Ubisoft’s Big Assassin’s Creed Mistake
Ubisoft had the keys to a vast successful Pirate RPG Kingdom just sitting in their hands, but threw them away with a series of baffling decisions.
Ten years ago, Ubisoft launched the wildly popular and critically celebrated game Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. It wasn’t actually the fourth game in the franchise, and its historical storyline was set prior to Assassin’s Creed III, but the silly numbered title didn’t stop it from becoming a big hit that’s still played and enjoyed by many gamers today.
Black Flag is notable on the design side because it kept everything that fans liked from the earlier installments while also charting a bold new path forward for the franchise, akin to a soft reboot. The new emphasis on both ship combat and world exploration brought truly epic scope and scale to the series without the unnecessary bloat that would later come to bury it, and the modern day storyline got to do some fun things without the baggage of the twisty lore that was wrapped up in the previous game.
If you’re a fan of the AC franchise, or friends with a fan, you’ve probably either said or heard that Black Flag is the best game in the series. It’s a case that’s easy to make. Protagonist Edward Kenway brought a lot of…
