the scale of the sea was too disconcerting and a big disappointment for me. i like big emptiness and doing nothing in my games, mind you.
It was one of my favorite ACs (not that I am a AC fan). I can’t help you with naval combat, I played it several years ago at this point.
There was a fair amount of upgrading to do, so you do the usual thing of taking on little ships before you progress to the bigger fish. Picking your battles was important, and sometimes you’d have to drop a victim if another ship wanders in for its defence. Standard stuff really, try to get as many guns on them and manoeuvre so they can’t get theirs on you, etc. I think if their sails were shredded it was an easy board.
I really enjoyed the game, but as usual the narrative didn’t live up to the freewheeling exploration… ie, the whole Montreal meta-studio part didn’t come into play much. Diving was cool.
Still my favourite AC game! Loved it and did a pretty completionist run through. The graphics probably look a bit dated these days, but it sure was fun!
I was so confused. I thought Skull & Bones got renamed to Avast and suddenly was the best pirate and AC game ever and didn’t even realize it came out yet - then saw replies from 2013.
Its the AC game that I’ve play ed, that had the best story, and some of the best characters, and, weirdly, most emotionel moments for me. The ending hits me really hard, whenever I watch the ending song credits - so great!
Instead of playing Tortuga I started this instead. My first AC game since the one in Italy (AC2?).
The graphics are dated but not bad. The controls are wonky to the point where I climb way too many buildings when I just want to go that way.
The setting, though. I like that part. It’s early for me (I’m just in Havana) and I can’t imagine finishing this. But maybe I’m wrong.
Nearly all the AC games are available on the PS Plus upgrade that cost me like $11 bucks. So I’ll play this until I’m bored and then try Unity maybe?
I just can’t get the hang of the piracy. Which is basically what I’m here for. I lose every battle.
Odyssey also has plenty of sea battles, albeit a few millennia earlier.
How odd. I assume you’re only trying to engage crappier ships than yours, yes?
It takes a little while to get a hang of the sea battles but once figured out they are fun. This feels a bit long and repetitive, I guess like all Assassin’s Creed games, but I’m hooked enough to want to get through the story.
And the game itself looks pretty good for 10 years old. I fired up Origins and think in some ways it looks worse than Black Flag.
Avast, me hearties, there’s a remake afoot (although not for a few years, probably):
I feel like I’ve put these notes down here somewhere before, but this was the first thread that comes up if I search ‘Black Flag’ and I don’t see a lot of detailed info. I do see a discussion I had with Tom ten years(!!!) ago where I’m struggling to articulate what I am hoping I can put down more clearly now, particularly since @brianrubin asked me about this in the Skull & Bones thread:
I kind of hate Assassins Creed: Black Flag. I recognize mine is an outlier opinion, but to summarize my problems with the game, I’ll say this - I think it’s a poor Assassins Creed game, as well as being a poor pirate game. Let me tackle each in turn.
If one comes to this game from the background of having played other Assassins Creed games, this one really only pays lip service to all that’s come before. There could have been a rich history here: the main character is the father of Haytham in the previous (AC3) game, we could have moved the plot forward from (spoilers!) the main present-day protagonist no longer being part of the picture. Heck, we could have had a protagonist who was an assassin, or antagonists who were templars, but we got this somewhat shambolic new thing, which veered into a somewhat sandboxy (I’ll come back to this) sailing and pirating world. But it also tried something dramatically new by introducing sages, which ties back into the Isu mythology by allowing one of those precursors to periodically reincarnate, retaining all memories of that original life as well as all previous reincarnations. That’s an interesting idea, but it really throws a monkey wrench into the mix when you’ve got a somewhat major story character (going to try my best to avoid spoilers) has this tie-in to a previous civilization that they seem to be trying to scrub the series free of. In more recent games, they’ve kind of moved the assassins themselves to the side, with Cassandra and Eivor not being actual assassins but more ancillary interested parties. I think this game is where the idea of the Assassins Creed started to move off the critical path.
As to the second part, why I thought this game was a poor pirate game, I kind of go into this idea upthread - I feel like Ubisoft had the seeds of some really awesome ideas, like this could have been an awesome pirate life sim, with hiring a crew, provisioning for expeditions, going out and creating a career, a life for a pirate character. But that’s not where this game was going; instead of an open ocean, there’s a few square miles that you can sail around in, and not really all that much to do in it.
I will freely admit that with this last criticism, I’m breaking one of my cardinal rules of art appreciation: I’m holding it against the game for not being what I want it to be. I’ve always felt very strongly that a thing should be appreciated for what it is and not damned for what it isn’t. I may not like it, but I should respect what was done. But I can’t do that here, and I admit that’s my failure rather than the games. I can’t play Black Flag without seeing the missed opportunities and unpaid-off potential. I can recognize that logically but I’ll always feel that the game failed for its misses. For those reasons, Black Flag will likely always be my least favorite AC.
Apart from the fact that I couldn’t care less about the story of AC, I can kind of see the point. Black Flag has by far the worst traditional gameplay of the AC series, even worse than 3. But the ship combat was so new and so good! It’s definitely a game that promised more than it delivered, but it kind of hit at the perfect time for me. I was getting really tired of both the story and the gameplay of old school AC, and the game said fuck it, here’s a ship combat game instead. Especially in the world in which every Ubisoft game starts to look like every other Ubisoft game, that hard turn was exhilerating.
See, the only AC game I’ve really played was Origins, which I loved, but petered out on, so maybe I’m enjoying this because I don’t have the baggage.
Or maybe ye is a pirate at heart, matey!
Not to beat a dead horse, but I think if they’d really said “fuck it” and really run with the idea of a pirate sim I’d have been totally onboard. This whole straddling both worlds thing they did just left me wanting more of both.
I was very disappointed by the pool of water that’s supposed to represent the Spanish Main in this game as well.
I had listened for years to the Jumping the Shark crew telling how great it was, with all the chants and everything, and it just never felt like sailing to me.
This game has been one my biggest disappointments in the modern gaming age, alongside Tomb Raider’s cover shooter deboot.
When you said it was a bad AC game, I thought you were going to talk more about how it played than the lore. Totally fair criticism if you’re invested in that side of the franchise, but that stuff has always just sort of bounced off me.
I was all set to explain that I could understand how at the time it could’ve felt like the biggest departure from the formula. It’s debatable, I would also see the argument for AC3 as still a larger shift as of Black Flag, but my point is I would understand that argument. But the franchise has kept changing in enough that in retrospect now Black Flag would still slide into the “original” formula my comparison to modern entries.
Anyway, that’s my flimsy argument against a point you weren’t making, carry on. :)
I didn’t even get into stuff like the ship-based stealth mission, which is still one of the weirdest gameplay elements I can remember.