Earlier this month, I got to play the upcoming remake of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag at a Ubisoft-hosted event in San Francisco. While there, I got a chance to chat with Black Flag Resynced‘s creative director, Paul Fu; game director Richard Knight; and Anvil engine architect Nicolas Lopez. We talked about a lot of stuff, but I also asked them to share their opinions on something people online continue to debate: What is the difference between a remake and a remaster?
When talking to Lopez and Fu, they both clarified that Black Flag Resynced is a completely new game that contains zero code from the original 2013 Black Flag. Instead, this new, gorgeous-looking remake is built using the same version of Ubisoft’s Anvil engine that powered 2025’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows. And as a result, the upcoming remake comes with all the bells and whistles that’d you expect with a modern, advanced, AAA open-world video game engine. But Fu believes a remake demands more than just making an old game look prettier.
“Right, for me, the definition [of a remake] is not just a graphical overhaul, but a systems overhaul, or rather expansion, and new content,” said Fu. “So, for me, a good remake has to have new content, new systems that expand on these core systems, which is what we aim for in [Resynced].”
Lopez shared his own thoughts on the remaster vs. remake question, adding: “Usually, the way I see a remaster is just, you know, recombining the code for the new console, higher resolution, maybe upscalers, DLSS, these kinds of things, but it’s basically the same assets. Maybe we’re making a few textures in HD, but this is not what [Resynced] is. This is a full-blown remake.”
Resynced isn’t just a remake, it is the ‘next Assassin’s Creed game’
Meanwhile, Knight wanted to make it clear that, in his opinion, a remake has to be more than just a better-looking and playing version of the old game. It needs to stand toe-to-toe with other recent blockbuster games, both visually and in terms of how it feels to play.
“The way I like to look at it is: A remaster is you take the original game and you do as much as you can to make it look good and add some sort of modern functionality,” said Knight.
“But a remake is when you go back into the guts, and you start to rebuild. With Black Flag Resynced, it was critical for us to not just take the old game and repackage it and spruce it up a little bit, but to make it feel like the next Assassin’s Creed game. To [make it] feel like a modern game. Maybe you’ve never heard of it before, you play it today, and it feels like ‘oh, well, this makes sense as a brand new Assassin’s Creed game.’ So, you know, it’s redoing the models and the cutscenes and all that stuff, but also just adding the kind of things that players would expect out of [a new Assassin’s Creed game] today.”
When I asked Knight if the plan was always to remake Black Flag, not just remaster or port it, he confirmed that Resynced has “always been a remake” since development started in 2023.
“What if we took that Black Flag experience and then you added sort of the modern tech and some of the features and stuff you see in games like Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Mirage?” said Knight. “What kind of game would we get out of it now? But part of why we call it Resynced is that it’s that idea that we can dream a little, we can add quality-of-life [changes], we can modify some things as we need and make it the next Assassin’s Creed game.”
Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is set to launch on Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC on July 9.