge technology."

Okay, look: That's all very fluffy and corporate, and thus easy to poke fun at, but Hocking comes to the table with an impressive CV: He was a level designer and scriptwriter on the original Splinter Cell, after which he served as creative director on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Far Cry 2, Crucible (for Amazon), and Watch Dogs: Legion. He also spent some time at Valve, possibly working on the still-waiting-for-it Left 4 Dead 3, and you don't get a gig at Valve unless you're really pretty good at your job.

That's also what makes Hocking's most recent split from Ubisoft seem cloudy. He was serving as creative director on Hexe, the codename for the supernatural-coded Assassin's Creed that was announced in 2022, but left without warning in February. Ubisoft thanked him for his contributions and wished him the best, using language that very much reminded me of the equally surprising departure, just a few months earlier, of Assassin's Creed franchise head Marc-Alexis Côté.

That split turned badly quickly—Côté quickly alleged that he'd been forced out, and sued Ubisoft over it in January—and while there's been no sign of such ugliness related to Hocking's exit, it sure does feel like there was a shakeup at Ubisoft (well, there undeniably was), and he didn't fit into the plan.

All of which is to say that, despite the highly-polished say-nothing of the Build Machine website, Hocking has a very strong background and I'm eager to find out what he's got cooking. No great shock that I've got a long wait for that: The studio is currently hiring for a "small number" of positions to start work on its first prototype. But there's more good news there, too. Hocking's studio is currently only hiring residents of Canada, so whatever's going on, you know it's bound to be cool.

Back in 2010, we gave the WW2 RTS Ruse an enviable 84% review score, applauding developer Eugen Systems for "doing something novel with one of strategy gaming's hoariest themes." Just five years later, it was gone—removed from Steam by publisher Ubisoft due to expiring license rights.

Now, in a surprise twist, it's back: More than 10 years after that takedown, Eugen Systems has relaunched Ruse on Steam with all previously released DLC attached, plus various technical updates and full Steam Deck support.

"While we developed and launched Ruse in 2010, the game didn’t officially belong to us," Eugen wrote in the re-launch announcement. "Sidelined due to distribution constraints, we could do nothing in the subsequent years to help the players who contacted us for assistance or tried to obtain the game. Recently, we received the opportunity to return Ruse to our catalog. This allowed us to re-release this pillar of the RTS genre, with some added extras!"

I don't see any specifics on those promised technical updates, aside from the verified Steam Deck support, and to be clear this isn't a remaster: The re-released Ruse is still a 2010 RTS. But, to repeat what we said earlier (that is, 16 years ago), it's a very good 2010 RTS.

The price—$30/£26.49/€30—has sparked a trickle of complaints from people who don't think a game of that vintage should cost so much, but more importantly, user reviews since the re-release are "overwhelmingly positive": 197 positive, compared to just two negative. It's not a huge number, but you have to like that ratio.

You don't see review charts like this every day:

Also note, speaking of price, that if you own Ruse already, the updates and DLC are yours for free—because again, this isn't a remaster or anything, it's just back on sale. Old saves and replays won't be accessible in the re-released version to prevent crashes, but they're still there too: If you want to use them, use the "Compatibility Branch" available in the Ruse Steam properties.

How this all came about is unclear at this point, although Eugen Systems is now listed as both the developer and publisher, meaning Ubisoft is completely out of the picture: Given Ubi's financial woes and restructuring, it doesn't feel like too much of a leap to assume that Eugen Systems was able to score the rights at a pretty good price. But hey, whatever: The important thing is, Ruse is back on Steam, and that's very cool indeed.

Ubisoft suck at keeping a secret. It's long had a problem with leaks, and the Assassin's Creed series has probably suffered more from that than its other series. Even Ubisoft has joked about Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced being "gaming's worst kept secret" following leak after leak. Much like the Age of Piracy in Black Flag, Ubisoft's age of leaks isn't over either.

Just yesterday, YouTuber xJ0nathan posted on X a supposed screenshot of Assassin's Creed's (codenamed) Invictus, a dedicated multiplayer spinoff. Honestly, there's not even much in the image to go off, just a character holding two weapons in an untextured liminal space. It's kinda exactly what you'd expect from a very, very early look at an Assassin's Creed game.

The official Assassin's Creed Twitter account responded to this leak, saying: "Nice try." While Ubisoft notes that the image "might have started as an image from our private test", it's since been "heavily altered (most probably with AI)."

If you're going to leak, do it well, I guess, as this hasn't got Ubisoft's stamp of approval: "Not great to spread misinformation."

Now, with little actual information on the game to go off, Ubisoft has promised updates on the project in the future, saying that "those genuinely curious" will hear more "when the time is right".

xJ0nathan has since followed up the original leak with a new, similar image that supposedly doesn't have any AI alterations, though there are some inconsistencies between the two images.

Either way, I'm all for a dedicated Assassin's Creed multiplayer game. Ever since its removal after Black Flag (there was co-op multiplayer in Unity, mind), I've missed its unique brand of social-stealth PvP.

Ubisoft has released the first of what it says will be "a series of deep dive articles" into the upcoming Assassin's Creed Black Resynced, serving up a close look at the smooth new moves pirate-assassin Edward Kenway will employ as he murders his way across the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy.

Parkour, stealth, and combat in Black Flag Resynced have all been—you guessed it!—"rebuilt from the ground up" to take advantage of advancements made in the series over the 13 years since the original Black Flag debuted. Creative director Paul Fu said the intent is "to honor the foundations of the original game while enhancing the experience for an action-adventure game."

