I've been playing the Assassin’s Creed Black Flag remake this week, and one thing that struck me beyond the pointlessness of the whole thing was how, in one small way at least, it was good to be back.
Luke Plunkett
Black Flag, originally released in 2013, sticks out like a sore thumb in the Assassin's Creed back catalogue because the things it's most remembered for, and the things it did best, had little to do with Assassin's Creed. While this is a mainline AC game in intent, saddled as it is with so much lore and so many scripted missions designed around following men around and stabbing them from a bush, the highlight of Black Flag is without a doubt all The Pirate Shit.
By giving the player command of a ship, dropping them in the middle of an open-world Caribbean and then throwing in stuff like ship-to-ship combat, naval missions, boss fights and a basic trading economy, Ubisoft inadvertently (or advertantly, I don't know!) also gave us a modern version of the classic Sid Meier's Pirates. Which, if you've never played it, is basically everything Black Flag's best pirate stuff was, only older, and without any fancy lighting or ocean effects.
There was so much to do here, and it was all so much fun, that I can barely remember the actual Assassin's Creed storyline from this game, because I probably spent 80-90% of my total playtime just sailing around doing the pirate stuff! I always thought that was such an incredible achievement for the developers– to ship a big AAA blockbuster is hard enough at the best of times, but to juice its diversionary side content to the extent it becomes the main attraction? And it becomes so popular that Ubisoft commits itself to a whole new game based just on that pirate stuff? That's incredible. I can't think of another game like it.
The reasons The Pirate Shit was (and is, if this is your first encounter with the game) so good are many! The game's exaggerated, almost cartoonish depiction of the Caribbean is one of the most idyllic works of art direction in video game history; everything from the lapping waves to the smooth, warm sunsets makes you feel like you're right there. Ships handle well, the segue to hand-to-hand combat is wonderful, naval combat is both easy to learn but difficult to master and the extra missions and trading stuff (not to mention the always-excellent fort challenges) mean that you can abandon the AC storyline entirely at points and just play the Pirate Game forever and it truly feels like its own game.
All of which is important stuff to keep in mind when playing and talking about this game! But also, let's be honest: the thing that tipped this game over from "good Assassin's Creed" into "one of my all-time favourites" was the sea shanties. While hardly one of the most expensive or flashy parts of the game, Ubisoft's decision to go and hire a bunch of real sea shanty experts to lend their voices to a game about pirates was a stroke of genius.
It's a beautiful thing to sail a ship in this game during its quieter moments. The sea rolling against the hull, the wind blowing gently through the sails, the moon rising softly into the early evening sky. It all looks and feels great. But to have all that going on, and then have this come over the top, is transcendent.
It doesn't matter that this game's shanties and songs are wildly and wilfully historically inaccurate (most of those included in the game date from the 18th, 19th and even 20th centuries). They feel like pirate sea shanties, in the way so much else we associate with pirates has more to do with movies than history books, and if their presence makes the game cooler without doing much actual historical harm, I think that's fine.
The work vocalists like Sean Dagher, Nils Brown (watch him belt one out on a stormy beach! Amazing!) and Michiel Schrey were able to put together for this game is astounding. Even listening to these shanties in a YouTube thumbnail on a website is giving me goosebumps. Hearing them in the game, with the lights off and the seas at your fingertips, is a video game sensation so immersive I will take it with me to my grave.
It's so funny to me that for all the time and money Ubisoft have spent remaking a video game that I don't think needed to be remade at all--I've still got the original on PS4 and it still looks and plays great!--the icing on the cake, the thing that made a very good game into a great one, was something so simple and so divorced from the AAA industry's obsession with fidelity and visuals and scale that you don't even need to play Black Flag to enjoy them, you can just pull up a playlist and listen to them in the car or on the way to work. And they're all just as good in 2026 as they were in 2013, no remastering needed.
