Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced Will Not Feature Levels or Gear Scores

Although they were once a welcome addition to a gameplay formula that was growing stale at the time, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced has decided to do away with RPG mechanics like levels and gear scores that have been a staple of the franchise for almost a decade. Ubisoft’s recently revealed Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced aims to preserve everything that fans loved about the original game while making smart changes in the right places to bring one of the franchise’s most highly regarded entries to modern gaming standards.

For the better part of a decade, Ubisoft’s approach to the Assassin’s Creed franchise has included a variety of RPG elements, such as player levels, gear scores, and progression gates—a vast departure from the standard action-adventure experience that the franchise was known for since 2007. At the time of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey‘s release in 2018, the addition of RPG mechanics was considered a great rework of the typically action-adventure AC formula, which was beginning to feel a little too formulaic in the eyes of fans and critics. However, as the series has continued to iterate on these RPG mechanics, more fans and critics have now somewhat soured on where the Assassin’s Creed formula has landed, with many finding recent entries like Odyssey and Valhalla to be a bit too bloated with RPG elements for their own good.

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced Map Revealed

Ubisoft’s upcoming remake of Assassin’s Creed Blag Flag has its map revealed, with a handful of new surprises added to the base game.

Ubisoft Wants Fans to Know Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced Is Not an RPG

As the first ground-up remake in the franchise, many fans may have wondered whether Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced would change the original game and include the franchise’s now-staple RPG elements, and now Ubisoft has confirmed that this will not be the case. Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced will not feature any leveling, gear scores, or progression gates, as confirmed by an Ubisoft representative on Reddit. The original post confirming the game’s lack of levels and gates comes from /r/AssassinsCreed on an official post diving into Resynced‘s combat changes and HUD customization elements, which are now fully customizable. While Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced‘s combat has been reworked to include a new defense mechanic with health bars, Ubisoft has been quick to hammer in the fact that this is still a classic action-adventure experience at its core.

Rearrange the covers into the correct US release order.

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What’s more, Ubisoft also mentions that even the added health and defense bars that were baked into older entries in the series are entirely optional. Players won’t be able to completely disable the new defense mechanic in Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, but they will be able to ignore its visual elements to a great extent due to the vast amount of HUD customization present in the remake. Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced‘s whole UI is fully customizable in the same way Shadows’ UI was, with options for “Simple” and “Minimal” HUD presets, or even the option to have absolutely no HUD at all.

It seems like Ubisoft has taken great measures to distance new entries in the Assassin’s Creed franchise from the likes of Valhalla and Odyssey. Recent games like Assassin’s Creed Mirage were marketed as a return to basics for the AC franchise, while the development team behind Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced continually states that this will be an action-adventure experience without any drastic genre departures from the original game. What that means for the future of Assassin’s Creed‘s formula is anyone’s guess.

Balance the critic averages

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Ubisoft has stated that more remakes in the Assassin’s Creed franchise are coming, and they have a good shot at sticking true to the classic formula, as Resynced seems to be doing. However, new entries in the series don’t have to follow any established rulebook. Assassin’s Creed Hexe could very well be a return to the action-adventure basics that defined the genre in the first part of its life, but that doesn’t mean that the leveling, gear scores, and progress gating that have been successful for Assassin’s Creed‘s longevity and profitability in recent years won’t come back as the primary way Ubisoft wants AC done going forward. Perhaps the old-school dodge-and-parry mechanics from the Assassin’s Creed games of yesterday could remain relegated to spin-offs and remakes going forward.