I missed Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag.
I played it on Xbox 360 when it first came out back in 2013; many school nights were lost to the Golden Age of Piracy, sailing the Jackdaw to its next glorious bounty. But somewhere along the line, I completed it. And then I completed its poorly timed follow-up, and then I hit a budgetary wall as neither I (jobless child) nor my parents (employed adults) could afford the Xbox One back then. Thus I played my 360 Slim to hell and back, enjoying what could only have been 1000+ hours of Skyrim with zero mods and not a care in the world. When I did eventually receive the gift of an Xbox One S, the Golden Age of AC had fallen to ruin.
I played (and enjoyed) Origins and Odyssey, and I still plan to open my copy of Valhalla back up one of these days, but until this past year I neither owned (nor cared to purchase) Unity and Syndicate. I liked the first game but don’t much love the need for the backwards compatible song and dance on my Xbox One, and I adore the Ezio Trilogy but am not quite ready to pay full price for a trilogy that I already spent years of my life picking the bones of back in its 360 heyday. Given that I already owned a free copy of the third game’s remaster from my Odyssey purchase, and that the pirate game with Assassins in it happened to be on the Microsoft clearance shelf, I decided to spend a few Reales on the prequel before jumping into the American Revolution. After all, what better way to experience a game series than in a hacked together, ass-backwards mess?
In this post, I won’t be talking about the entire game piece by piece, bit by bit. I will be talking about my experience replaying Black Flag, a decade after I set it down. Whatever stuck out to me, whatever rubbed me the wrong way, whatever shines even more now that I’m older; it’s all going in here, where I can perhaps feel accomplished for spending so many hours of my life sailing a make-believe ship through a historically accurate rendition of the devil’s sweaty midsection.
Startin’ Over
Edward Kenway’s story never fails to draw me in. Even though I play as him, I can barely suppress the urge to just let this greedy little man die by his own self-interest. Edward is living for himself, but despite this, you can tell that he still wants to do right by those he calls friends. This is made even more clear in the game’s final moments, when you see all his fallen friends sitting at the table overlooking Great Inagua. They’re happy, lively, and exactly as Edward remembers them best. I think that the weirdly ethereal memories that we see, memories of him and his wife Caroline, are what makes it even harder to be mad at him. Without those, I think that it would be much easier to write him off as an idiot who sailed away from home to get rich quick when he should have just figured it the hell out alongside his wife, who clearly loves him. But that’s just it – the addition of these scenes shows us that despite everything he does, the objective (or at least the one that he tells himself) is to get enough money to give Caroline a life that he thinks she deserves. Even though she would be happy with nothing more than the two of them, together, he is insistent that the life he can provide is not the life that she deserves to live. And so every ship you take, every camp you pillage, every life you extinguish is given the tint of “he wants this for Caroline”.
Which is what I would think, if not for the fact that the man is clearly loving this shit. He amasses a fortune, both in wealth and influence amongst his fellow pirates, yet he doesn’t return home to his wife. He stays in the Caribbean for seven years. Nearly a decade he spends doing whatever he likes, even acquiring and renovating his own ISLAND, but the thought to return home and show his wife the spoils of his glory just...never shows up. And in the brief moments when he is called out on this by others, people who have their own opinions on his choices, he provides an excuse as to why he can’t go home. Why he can’t face his problems head-on, taking the bull by the horns and handling what may be a tough conversation with someone whom he loves dearly.
Of course, it takes the entire game for him to come to grips with his own mistakes. And when he finally does...well, the game ends. If you know how it ends, then you know, but I don’t want to cry bittersweet tears over my keyboard. Let’s talk about ships, damnit.
Ships Are Sailin’
In this game, you can become a pirate. Engage in ship combat, fleet management, resource economies, sailing the open seas, fighting authority, exploring unmarked locations, and most importantly, getting a lot of fucking money. It feels really good to be a pirate in this game, bottom line. The game takes practically everything from AC3 and then retrofits it to a swashbuckling experience, which is almost startlingly easy to do considering the sheer differences between the two games in...well, practically every way. The fourth game takes the interesting (though limited) ship combat from its predecessor and fleshes it out into a self-sustaining gameplay loop, then takes the naval missions from that game and flips them on their head. Rather than going out on these missions in your own ship, like in AC3, you can actually capture ships that you find in the open world of Black Flag and then send those captured ships on missions for you. With my middle management senses now tingling, the game lets you essentially gather a pirate empire of your own making through the fleet map. Sending ships out regularly results in exponentially higher passive income every time you play, but at the cost of these ships being out much longer. And that is where the system stumbles and nearly falls onto it’s face:
The fleet missions take real world time.
This doesn’t seem like a problem at first, but then you realize that the times get progressively longer as you unlock more fleet missions. Much, much, MUCH larger. Meaning there is a non-zero chance that you could have a twenty hour fleet mission happening in the background by the endgame. This single feature of the fleet map turns what was once a quick and fun side activity into an achievement-tracker slog, where by the end of my playthrough I would simply enter the game, check my fleet map, and turn it off again until the mission was complete. When the amount of hours for mission completion are more than the amount of hours that I am awake over the course of a full day, I feel like something has fundamentally broken. It is okay to make your players wait a little while to finish a mission, especially if it gives them an extra bonus to look forward to when they’re logging in or logging off. But letting the times get so out of hand just results in the fleet missions feeling like a case of diminishing returns. Add that to the fact that they are infinitely repeatable once you have completed one, and that they have no satisfying conclusion once you complete the final unlockable fleet mission, and this iteration of the fleet map is only fun for those who get marginally involved with it.
On a completely different note, Great Inagua was such a great idea. It wasn’t as personalized or characterized as the Homestead from AC3, but having your own pirate hideout in a (not-so-hidden) cove is just awesome. You can complete renovations to various parts of the island as the game progresses, giving the feeling that your influence is really growing and that your hideout is growing to match it. The emotional weight of the island comes from the memories you made there with the people you’ve called friends, and when those people die, the memories tend to linger. They hit you when you look at a barstool for a second too long, or when a name is mentioned and you can see them leaning over your ship’s railing like they never left. Great Inagua isn’t your home because it is unique, it becomes home with the memories you make there. Otherwise, it’s just like any other island in Black Flag’s Caribbean: lively, but lacking in soul.
A Strange Stoppin’ Point
I know that this is a weird place to end on, but I am writing this specifically as a double feature: my next post will be about Assassin’s Creed: Rogue Remastered, and how I think it added or removed parts of what made Black Flag work. I have completed Black Flag’s DLC, Freedom Cry, and I may write a shorter post about that prior to the Rogue release. However, at this point in time, I have gotten through my specific thoughts on Black Flag surprisingly quickly. I love this game, and I could talk about it for hours without achieving anything of substance – but I do value my own time, and I have highlighted the details that I wanted to.
Share the post if you liked it, comment if you have something to add, but regardless, I’ll see you next time. Have a good one!
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