An overly intense preview of the Assassin’s Creed Black Flag pirate remake

I closely compared maps, studied new islands, counted an extra sync point in Havana and got an answer about how in the world they’re going to end this game, given the thing they cut.

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, running on PC. Screenshot: Ubisoft, captured by Game File

Last week, I emailed a Ubisoft PR person some extremely specific questions about Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, the July-scheduled remake of the company’s 2013 pirate adventure.

I was curious about the remake’s location of the Voynich Manuscript.

It seemed to have moved.

Was I right?

Whether you know anything about Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag or nothing, you may correctly wonder why in the world I was asking this.

Black Flag Resynced is the remake of the blockbuster pirate (and assassin) exploits of Edward Kenway, grandfather of the main protagonist of Assassin’s Creed III. It’s set across much of the Caribbean circa the early 1700s. You’re a pirate with a pirate ship, and can sail the sea, raid rival ships, dock at cities, explore islands, get in a dinghy to spear sharks, use a diving bell to plunder wrecks and chase down wind-blown pages of shanty lyrics so that your crew can sing them.

As the original made clear, this is all experienced via a fictional memory-simulation device called the Animus, used in the modern day, by people tied up in a centuries long conflict between rival secret societies.

Collectible manuscripts are not a major feature.

Black Flag is a game from Ubisoft’s glory days that has been overhauled—however necessary or not—to help Ubisoft in one of its lowest moments, as the company’s output slows and it struggles to release a hit.

Ubisoft is spending its promotional energy for Resynced by showcasing the remake’s graphics (they’re indeed great), the game’s improved combat mechanics (definitely better; you can trip people and throw them into boxes), better stealth (you can now crouch with the press of a button rather than waiting for Edward to walk into high foliage to trigger a finicky auto-crouch) and the company wants me and you to know that there’s a big helping of new content sprinkled across the game (I found some of it).

Last week, I played Resynced for three hours in a meeting room on Manhattan’s East Side, in a space I shared with a Ubisoft PR rep, a quality assurance lead, an expert combat designer, and an IT official.

I legit got a lot out of the session, and I respect that they set up the multi-stage demo to show several exciting parts of the game. I played the revamped intro (shot-for-shot similar to the original, except there’s a moment when our shipwrecked pirate protagonist must briefly dive and resurface to reach shore—this teases that Resynced lets Edward swim below the waves, where he’ll sometimes find coral and treasure. The Ubisoft team wanted to impress press like me and engineered the demo to end with a mission involving Blackbeard. Between, I did a lot of sailing and some plundering.

Sure, that was all nice.

But I got a little hung up on the Voynich Manuscript, a very unimportant collectible that was part of a series of 20 real-life bits of mysterious writing. These papers were locked in treasure chests found on islands across the original Black Flag’s map.

The night before I played Resynced, I’d stayed up until 2 am playing the 2013 PS4 version of the original game, to be ready for a comparison. I had played the PS4 edition’s first missions, dipped into its rendition of Havana, and briefly sidetracked myself to raid a guarded courtyard where I found a treasure chest that contained the Voynich Manuscript.

When I sauntered into Resynced’s Havana at the Ubisoft-hosted preview, I approached what I thought was the same courtyard, beat up a few enemy guards, reached into that treasure chest and grabbed… the Tabulae Rudolphinae?

Whoa, whoa, whoa, Ubisoft remake team!

A different, real, mysterious manuscript?

Later I consulted Google. The Tabulae Rudolphinae was in the original Black Flag, too, but it was in a treasure chest in Nassau.

What was going on here? Just how different was this version of the game?

You see, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag is a certain type of video game remake. It is not strictly a shot-for-shot, prettier-but-perfectly-faithful remake a la Nintendo’s 2023 Metroid Prime Remastered.

I don’t think it is a a meta-adventure about being a remake, a la Square Enix’s 2020 Final Fantasy VII Remake.

It seems closest to EA’s 2023 Dead Space remake, which tells the same main story as the original with largely the same moments, some restaged for impact, but with major graphical upgrades, numerous quality of life improvements, better gameplay and a bevy of new side-quests woven in.

So what are they moving manuscripts around for?

Over email, the game’s creative director, Paul Fum told me this was the result of the team rebuilding the original game’s virtual Caribbean, adding new, more detailed locations that led to them redistributing some of Black Flag’s in-game treasures. “There are now different chest types with different rewards,” he wrote. “Food, ammo and petty loot can be found in logical spaces where we added bits of environmental storytelling, including new areas. As such, we did reshuffle a lot of rewards in the game to fit this expanded version of the Caribbean.”

Let it be known to writers and users of Black Flag walkthroughs and tips: The old guides clearly aren’t going to work.

I had an even more specific question that Fu’s colleague, game director Richard Knight, humored:

Why were there now nine climbable survey points in Resynced’s Havana vs. the original game’s eight?

Yes, I, the author of 50 Things About Assassin’s Creed III That You Should Know (2012) and Another 46 hours with Assassin’s Creed Shadows (2025), notice these kinds of things.

“Good catch!” Knight wrote, understanding the wisdom of flattering the previewer.