Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag is a popular series favourite, with trading out the dowdy Connor and colonial New England from AC3 for Welsh privateer Edward Kenway and a merry shanty-singing pirate ship. The game's Resynced remake was recently announced and arrives 13 years after the initial release, and today we have the first firm technical details about what's changed in the new version for PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.
The long and short of it is this: the entire game has been remade in the latest version of the Anvil engine, bringing the Caribbean setting to life with modern high-res textures and improved environmental detail. There are also changes to the core gameplay, with more modern movement mechanics and seamless transitions between areas, plus new story content.
Lighting tech has come a long way in the past decade plus, and so it's no surprise that a more modern lighting engine produces strikingly different results both on land and underwater. There's even a new dynamic weather system, which changes the atmosphere of the game and requires a different approach to navigation and combat when you're at sea in the Jackdaw. On the animation front, the team has used modern motion capture technology to deliver more dynamic cinematics, including handcrafted facial animations for Kenway. There's also a choice of nicely animated pets for your ship.
The game supports ray-traced global illumination (RTGI) and reflections, with the PC version offering "standard" and "extended" RT lighting modes. To run this with the extreme graphics preset at 4K 60fps, the developers recommend a Ryzen 7 5700X3D or Core i7 12700K CPU and an RTX 4090 or Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card - quite robust specifications, but slightly below the "RT Extreme" preset for Assassin's Creed Shadows, which suggested a newer-gen CPU (7800X3D/13700K) and the same RTX 4090 graphics card.
The PC version includes DLSS 4.5, FSR 4 and XeSS 3 in terms of upscalers, HDR and ultra-wide aspect ratios are supported, and the frame-rate can run uncapped in both gameplay and cutscenes. Finally on the PC front, there are dedicated presets for handhelds like the Steam Deck or ROG Ally, and a built-in benchmark is available for tuning your settings - or testing graphics cards and CPUs if you're a DF-like entity.
In terms of gameplay changes, the combat system has been reworked to be a bit more fluid, with faster combos, a perfect parry system and takedown chaining. Outside of combat, traversal again gains more modern trappings, like free jumps, back ejects and side ejects, making movement more similar to the modern games and eliminating some of the friction in the older-style controls.
Similarly, it's possible to crouch freely now, and tailing/eavesdropping missions aren't instantly failed if you're spotted. Instead, AI characters should react more realistically, allowing you to adapt your approach and get away with slight infractions that would have caused a strict desync in the original game.
Finally, the naval arsenal has been technically expanded through an alternate fire upgrade system for every weapon on the Jackdaw. This provides you with a shade more tactical flexibility during engagements, while three officers with their own quests and special abilities provide further grounds for experimentation. Most importantly, there are new sea shanties, and even new music from WoodKid - whose work we last saw in Death Stranding 2.
Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced will be released on 9th July, 2026 for $60. It'll be fascinating to test how the game looks and performs on each target platform, as the level of visual fidelity here doesn't look far off the recent mainline entries to the series.