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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.”
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