Much of what's revealed in the showcase is what you'd expect from a remake of a game that's more than a decade old: Fenway's movement will be "snappier and more deliberate," for instance, while the "Observe" feature introduced in Assassin's Creed Shadows will enable him to more easily find clues and objectives, and to tag enemies. Tailing and eavesdropping have been improved so missions won't fail if you lose track of your target,

The update also digs into takedowns, environmental combat, and new "advanced attacks," and warns that "combat in Resynced is more demanding than before," as enemies will adapt to your behaviour, especially if you fall into predictable patterns.

"For example, wait around too much for a parry, and enemies will react by performing Unstoppable Attacks that cannot be parried," Fu said. "Abuse a kick too much, and enemies will quickly dodge them. The trick is to alternate between offense and defense. Varying your combos helps. Rotate between kicks, sweeps, rope darts, pistols and heavy strikes at the end of your attack combos to confuse enemies."

I wouldn't say that charging into a camp in broad daylight and loudly perforating a bunch of guys strikes me as the acme of professional assassination, but dead is dead, I suppose.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resyned comes out on July 9, and is available for pre-purchase now on Steam and the Epic Games Store.

Though I have clocked up several dozen hours in Ghost Recon Wildlands, 2017’s open-world military shooter, it’s taken till now to notice that I hadn’t finished its first mission. Instead, I’ve fought the cartel sponging off Bolivia haphazardly, daisy-chaining disconnected missions together with the odd opportunity to kidnap a henchman and raid a hacienda, inviting mishap en route.

Chaos spirals quickly in the Wildlands. I only wanted to commandeer a convoy when my helicopter was shot down. Next, the minibus I hijacked was made undriveable by a road accident. The town I then entered to pump a random guy for secrets became a battleground when he pulled a gun on me, inspiring me to call in rebel reinforcements (and a mortar bombardment, why not?). Our helicopter escape crossed paths with another convoy, whose leader I kidnapped, drove away and interrogated. This unexpectedly fulfilled a task, leading to the location of a commander whose death marked the completion of a main mission I have no memory of ever instigating. A true deniable op.

Wildlands is a sequel in the tactical, squad-based Ghost Recon series which began in 2001. Typically, you issue movement and engagement commands to your team and use fancy gadgets. Wildlands is a bit different. Its creators identified the fun thing about the series—using your wits and gadgetry to navigate a hostile environment, to better attack the enemies therein—and built a sprawling world around it.

Bad company

The first missions Wildlands assigns you, which I originally absent-mindedly walked away from, don’t just offer a taste of the game. They are the game. They have us stealthily approaching targets, rescuing a man, stealing a car, hacking computers and finally bearing down on the local bigwigs at their hunting lodge. You’re equipped with a small armoury, night-vision, a drone and binoculars, and a Sync Shot ability to simultaneously shoot targets with your AI squadmates. In the course of these tasks, you’ll be reconnoitring, quietly dispatching, loudly raiding, and making helicopter getaways. Listen: my patience for wordy tutorials and massive skill trees are stretched thin. What joy, then, when the fruits of a game are offered to you in the first 15 minutes.

What makes Wildlands dazzle in regular diversions can, however, make it tough company over a longer duration. Its missions and targets lack variety. Its stealth is not particularly involved. Wildlands’ novel structure, letting you take on region bosses in the order you see fit, has little bearing on the game’s progression. More fatally, as an inheritor of Far Cry 3’s obsession with clearing outposts and marking enemies, and of Assassin’s Creed’s fondness for surveillance birds and a minimap chockablock with icons, Wildlands’ playbook of tech and tactics quickly slot into familiar routines.

And yet the chimeric Wildlands proves better than the sum of its parts. Having seen its tricks, I haven’t moved on. One idea of Wildland’s worth keeping around is the idea of extracting ‘intel’ from lieutenants. These are miscellaneous NPCs who drive around innocuously until they are T-boned from a mountain hairpin, pulled from the wreckage and interrogated. In gratitude for the adventure, they mark a set of collectibles in the locality on your map.

Going out and acquiring these collectibles—side-missions, weapon cases, or skill points—generally improves your situation in the game, bringing forth new weapons and providing the resources to improve your abilities. Abilities like thermal vision (cool but inessential), enhanced damage to vehicles (handy), and a skill that makes your AI squad-mates less embarrassing (vital). The contents of weapon cases are not disguised on the map, making some (folded buttstocks, anyone?) easy to ignore. This refreshingly diminishes the sense of FOMO that other games intensify. Moreover, you are kitted out, more or less, from the get-go.

Tom Clancy's HAWX

Hard to ignore is the hawkish Tom Clancy-ness of it all. You are Nomad, leader of an American special forces team fighting to effect regime change in a Latin American country. Have you heard this one before? In the helicopter ride in at the game’s outset, CIA spy Karen Bowman sets out the game’s unconvincing revenge arc. The Ghosts are in Bolivia for cartel boss El Sueño, and to help local rebels wedged between his Santa Blanca faction and the corrupt state forces La Unidad. You see, El Sueño killed an undercover American embroiled in foreign affairs, and that’s ruffled our feathers. This isn’t WWIII we’re trying to avert here. It’s a side-plot in the war on drugs.

If this doesn’t push your buttons, they work for your uncomplicated protagonist, whose naff patriotic rejoinders are delivered with bland solemnity. “Sometimes I think about the bad things we do for the good of our country,” Nomad soliloquises, uninvited, at some point. “I’d do it all again. In a heartbeat.” Great! But I do wish you’d stop saying this out of my avatar’s mouth.

Wildlands’ version of Bolivia is a fabulously inviting depiction of a landscape, whose physical environments are enchanting enough to keep you exploring. Atmospheric effects shepherd changes in mood and the chirps of biome-specific creatures help plant your feet in the virtual soil. It is also a bombastic caricature of a country more at home in the Just Cause games, which have the grace to fictionalise their settings.

