What just happened? In a half-hour showcase stream, Ubisoft finally pulled back the curtain this week on what has been its worst-kept secret for months. The company has revisited its 2013 open-world pirate simulation game with significantly enhanced visuals, rebalanced gameplay, and new content. Despite focusing heavily on ray tracing, Ubisoft promises that Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced will support a broad range of PCs, including handhelds.
The company has rebuilt Black Flag's graphics from the ground up using the latest version of its Anvil engine, likely reusing technology from last year's entry, Assassin's Creed Shadows. The visuals incorporate micropolygons, physically based rendering, advanced water simulation, ray-traced global illumination, and RT reflections.
Every performance preset in the official PC system requirements includes ray tracing, and every performance setting on PlayStation 5 incorporates RT global illumination, even the 60fps mode. This indicates that Ubisoft has optimized the feature to run at high frame rates on modest GPUs.
Still, the PC version retains the option for a software-based solution or pre-baked lighting for graphics cards that do not support hardware-accelerated RT, such as Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1660 or AMD's Radeon RX 5500 XT. These settings are also likely recommended for handheld gaming PCs, for which Black Flag Resynced has dedicated visual presets.
For standard ray tracing in 1080p with balanced upscaling at 60 fps, Ubisoft recommends a GeForce RTX 3060, RX 6600 XT, or an Intel Arc B580. Higher resolutions with quality upscaling and higher ray tracing presets require high-end GPUs with at least 10GB of VRAM. The game will require 65GB of storage space and include a benchmark to test performance.
Black Flag Resynced also changes most of the original version's gameplay elements substantially. Ubisoft replaced the combat with a parry-based system, added new weapons for naval battles, introduced new jumping mechanics, and reworked the stealth mechanics. Players can dive and crouch anywhere to avoid detection, and being discovered during tailing missions – a major source of complaints over the original version – now alters the story instead of resulting in an instant failure. New characters and missions have also been added.
Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced will be available on July 9 on Steam, the Epic Games Store, the Ubisoft Store, Nvidia GeForce Now, Blacknut, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series consoles.
Insider Gaming reports that the remake's commercial performance will influence Ubisoft's decision to revisit other Assassin's Creed games.