By almost every metric, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced succeeded, and the proof of that goes beyond my individual addiction to the game. The reviews landed very well, Steam concurrent player counts reached a new franchise high, and the title’s technical performance is actually pretty great on both consoles and PC. All of that, I’d say, is a pleasant surprise; the conversation surrounding Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced‘s in-game store? Not so much.
It’s practically a joke at this point: Ubisoft moved two million copies of Black Flag Resynced on day one, blowing past its last release, Shadows, and vindicating a remake that had the massive weight of player expectation on its back. Every reveal of a new feature was met with visible pre-launch suspicion from the potential player base, and Ubisoft threaded the needle anyway. Yet, even despite this tremendous restock of goodwill, Ubisoft found a way to jump on the nearest rake anyway, with $85 worth of microtransactions and a subsequent flight to slash the very staff who made this game.
For the Most Part, Ubisoft Nailed the Hard Part
To be clear, the beauty of Black Flag was always the sailing, the brilliantly economical storytelling, and the sheer tangibility of its pirate fantasy; Resynced does not fumble any of that. The visual upgrade is perhaps best-in-class, the world holds up entirely by modern standards, and the technical rollout was clean enough that the usual launch-day pile-on players might expect these days never materialized. That is not nothing—it is arguably the hardest possible version of this job, and the studios involved cleared the bar.
Of course, the trepidation going in was reasonable on the consumer’s part, and some of it turned out to be justified. Resynced‘s new mechanical additions are, in fact, uneven, and anyone who was suspicious of the new officers can consider themselves vindicated, because those characters do indeed present poorly, with routinely mediocre writing, the same lack of motion capture, the same recycled animation, and the very same shot/reverse shot framing blandness that’s existed since Origins. But the mechanical jank is a design problem, and design problems can be forgivable—what actually followed Black Flag Resynced‘s launch is not.
$85 Worth of Microtransactions Is Bad
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Image via Ubisoft -
Image via Ubisoft -
Image via Ubisoft
Resynced launched as a premium, single-player, story-complete remake with roughly $85 in additional purchases sitting next to it on day one. To be clear about the terms, they are all optional, and the base game is no less complete without them, but they do provide real gameplay benefits, so I get that the word “optional” looks like it’s doing an awful lot of work. And, to Ubisoft’s credit, this is also not a uniquely Ubisoft disease: the Resident Evil 4 remake shipped with microtransactions that handed out gameplay advantages, and Capcom took a fraction of the heat for it.
Balance the critic averages
Balance the critic averages
Easy (6)Medium (8)Hard (10)
But precedent doesn’t change the fact that Ubisoft has earned every ounce of this particular backlash, because Ubisoft has been doing this for a decade or more, and the leadership there has never once shown evidence of having learned from the backlash. Players raise these frustrations with every single launch, especially in this franchise. All Ubisoft ever seems to do in response is conjure up wily new ways to funnel funds out of its player base.
There are actually two fresh examples of this sort of avarice within Resynced, too. For one, the menu’s UI has swapped the traditional pause button (at least on controller) for an in-game shop, which flips years of muscle memory into something Ubisoft can capitalize on. And even more plainly, the game teaches players how to spend money on microtransactions via a pop-up that’s labeled as a “tutorial.”
Of course, players on most digital storefronts—especially Steam—clocked this stuff immediately. That’s worth sitting with, because this all goes beyond the officers, or the writing, or the mocap, to something more predatory. Here’s Steam user saintonthegame:
Bought the Deluxe Edition, foolishly thinking I’d be buying the FULL game. Here I was thinking Ubisoft had turned a new leaf, then WHAM, they hit you with over £75 worth of additional day 1 DLC. What’s worse is that I got a pop-up in-game labelled ‘Tutorial’, directing me to [the] store. Yes, there’s a tutorial on how to buy DLC!
Ubisoft actually replied to that negative review on Steam the very same way it replied to several others—notice, though, that this one-size-fits-all reply addresses only the first half of the complaint, and it is technically true; nothing in the store is required to finish or enjoy Resynced. But it also completely sidesteps the tutorialized cash shop, and frankly, I don’t blame whoever wrote that reply. Being handed that task—to find a marketing-friendly way to explain Ubisoft’s latest breakthrough in wallet-emptying—would be both hard and embarrassing.
Another Steam user, Riley Buell, summed up much of this frustration quite nicely in their negative review:
For anyone who says, “just don’t look at the DLC list” or “Who cares if they didn’t add it to the deluxe edition” is not getting the point. It’s about the fact that on the day the game drops they release 80 dollars worth of ‘extra content’ instead of using that content to better the game for everyone. It just shows what Ubisoft has done and represented for like 12 years now… that they prefer the money grab to the game experience for all players.
Unsurprisingly, this review did not receive a reply from Ubisoft. What’s more surprising, perhaps, is that the situation worsened for the hardworking developers who created some of the best aspects of Black Flag Resynced.
Ubisoft Laying Off 51 People Who Just Made Its Latest Successful Game Is Worse
Directly after Resynced’s launch, the same one that sold two million copies in a day, Ubisoft moved to lay off 51 people from Ubisoft Barcelona—the studio responsible for the underwater exploration and tech, which are two of the single most improved elements of this remake and some of the clearest net-positive additions it has. That is Ubisoft’s reward for the best work in the package. It’s difficult to articulate how bleak it is to watch developers create a successful game, lose their job anyway, and then have their achievement buried under monetization decisions they almost certainly had no say in.
It’s also far too common in this industry that the team that built the best part of a recently posted hit for a company are the ones who ended up paying for it. Yet, in this case, it feels as if Ubisoft is trying to “get away” with something, considering just how soon this decision comes after the release of Black Flag Resynced. Either way, it’s never been clearer that whatever lesson players have spent a decade trying to teach this company, it has not landed.
According to Video Games Chronicle, in response to the upcoming layoffs, Ubisoft Barcelona and its representative union, Coordinadora Sindical del Videojuego (CSVI), have begun a strike on July 14 that will last through Thursday, July 16.
A Net-Positive Remake I Wish I Hadn’t Bought
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Image via Ubisoft -
Image via Ubisoft -
Image via Ubisoft
Ultimately, my intention is to be fair, because Resynced sits at “Mostly Positive” on Steam, and I can confidently say that the rating is accurate. While the new officers are mostly a wash and the gameplay jank muddies my overall opinion, it’s a visual and technical marvel, and I have been totally absorbed by Black Flag Resynced. It is a net-positive remake of an already great game.
But considering the miasma of greed that surrounds Black Flag Resynced—the animation recycling, the $85 worth of microtransactions, the predatory UI changes, and most importantly, the decision to cut the very developers who made the game as good as it is—I truly wish I hadn’t purchased this game. I wouldn’t recommend it to people, either, especially those who care about the human cost of game-making. Ubisoft should not be rewarded for the half-measure of successfully remaking a game that was already great, and by hiding its business practices behind that legacy, it has rightfully lost any faith I had left in future titles like Assassin’s Creed Hexe.
- Released
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July 9, 2026
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ / Blood, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, Use of Alcohol, Violence / In-Game Purchases, Users Interact
