Because a 13-year-old game is being offered with over 80 euros worth of additional content, Black Flag Resynced was met with a barrage of criticism at launch. The developers are now responding, saying: You don’t have to buy the cosmetics.
Actually, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced had a pretty solid launch. On the review aggregator Metacritic, the remake of the fourth installment in the series—which is still beloved by many fans today—debuted with a rock-solid score of 84/100; in our GameStar review, we even gave it one more point.
And the sales figures for Black Flag Resynced are impressive as well. According to Ubisoft, the remake of the pirate adventure sold over 2 million copies on its release day—reason enough for Ubisoft to celebrate.
At the same time, however, the remake is currently in the deep red when it comes to user reviews on Steam. Although these have since improved to 79 percent (mostly positive
), shortly after release, Black Flag Resynced was temporarily sitting at just 35 percent positive reviews.
Criticism was directed, among other things, at the game’s performance, but above all at the numerous paid add-ons that were offered in the game’s (Steam) store at launch and were also advertised quite prominently in-game. If you add up their prices, you arrive at thehefty sum of 84 euros. And the base game alone already costs around 60 euros. Given that Black Flag is already over ten years old, many users accused Ubisoft of greed.
The development team at Ubisoft Singapore has since responded to the criticism and addressed many of the negative comments on Steam. The message that emerges across all the comments may not sit well with every reviewer:
We’ve been following your feedback since the release and are reading every word of it. Thank you for caring so much about “Black Flag Resynced.” We’d like to make one thing clear: The standard edition offers the full, complete gaming experience. Every mission, every island, the entire story, and the complete game world are included—without any restrictions.
The expansion packs are purely optional extras for players who want to use them, and by no means a prerequisite for enjoying or completing the game. We’ll continue to listen to you as you play!
– Ubisoft Singapore (viaPC Gamer)
It basically means: You are the ones making the purchasing decisions. The DLCs are just cosmetic extras; no one is forcing you to buy these skins.Black Flag Resyncedreplicates the complete gameplay experience of the original Black Flag. You don’t need any of this additional content to enjoy the game in all its glory.
In fact, almost all nine of the add-ons in the store are skins for Edward or his ship, the Jackdaw. These are irrelevant to the gameplay experience and—as our tester Jesko notes—even hinder immersion in the historical pirate setting.
Only the Map Pack offers you a gameplay advantage of sorts, as it reveals the locations of Maya stelae, sea shanties, and treasure chests directly on the map. However, this also somewhat ruins the joy of exploration; otherwise, you’d discover these items and locations by syncing at vantage points.
So, whether you want to spend money on this extra stuff is ultimately up to you. Given Ubisoft’s current financial crisis, though, the French publisher can certainly use every penny—which is probably why they’ve woven this kind of additional content into the game.
In the link box above, you can read more about the remake of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag.