Ubisoft abstracts real places into games all the time, usually with the tactful application of historical distance. But there’s something odd about how Wildlands thugs outnumber its non-combatants. Where regular people appear, they are quaking or fleeing or otherwise lingering in a town, unbothered by the presence of American soldiers. The decorating of interchangeable settlements with gruesome corpse displays is also worryingly unremarked upon, not least by locals taking the air. Any residual sincerity is undercut by the armed helicopters all over the place, flashing notifications of “UNIDAD PATROL NEARBY” and the suspicion that your explosive conduct must surely be more a hindrance to local people than a help. The game Ubisoft made, between the caricature and the self-serious chauvinism, is confusingly cartoonish.

Mission fail

On a tactical level, there is enough to keep you busy. Just enough thinking around a problem is required to accomplish your goals. Can’t enter a gate? Parachute in. Anti-aircraft nearby? Blow it up first. Compound is alarmed? Shoot its power box. Your surveillance gadgets mean it’s normally easy to evade guards. But they’ll investigate a gunshot, and an alert will ring out on a discovered body. When you’re spotted, it’s time to embrace the mayhem.

When Wildlands forces stealth rules, it’s a mission fail. A mission released as an update links you up with Tom Clancy franchise stablemate Sam Fisher, alias Mr. Splinter Cell. You must rendezvous inside an enemy base between 9pm and 4am, without being spotted or killing anybody.

My first attempt is foiled while trying to crawl under a trailer. On my second attempt I’m casing the joint when my squadmate cries, “We got a man down!” He walked into a speeding train. The third attempt fails because I leave the mission area, which I dispute, and the fourth fails after I’m spotted by a guard before I can grab him. Finally on my fifth attempt I go through a gap in a fence, obviously a prescribed route, and find Sam as he triggers a massive armed response by hacking a laptop. I hold off the attack until an escape is possible through the jungle towards a hijacked car. Devastatingly, I turn to see a helicopter shooting rockets not at me, but at Sam, still plodding through the base to my getaway point.

This is no meticulous espionage simulation. It doesn’t have much resemblance to reality, nor a story worth sticking around for. I’m here for the moment plans slide into chaos, and I know Wildlands has that in abundance.

Earlier this week writer and director Noah Hawley, who's previously been behind the Fargo series as well as Alien: Earth, spoke about his upcoming TV adaptation of Ubisoft's Far Cry. Hawley made some comments that caused a bit of a stir while explaining why he wouldn't be directly adapting any of the existing games.

"I'm not specifically adapting any of the games that they've put out," Hawley told Deadline. "I'm saying much as I did with the Coens or X-Men or Alien, 'Let me have a dialog with this franchise, because this is what I think a Far Cry story is.'"

What really put the cat among the pigeons though was Hawley's contention that "games are built in a way that doesn't make for the best drama. When you play a videogame, you only really move forward through the gameplay section, and then you have these cutscenes that you can skip, so when you go to adapt those games you have to be aware that makes the human drama kind of irrelevant to the storyline. That is death for a show."

The director of Far Cry 4, unsurprisingly, did not agree. "This is kinda pissing me off," Alex Hutchinson wrote on LinkedIn. "And I like Noah Hawley's work."

Hutchinson has now expanded on his thoughts in a new interview with IGN, saying that "gamers just want to feel their loves are respected, not dismissed, as they often were historically," before taking aim specifically at Hawley's claims about cutscenes.

"I think in certain genres a lot of people skip cutscenes," says Hutchinson. "Certainly the player story takes primacy, but story is a complex topic in games. Theme, setting, character are all key to story and are certainly drivers of player engagement so, even if they're skipping some cinematics, they are deeply engaged in narrative as they occupy a role and move through a designed space."

I'm not much of a cutscene-skipper myself (except on repeat playthroughs), and don't understand why you'd play something like Resident Evil Requiem, or indeed a Far Cry game, and skip the narrative context. It's also inarguable that the quality of production and writing across the industry has, generally speaking, improved massively over the last decade or so: I can genuinely call Requiem a well-written game with a straight face, which certainly wouldn't be the case with some of the older Resident Evils.

"The best Far Cry game to me is a fish out of water story," continues Hutchinson. "Dropping the player as a 'normal' person with limited knowledge into an extreme situation with a bunch of toys and challenges. Then the story acts as both asking the player questions and then providing reactions based on the player's input.

"My biggest problem is [Hawley's] dismissal of the game stories as pointless. His position isn't without merit, and his adaptations of Alien and Fargo also basically threw away history. This worked well in Fargo but less well in Alien, which turned into a kind of weird Peter Pan gets a dog story instead of remaining true to the best elements of the brand."

That's a rather brutal drive-by on Alien: Earth, though it's one I agree with: that show started fantastically well, but for me ended up in completely the wrong place. There's lots to enjoy in the first series, and hopefully Hawley can channel the best bits into a great season two, but that show's finale in particular was both absurd and unsatisfying.

But I don't want to come across as being too dismissive of Hawley's remarks (after all, he certainly knows more about making good TV than me). As PCG's Andy Chalk noted, "Far Cry at this point is a formula: A guy, some pals, and a situation that can only be resolved through the persistent application of extreme violence." A little like Bioshock and its lighthouse, you can start from that and tell any number of stories.

There's no further details about what to expect from Hawley's Far Cry series. Though if he does get it wrong, you can bet these comments will come back to haunt him.

1999 was an exceptional year for PC gaming. One of the all-time greatest, really. Age of Empires 2, Alpha Centauri, Freespace 2, Homeworld, System Shock 2, Planescape: Torment, Unreal Tournament, Dungeon Keeper 2, Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun—we were eating well.

