- Primary Subject: Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced – Removal of Modern-Day Storyline
- Key Update: Argues that removing Black Flag’s Abstergo present-day segments weakens the game’s narrative depth and removes its meta-commentary on corporate control, even if those sections were originally less popular with players.
- Status: Opinion
- Last Verified: July 14, 2026
- Quick Answer: The piece argues that while Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced benefits from cutting its modern-day gameplay sections, it also loses the original game’s layered storytelling and satire.
Spoiler Warning: If you're planning to play Black Flag Resynced completely blind, you may want to bookmark this one for later.
Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced makes a compelling case for revisiting one of Ubisoft's greatest adventures. Ironically, it also makes an even stronger case that cutting its modern-day story was a mistake.
The remake removes the original game's present-day storyline, discarding the Abstergo Entertainment sequences that tied Edward Kenway's adventure to Assassin's Creed's wider mythology.
If your least favorite moments in Assassin's Creed were the ones that pulled you out of history, Resynced's biggest change probably feels long overdue.
Edward’s naval battles, treasure hunts, and escalating personal tragedy remain the obvious attraction, while walking through a corporate office and hacking computers hardly competes with boarding a Spanish galleon during a thunderstorm.
Yet playing Black Flag without those sections exposes how much work they were quietly doing.
The problem was never that Assassin’s Creed had a modern-day story.
The problem was that Ubisoft repeatedly mishandled, abandoned, and eventually concealed it. After replaying it, I don't think Black Flag Resynced proves Assassin's Creed was better off without its modern-day story.
If anything, it convinced me those sections were part of what made Black Flag feel so layered in the first place.
What Does Black Flag Lose Without Abstergo Entertainment?
The original Black Flag casts the player as an employee of Abstergo Entertainment, a media subsidiary using ancestral memories to develop commercial entertainment.
Edward isn't the subject of historical research. He's intellectual property, with Abstergo executives combing through centuries-old memories the same way a publisher might sift through ideas for its next blockbuster franchise (sound familiar?).
Once I understood that context, I couldn't look at Black Flag the same way again.
Edward’s adventure remains sincere, particularly as his selfish pursuit of wealth gradually leaves him isolated from the people who once gave his life meaning, but it also becomes material being repackaged by a corporation with little interest in understanding him.
Abstergo filters Edward's memories through the same commercial mindset that turns beloved franchises into carefully packaged blockbusters.
The game wore its satire on its sleeve, and I think it was better for it. Abstergo's executives openly discuss reshaping history into something easier to market, sanding down Edward's rough edges and cherry-picking the most cinematic moments for mass consumption.
Their shallow enthusiasm for pirates is funny precisely because the game surrounding them is itself a lavish Ubisoft production about pirates.
Black Flag could indulge every familiar fantasy, from sea shanties to buried treasure, while maintaining enough self-awareness to recognize the commercial machinery behind that fantasy.
Once those Abstergo sections are gone, so is the clever second conversation the game was having with the player.
Edward’s story still functions, but Resynced becomes much closer to the uncomplicated historical crowd-pleaser that the original was gently mocking.
There is an uncomfortable irony in seeing a modern remake streamline away a storyline about corporate executives streamlining history for broader consumption (one imagines the fictional Abstergo approving the decision immediately).
Those interludes also created useful distance from Edward. His story covers years, shifting alliances, and increasingly painful consequences, so the returns to the present provided breathing room between major chapters.
They gave the player a moment to consider what had changed before being dropped back into another stage of his decline.
Without those present-day interludes, the historical plot flows more continuously, but I don't think it's more satisfying because of it.
The historical story still works, but it doesn't flow quite as well, and several narrative threads no longer receive the payoff they were built around.
Were The Modern-Day Sections Actually the Problem?
I'll be the first to admit that Assassin's Creed's present-day storyline has never been everyone's favourite part of the series.
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Even during the Desmond Miles era, many players resented being pulled from Renaissance Italy or colonial America to walk around a hideout, listen to conversations, and operate the Animus.
Black Flag made the contrast especially severe by replacing ship combat and tropical exploration with first-person office work.
To a point, I understood the criticism. The modern-day sequences rarely matched the excitement of the historical campaigns, with limited gameplay and an overreliance on exposition doing them few favors.
After all, who wouldn't want to get back out onto the Caribbean instead of walking around an office looking for passwords? (I certainly wasn't rushing to inspect another photocopier.)
Ubisoft had become so good at building historical playgrounds that every trip back to the present felt like hitting the brakes, then mistook that reaction as proof the present-day story itself was the problem.
But poor execution doesn't automatically make an idea a bad one.
The most sensible response would have been to improve how the modern material was paced and played, perhaps by making certain investigations optional, allowing players to choose when to leave the Animus, or giving present-day missions mechanics equal to their narrative importance.
Ubisoft instead spent years trying to write that part of its identity out of the franchise.
One thing I don't think gets enough credit is how the modern-day storyline connected each historical setting to something larger than itself.
Altaïr, Ezio, and Connor never felt like three unrelated heroes separated by centuries. Their memories became chapters in a much larger conflict stretching from the distant past to an uncertain present.
The Animus transformed an anthology of historical adventures into one science-fiction conspiracy unfolding across time - which remains one of the most wonderfully ridiculous elevator pitches in gaming.
Modern-day Assassin’s Creed was therefore never valuable solely because people enjoyed controlling Desmond. It was valuable because it made each historical period part of something larger.
The Crusades, Renaissance Italy, and the American Revolution weren't isolated historical playgrounds chosen for their commercial appeal but chapters in the same overarching story.
After Desmond's death, Ubisoft never really found another throughline that could hold the series together.
Anonymous Abstergo employees, Juno’s unresolved plans, Layla Hassan, Basim, the Reader, and newer Animus-based storylines have all offered possible directions, but too many have been introduced without being properly developed or resolved.
Important threads have disappeared between releases, migrated into external media, or become buried inside optional files that only the most committed players will ever read.
The resulting confusion has often been presented as evidence that modern-day Assassin’s Creed does not work.
However, what I think it demonstrates is that serialized storytelling only works when a franchise commits to its overarching narrative instead of constantly resetting it.
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