This was also the year of Heroes of Might and Magic 3, which has long been considered the pinnacle of the strategy series—hence the questionable HD remaster in 2015—as well as a genre all-timer. Nearly 30 years later, it's still the gold standard. But Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era is coming for it.

New age

Olden Era out in early access today, featuring the first act of the campaign, but plenty more besides, and it feels like it was plucked out of the timestream by a benevolent cosmic deity, giving strategy freaks of a certain vintage everything they could ask for.

This is not a remake—it features new factions amid the familiar ones, a brand-new campaign, systems both updated and completely new, and an art style that serves as a nod to HoMM3 without being beholden to it. This is a new game, but it's undeniably been made for those of us who played and loved HoMM3—as well as those who would have, had they been born.

Playing it over these last few days has been as comfortable as sinking into the sofa with a lovely, cosy blanket draped over me. Comfort and contentment. I might dabble in some Stardew Valley or Pokopia, but this is really my kind of cosy game. Yes, the vibes-based not-quite-genre of cosy gaming usually doesn't include things built on conflict and war, but Olden Era evokes many of the same feelings that cosy games tend to engender in their adherents.

The colourful, inviting maps; the overwhelming sense of nostalgia; the sincerity of the writing and light world building; even the clarity of its structure—they all contribute to this reassuring feeling of cosiness. Even with an apocalyptic threat bearing down on the world, this is whimsical fantasy at its core, but whimsy tempered by clear rules and achievable objectives. You get to experience the joy of knowing what to do every day. The real fantasy.

OK, a quick primer if you skipped the series and never dipped into adjacent games like Age of Wonders and King's Bounty. Olden Era is a turn-based strategy game divided into two phases: exploration and combat. Your hero traipses around a variety of vibrant fantasy realms with their army in tow, grabbing gold and resources, taking over buildings and bumping into foes—both the static kind, usually guarding some kind of treasure or useful building, as well as other roaming heroes.

Brawls take place on a hex grid, letting you command your units when it's their turn, which depends on their initiative and speed characteristics. Fairies, knights, dragons, banshees, horrible little frog-men—all the fantasy stalwarts are here. Your hero doesn't actually fight in the scrum, though, instead hanging back at the edge of the hexy board, where they can occasionally fire off an attack or cast a spell from their burgeoning magical tome.

So you ride around looting and fighting. Simple! But that's always been HoMM's greatest trick: making you think it's straightforward, until you dig a bit deeper, and then realise you're still digging hours later, uncovering all this obsession-forming depth.

The not-entirely-linear campaign is a great place to start as you ease yourself into your new obsession. Olden Era is usually a race, sometimes a marathon, often a sprint, but the game initially makes you the only hero on the map. This allows you to get to grips with things before its more intense, competitive nature is revealed. Eventually you'll be managing multiple heroes, and thus multiple armies, as you try to beat your opponents to unit-spawning buildings and bountiful treasure.

Being early access, though, means there are still wrinkles needing to be ironed out. In one mission, for instance, time simply stopped working.

Each mission is divided into days, weeks and months, you see. Every day lets you travel a specific distance (the number can be increased by skills, spells and shrine buffs), and at the end of the day you'll get gold and resources based on the buildings in your property portfolio. Certain points of interest that give you buffs or rewards will also reset after a week, and you'll be able to revisit recruitment buildings to get new units. So when time breaks, none of this happens. Reloading an autosave fixed this bug for me, so the mission was salvageable.

Mission accomplished

The odd bug or design quirk aside, I'm pleased to report that I encountered few speed bumps in my many races, leaving me free to focus on the important stuff: winning wars. That's easier said than done, though. Even in some of the more forgiving early campaign missions, you can find yourself in a seemingly unwinnable situation if you make a few missteps.

Enemy hero AI is extremely competent, quick and just the right amount of aggressive—it will gleefully give chase to try and murder you, but it can also get distracted by other priorities, giving you a bit of breathing room. It does mean you need to put thought into your plans for each day, though, even when you're not playing against a human opponent.

At first, you'll probably just be rushing towards the fantasy of commanding a big army. And they can get very big. While you're limited to only seven units, how many troops you've got in each stack is up to you. You can also split stacks into multiple units, sacrificing might for battlefield control. But big armies need big economies, and that's what might trip you up.

Don't worry, you don't need to pay for your army's upkeep, but to get the high-tier units, and to reinforce units that have taken a beating, you need plenty of cash. You also need specific resources to construct the buildings that generate them. And eventually you'll want to upgrade these units, which as always requires yet more cash.

See, while you can find buildings on your adventures that generate units for you to purchase every week, to get more control over your roster you'll need to invest in your cities—which are also where you can construct marketplaces, mage guilds, fortifications and economy buildings.

Some financial planning is required, then. Say you want to field some griffins. First of all, you'll need to either be a member of the Temple faction, or in control of one of their cities. Then you'll need to build a rookery, which costs 3,250 gold, five wood and five iron. This will immediately let you recruit a small number of griffins—seven, to be exact—for 1,785 gold.

A week later, you'll be able to recruit another seven griffins. If you want a larger pool to recruit from, you'll need some upgrades. The second fortification building project will bump the number up to 10 a week. To get that, you'll need to spend 2,500 gold and five iron on the first fortification project, and then 2,500 gold and 10 iron on the second.

There are plenty of ways to get passive and active income, but you've also got enemy heroes with all the same demands on their economies, and they'll be eager to take your cities and captured buildings away from you. So you'll need defenses to protect your stuff, and extra heroes so you can quickly reclaim anything that was stolen from you, which will also allow you to more quickly hoover up resources and treasure scattered across the map.

A bad week, heck, even a bad day, can be a real setback, giving your opponent everything they need to put you in the ground for good. But being smart about your priorities and not overextending will help you avoid these gloomy times.

X marks the spot

Olden Era is not a 4X game, technically, but it's pretty close. It's no surprise that Age of Wonders, which was originally inspired by HoMM, proved to be such a comfortable fit for the genre when it fully embraced the 4X pillars in Age of Wonders 3. If you're expecting something similar with Olden Era, though, you might be disappointed. There's no population management, diplomacy is simply a secondary skill that allows you to recruit neutral units, and there are no opportunities to develop a bespoke society.

Despite my love of Age of Wonders 4 in particular, and 4X games more broadly, I'm not missing these features here. Olden Era is a more focused experience, but one secretly hides an abyss where you can lose yourself in the nitty gritty, as you try to turn your realm into the most efficient, warmongering machine possible.

This can be done by fine-tuning your economy, making sensible picks when you level up and equip your hero, figuring out the best unit synergies and getting stuck into the law system. Each faction has two law trees full of boons, split into faction and army buffs. These can reduce recruitment costs, net you regular shipments of resources or increase the strength of specific units. It's through these laws that you can also increase the recruitment pool, so you'll get additional griffins to recruit every week.

There are so many ways to build and develop your armies, heroes and realms, even within the same faction, and while Olden Era rarely tries to limit you, the fact that it's a race encourages you to specialise more, to pick a specific strategy and focus on that. This even goes for your unit roster, as there are morale costs to fielding units from different factions, and high morale means units are more likely to act twice in a turn. But there are strategies that get around this, or negate its impact. You've always got options. This flexibility doesn't mean you should try to do everything; it just means you have the option to pivot when things fall apart.

When it's all laid out, Olden Era could seem daunting to the uninitiated, but the way it encourages this focus, and the way it's broken up into days where you might only be able to do a couple of things, actually makes the difficulty gradient pretty gentle. The magic system, though, could benefit from a bit more clarity.

Olden Era's magic system is great in practical terms, but not especially intuitive, and it works a bit differently from previous games in the series. You can construct mage guilds in your cities, and each unlocks a bunch of random spells—seven for the first tier, with each higher tier of building unlocking fewer but more powerful spells. Heroes then need to visit the city where the guild is located to receive the random spells that specific guild unlocked. Every hero can learn any of the lower tier spells, but they need proficiency in specific magic schools to cast the more powerful ones.

Every spell that's been unlocked, in every city, is collected in the Magic Observatory. Here you can upgrade spells using the resources you've collected, but you can also unlock new spells, as long as you have the appropriate guild constructed, at a limit of one per day.

Then you've got neutral magic, and each neutral spell has to be unlocked manually by spending a special resource, insight, which you can only get by generating enough astrology points, which you'll get from your cities. Even after you've unlocked them, your heroes will need to be at the appropriate level to actually learn them.

You'll have to go through a lot of steps and a lot of menus, then, but it's worth it. Magic in Olden Era is game-changing. At the higher tiers, you'll get access to apocalyptically powerful spells like Armageddon, which has a meagre base attack of 100, but adds 10 times the hero's spell power, and then hits every unit on the battlefield, including your own. Might be best to save that one for when you've got a lot of magic resistance.

Practical magic

Neutral spells aren't as flashy as the stuff you'll cast in combat, but they give you a lot of utility—flight, extra movement points, town portals. They're incredibly powerful, even if you won't be using them in a fight.

Dimension Door, for instance, allows you to teleport your hero to a location within eight squares. It's less powerful and cheesy than it was in previous games, though. In HoMM3 you could teleport to areas you wouldn't normally be able to access quickly because of geographical obstacles or monsters. This is still possible, but with more restrictions, as Olden Era's maps have borders protected by guardians that must be defeated before you can cross over, even if you have mobility spells. I miss the cheese, but I suspect it'll go down well with the PvPers.

Developer Unfrozen clearly knows its audience, because while Olden Era is still in development, it has all the features HoMM veterans could ask for. There are already five game modes, including the campaign, so you can dive right into a classic match, or shake things up with the single hero mode, and if you're more interested in simply trouncing an opponent in a duel, then you can pick the arena mode.

Olden Era utilises proc-gen maps, but lovers of hand-crafted adventures will be well taken care of as well. The campaign maps are hand-made, and once you're done with the first available act, you can dip into scenarios, featuring bespoke stories and objectives in more hand-crafted missions.

Even better, Olden Era has launched with a beefy map editor containing pretty much everything one would need to start tinkering away—despite the caveat from Unfrozen that it's "still in development and will be significantly improved". I've not created anything usable yet, but I am tinkering away on the monstrosity above. It's very on-brand.

When it comes to early access, I often find it hard to recommend anyone shell out for an unfinished game, especially when we have no idea what the future holds. It could get better. But it could get worse. You lose nothing by waiting. This will be true if you wait for Olden Era to hit 1.0. That said, it's already great. It's not a reinvention or a divisive reinterpretation: this is just classic HoMM, a bit modernised, a few tweaks here and there, but otherwise what you'd expect, and more importantly, what you'd actually want.

The Division Resurgence is a free-to-play mobile take on more-ish third-person shooter The Division. Announced in 2022, it finally hit iOS and Android on March 31. Now, with very little fanfare or prior warning, The Division Resurgence has launched for PC.

The quiet release could have something to do with it being in early access: according to Ubisoft the present PC release is "for technical testing ahead of its official launch in August". That's good for people who don't want to play the game on mobile, but it's surprising that the PC release is coming out at all: there's been no hint that it would, prior to its sudden appearance today.

Indeed, Ubisoft writes repeatedly in the game's "manifesto" about its mobile-only nature: "Our objective in bringing the Division universe to mobile, is to enable more people worldwide to enjoy this open world experience whenever and wherever they want," reads part of the spiel.

There's the possibility that Resurgence hasn't attracted enough players on mobile, hence the sudden pivot. Reviews haven't been super positive but nor are they damning: The Sixth Axis admired Resurgence's "well-rounded set of modes" and noted that "the tactical looter shooter grind is still pretty fun", but disliked its menus, "clunky" gamepad controls and bugs.

By dint of it being a mobile port, the recommended PC specs for the Division Resurgence aren't too steep:

At present, The Division Resurgence is only available on Ubisoft Connect.

Noah Hawley, the executive producer of the live action Far Cry series revealed (and then quickly unrevealed, but too late) last year, says he was attracted to the series because it's an "anthology" that tells a different story, with different setting, characters, and motivations, with every new game. And precisely none of those games will be featured in the series, because Hawley has other ideas.

"It was an exciting idea that we could build an anthology game adaptation where each season is a different story about civilized people thrown into situations where they have to become increasingly uncivilized," Hawley told Deadline.

"I’m not specifically adapting any of the games that they’ve put out—I’m saying much as I did with the Coens [Hawley was the chief creator of the Fargo series] or X-Men [he created FX’s Legion] or Alien, ‘Let me have a dialog with this franchise, because this is what I think a Far Cry story is'." With last year's Alien: Earth, Hawley more or less ignored the series canon to tell his own story.

Hawley also pointed out the need for "a larger conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of adapting videogames," because of the way they're structurally different from television or films.

"When you play a videogame, you only really move forward through the gameplay section, and then you have these cutscenes that you can skip, so when you go to adapt those games you have to be aware that makes the human drama kind of irrelevant to the storyline," Hawley said. "That is death for a show."

I don't necessarily agree with that take, and the idea of the Far Cry story being propelled forward by Hurk and me careening through rural Montana in a beat-up hatchback with a rocket launcher hanging out the back window is fun but perhaps doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. On the other hand, I'll be the first to admit that Hawley probably knows more about making a TV show than I do, and as someone who doesn't skip cutscenes—even in a Far Cry game—I might be an outlier here.

Hawley's approach hasn't been universally welcomed: Plenty of folks in the Far Cry subreddit don't care for it, and Far Cry 4 creative director Alex Hutchinson seemed to take issue with it as well, saying in response to a post about the report on LinkedIn, "This is kinda pissing me off. And I like Noah Hawley’s work."

Myself, though, I think I see where Hawley is coming from. Far Cry at this point is a formula: A guy, some pals, and a situation that can only be resolved through the persistent application of extreme violence. The details don't really matter, because none of them provide an especially compelling narrative to begin with: Lots of fans cite Vaas from Far Cry 3 as a peak villain, but for my money the batshit ending of Far Cry 5 is the real gold.

The point is that when you view Far Cry that way—that it's a parable about stripping away the veneer of civilization, told over and over again—then you can tell pretty much whatever tale you'd like, and it'll work.

And if that doesn't float your boat, well, there's always Uwe Boll.

As reported by IGN, Assassin's Creed Hexe game director Benoit Richer has left the project. Richer is the second director-level developer to leave the team this year, with creative director Clint Hocking having departed in February.

Richer announced his career move on LinkedIn. According to the website for Servo Games, Richer is a cofounder of the new studio alongside three other former Ubisoft devs: Luc Tremblay, Danny Marcoux, and Alex Droun.

On February 25, we reported on the departure of Hexe's creative director, Clint Hocking, who was immediately replaced with Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag director Jean Guesden. Ubisoft has not yet publicly shared Richer's replacement as game director on Hexe.

Any number of things could be going on behind the scenes of Hexe's development, but back-to-back departures in a team's senior leadership is rarely a sign things are going well. Hexe remains a complete mystery otherwise: It's got distinctly witchy vibes, both with its name, as well as the creepy twig version of the Assassin log featured in its 2022 reveal trailer.

Ubisoft has described it as being a different sort of game from the open world, action-RPG era of Assassin's Creed that began with 2017's Origins, but that could mean any number of things. In the more near future of the series, we finally got to see Black Flag Resynced last week, the worst-kept secret in gaming. The long-rumored Assassin's Creed 4 remake will release on July 9, and it will apparently still have blood, if you were worried.

Assassin's Creed's former overall franchise boss, Marc-Alexis Côté, left the series and Ubisoft last year, and that particular break-up hasn't been pretty: Côté has sued Ubisoft alleging "constructive dismissal" (basically getting pressured into resigning through hostile working conditions). Côté is claiming $1.3 million Canadian in damages.

If you're a vampire, you know the two most beautiful words in the English language: free blood. And if you caught the recent Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced reveal and were left uneasy by the lack of cherry syrup, you'll be extra pleased to know that blood is coming, and it will be free.

Producer at Ubisoft Singapore Justin Ng took to X to get in front of fan concerns that the game's violence had been toned down. In a post Thursday, he said "A few things to quickly address I guess (without getting into trouble hopefully). There WILL be blood in the final game, and it will not be a paid DLC. We hear the feedback on the VFX and audio cues on fights. It's being toned down."

If you're wondering where this is coming from, players have voiced concerns on social media this past week, worrying that the new game's combat might have a squeaky-clean sheen. Reddit user decimus_87 said of the reveal, "I hope they get rid of or at least change the cartoony sparks during fighting." In a reply on the same thread, Minute_Tomorrow_7935 commented "I hope they add blood. Shadows has quite satisfying blood animations so it seems odd if they've fully removed that from this game."

While it's impossible to appraise the full game from some brief footage, it seems natural that people are scrutinizing the fights. An overhaul to combat is one of the remake's big selling points, so without a multiplayer revival to round things out (yes, I'm bitter about it, can't you tell?), it's hard to say how appealing Resynced will be without some top shelf sword-swinging.

Ng assured fans further down in the aforementioned X thread that non-combat systems should feel familiar, too. When asked if social stealth would be back, Ng simply said "It's still there. #Faithful." It should be welcome news to any fans of AC's swashbucklingest entry.

And while it might sound ridiculous to even suggest that blood might come in the form of a paid DLC, there is certainly precedent.

The Assassin's Creed Black Flag remake is just over yon horizon, scheduled to dock this summer, nevermind the leaky hull that Ubisoft always springs when trying to keep a secret. The fourth mainline Assassin's Creed game was an unequivocal pirate game favorite in the years before we had Sea of Thieves. It's still got a place in a lot of hearts thanks to roguish pirate protagonist Edward Kenway and his antics rallying a bunch of pirate legends to a haven in Nassau.

When is the Black Flag Resynced release date?

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced launches on July 9, 2026 on PC (via Steam or Epic), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S for $60 / £50.

What's new in Black Flag Resynced?

Remake or remaster?

Ubisoft says that Black Flag has been "rebuilt from the ground up" in the latest version of its Ubisoft Anvil Engine, the version it used for Mirage and Shadows. So let's call it a remake, then. Ubisoft says that the upgrade is bringing modern tech like ray-traced lighting, water rendering, and weather simulation.

Who's making it?

Ubisoft Singapore is leading development on Resynced. Yup, that's the studio that did Skull and Bones, for better or worse, "with many of the original game’s developers returning to bring the game to the latest generation of hardware," Ubisoft adds.

Combat and stealth got a rework

Ubisoft was big on highlighting the way that combat has been updated: mostly the ability to do parries and takedowns. It's been "rebuilt from the ground up", and that combat in Resynced is more demanding than before as enemies will adapt to your behaviour, especially if you fall into predictable patterns.

On the stealth side, it highlights how Kenway can now freely crouch whenever as a stealth approach. That plays into all those many tailing missions, which it says have been updated so that being spotted doesn't just instantly fail the mission and instead just means you'll transition to head-on combat to resolve the situation. So stealth is encouraged, but perhaps not required.

What else is new?

• New story scenes, including one with Edward's wife Caroline
• 3 new recruitable crew officers (Lucy Baldwin, "The Padre", and Tobias "Deadman" Smith) with their own story questlines
• The modern day segments connecting to the animus feature "new moments that focus on Edward's internal struggles"
• 10 new sea shanties featuring French artist Woodkid
• Six hours of new quests, and "similar activities"
• Kenway’s Fleet mini-game no longer trapped on an app, you can now play it in-game
• New weapon upgrades for your ship
• Ziplines scattered across the cities
• You can manually jump whenever you like
• The Observe feature in AC Shadows has been added to Eagle Vision
• Cat or monkey pet to live on your ship (Jackd—awwwww, right?)

What's staying the same?

What's NOT in Black Flag Resynced?

After a year of leaks and horsing around that Ubisoft probably didn't find nearly as funny as I did, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced was finally given the official curtain-lifting today. The reveal of "gaming's worst-kept secret" was pretty much what we expected—it's a remake of Black Flag—but hidden in Ubisoft's big announcement roundup is a fun little bit of trivia: Development is being led by Ubisoft Singapore.

Ubisoft Singapore is one of the many studios Ubisoft has around the world, but it's notable in this particular context because Singapore is also the developer of Skull and Bones, Ubi's other big pirate fantasy adventure—the game whose well-documented difficulties enabled me to do this:

Skull and Bones was the victim of its own Ubisoft curse, you see. Where Black Flag Resync was destined to leak, Skull and Bones was doomed to delays, at least one of which happened less than two months ahead of its planned release in 2022. That date was itself the result of multiple prior delays: Skull and Bones was announced in 2017 and was originally supposed to be out in the fall of 2018. Missed it by that much.

I'm not suggesting here that Ubisoft is going to mash the brakes on Black Flag Resynced until 2032: As much as I enjoy utterly baseless, wild speculation, I'm pretty confident it will make its July 9 release target.

But recall that work on Skull and Bones began in 2013, right on the heels of Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag's release, and it was originally envisioned as a multiplayer expansion for Black Flag. After more than 10 years of tossin' on turbulent seas, Singapore finally shoves Skull and Bones out the door, and what do they get told? Yer doin' Black Flag again!

It's a living, as the saying goes, but holy cow. After 13 solid years of working on Edward Kenway and his various legally distinct spinoff adventures, I would imagine the Singapore squad is really looking forward to turning its attention to something different. Hey, maybe Ubisoft can put 'em to work on Beyond Good and Evil 2. Getting that out the door shouldn't eat up more than, oh, another 17 years.

For the record, Ubisoft Singapore isn't working on Black Flag Resynced alone. They're not included on the announcement page but mashed down in the fine print of the actual press release is a list of co-dev studios, and it's basically like someone put Gary Oldman in charge of production: The full roster includes: Ubisoft Barcelona, Ubisoft Belgrade, Ubisoft Blue Byte, Ubisoft Bordeaux, Ubisoft Bucharest, Ubisoft Chengdu, Ubisoft Da Nang, Ubisoft India, Ubisoft Kyiv, Ubisoft Montpellier, Ubisoft Montreal, Ubisoft Philippines, Ubisoft Quebec, Ubisoft Shanghai, and Ubisoft Sofia.

After more than a year of leaks that got so out of hand they forced Ubisoft's legal department to crack a smile, the big moment is finally upon us: Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced has been formally, fully, and finally revealed to the world. And it won't be too long before we get to actually play it, as Ubisoft also unveiled the launch date of July 9.

We've also got the Black Flag Resynced PC system requirements:

• Minimum System Requirements For 1920x1080, 30 FPS, Low Preset, Ray Tracing – Standard, Upscaler – Balanced
  • CPU: Intel Core i7-8700K 3.7 GHz, AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz
  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 (6GB), AMD Radeon RX5500XT (8GB) or Intel ARC A580 (8GB)
  • RAM: 16GB (Dual-channel setup)
  • Storage space: 65 GB (SSD required)
  • OS: Windows 11
• Recommended System Requirements For 1920x1080, 60 FPS, Medium Preset, Ray Tracing – Standard, Upscaler – Balanced
  • CPU: Intel Core i5-10600K 4.1 GHz, AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz
  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 (12GB), AMD Radeon RX6600XT (8GB), or Intel ARC B580 (12GB)
  • RAM: 16GB (Dual-channel setup)
  • Storage space: 65 GB (SSD required)
  • OS: Windows 11
• Recommended System Requirements For 2560x1440 (2K), 60 FPS, High Preset, Ray Tracing – Standard, Upscaler – Balanced
  • CPU: Intel Core i5-11600K 3.9 GHz, AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 3.7 GHz
  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 (10GB) or AMD Radeon RX6800XT (16GB)
  • RAM: 16GB (Dual-channel setup)
  • Storage space: 65 GB (SSD required)
  • OS: Windows 11
• Recommended System Requirements For 3840x2160 (4K), 60 FPS, Ultra Preset, Ray Tracing – Extended, Upscaler – Quality
  • CPU: Intel Core i7-12700K 3.6 GHz, AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D 3 GHz
  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 (24GB) or AMD Radeon RX7900XTX (24GB)
  • RAM: 16GB (Dual-channel setup)
  • Storage space: 65 GB (SSD required)
  • OS: Windows 11

A Core i7-8700K, GTX 1660, and 16GB RAM struck me as a little on the steep side for a minimum spec—although some of that feeling may arise from the fact that Black Flag originally came out in 2013. You shouldn't need that much horsepower to run a 2013 game, right?

It's not really a 2013 game, of course: Black Flag Resynced is "rebuilt from the ground up" in Ubisoft's Anvil engine, and as PC Gamer hardware writer Nick Evanson noted, the Resynced requirements are quite similar to those of Assassin's Creed Shadows, which he said "makes sense, because they're both on Anvil."

Black Flag Resynced promises "updated visuals and enriched gameplay, including parry driven combat, improved stealth and parkour, deeper naval mechanics, and new narrative content." Among that new content is a trio of new officers who can join you on your adventures—Lucy Baldwin, the Padre, and Dead Man Smith—each with their own unique quest that reveals more about their histories. They'll also bring new special abilities to your ship, like double shots from broadside weapons.

"Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced matters deeply to us and to you," game director Richard Knight said during today's showcase. "That's why we took the time to rebuild it with the care it deserves. This remains a solo adventure and character-driven experience. It is not an RPG. The focus stays on how you play and how you explore the world."

That might seem like kind of an odd thing to focus on, but there's a point: Creative director Paul Fu said that because Ubisoft wants Resynced to be a "pure story-driven adventure" that's "fully focused on Edward's adventures," it will not offer the multiplayer elements that were in the original game.

Here's a deeper dive into the updated gameplay:

And some new screens:

It's been quite a ride, with spoilers coming from merch makers, voice actors, age rating boards, and various "anonymous sources," who probably aren't used to having to stand in line when they want to spill some beans.

Ubisoft didn't take that leakiness especially well at first but eventually had a change of heart about the whole thing and decided to embrace the absurdity of it all. Which was understandable, really: Have to laugh to keep yourself from crying, and all that.

The standard edition of Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced goes for $60, and is up for pre-purchase now on Steam, the Epic Games Store, and the Ubisoft Store. Ubisoft also confirmed during today's showcase that the original Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag will remain available for purchase.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced will be out on July 9—I already said that, I know, but a reminder never hurts. In the meantime, why not try our new pirate quiz? I can promise* you that "What's a pirate's favorite letter?" is absolutely not one of the questions.

(*not actually a promise, I have no idea)

Sometimes you just gotta roll with the punches and, credit where it's due, Ubisoft eventually leaned into the fact that its Assassin's Creed Black Flag remake became, in the publisher's own words, "the worst-kept secret in gaming."

The remake's existence was revealed ahead of time by countless leaks: everything from age rating boards to anonymous sources to its own lead actor, Matt Ryan—who then said he wouldn't be saying any more because "the company threatened to sue me." It got leaked by the existence of a statue. Twice.

Finally wiser heads prevailed and Ubisoft began meme-ing about the game, and yesterday officially confirmed that the game will be revealed later this week. But wait! There's still time for the leakiest game ever to offer up one more leak for old times' sake, with a clip from what is presumably the reveal trailer finding its way onto X.

The clip gives our first look at in-game footage, with protagonist Edward Kenway alongside Blackbeard during some naval warfare, with lots of explosions and rousing battle cries. It's only a short snippet but there's time enough to see Kenway wielding cutlasses, Blackbeard jollying around with a telescope, cannons being loaded, and Kenway taking the ship's wheel.

It also features Matt Ryan delivering the line "so let the Black Flag signal nothing but your allegiance to man's natural freedoms", so it's nice to know that Ubisoft definitely did call off the lawyers.

Some fans have already stitched together comparison shots, which show the remake does have much more detailed character models and improved lighting. Though if we're being honest this was always a great-looking game: it's a glow-up, sure, but I don't know how many folks who own the original will be rushing to throw their money at Ubisoft.

The official reveal of Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced will be during a showcase on Thursday, April 23 which takes place at 9am PST / 12pm EST / 5pm GMT. Hopefully the hull of Kenway's boat proves less leaky than the project itself.