Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is a 2026 action-adventure game developed primarily by Ubisoft Singapore and published by Ubisoft. A remake of the 2013 game Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, originally developed by Ubisoft Montreal, it was released for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S on July 9, 2026. Resynced acts as the fifteenth main installment in the Assassin's Creed series, with its modern day story continuing the story arc that began in Assassin's Creed Shadows.
Gameplay Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is a remake of the 2013 game Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. Like the original, Resynced is set in the Caribbean during the later years of the Golden Age of Piracy and follows pirate Edward Kenway, combining on-foot exploration with ship-based traversal and naval combat.
Built in the latest iteration of the Ubisoft Anvil engine, the remake emphasizes a solo adventure and character-driven experience rather than role-playing elements. It retains the original game's overall world structure while featuring rebuilt character models and environments, along with changes to combat, stealth, parkour, and naval gameplay. Changes to movement and mission design include back ejects, side ejects, a manual crouch option, and revised tailing and eavesdropping missions in which detection no longer automatically results in failure, though the ability to replay older missions has been removed entirely. Combat was revised around more precise parries and shorter combo chains, but swords remain the primary means of combat, as the Hidden Blade is no longer usable in combat outside of stealth and contextual kills.
Other features include recruitable officers for the Jackdaw, expanded underwater exploration, extra ship customization options, dynamic weather effects that influence ship handling, additional story content involving figures such as Anne Bonny, Blackbeard, and Stede Bonnet, alongside new sea shanties.
Development In June 2024, Ubisoft chief executive officer Yves Guillemot said that the company had several remakes of older Assassin's Creed titles in development. Numerous reports highlighted the existence of an Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag remake. In September 2025, French outlet Jeux Vidéo Magazine reported that the remake was targeting a March 2026 release. In December, a Black Flag remake was listed on the PEGI rating board website. Insider Gaming called the Black Flag remake "the worst-kept secret in gaming".
Ubisoft publicly acknowledged the project on March 4, 2026, in a franchise update written by Jean Guesdon, the company's head of content. The post included artwork bearing the title Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced.
The remake was developed primarily by Ubisoft Singapore. 15 Ubisoft studios worked on Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, including its Belgrade studio that was closed in June 2026, and Ubisoft Barcelona, which laid off the entire team after release.
Gameplay design Ubisoft sought to distinguish Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced as an action-adventure game over recent entries that leaned into RPG mechanics. Black Flag Resynced includes a fully customizable HUD with a number of presets depending on player preference. By default, players see enemy health and defense bars which Ubisoft chose to ensure players understand the new defense mechanics. A "Minimal" HUD setting displays only essential information like health and interaction prompts while a "Simple" setting gives aid for combat and navigation.
Writing Darby McDevitt, lead scriptwriter on the original Black Flag, returned to write two new scenes for Black Flag Resynced and amend an existing one. Ubisoft wanted to remain faithful to McDevitt's original vision. The team didn't feel the need to alter Kenway's introduction to explain him having athletic parkour abilities as a pirate. They wanted to explore the theme of greed further in Black Flag Resynced. A new scene between Kenway and his wife Caroline was added to deepen the character's personal journey and Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet get expanded arcs. The Freedom Cry DLC has been removed in Black Flag Resynced with the game instead being "fully focused on Edward's adventures in the Caribbean" according to Paul Fu. Creative director Jean Guesdon described it as a "game full of light" taking place "under the bright Caribbean sky" with a "sense of escapism". Modern day sections from the original Black Flag set in the Abstergo Entertainment offices have been removed and replaced with new sequences delving into Edward's memories. Guedon said that, "back then in 2013, the present day reflected where the franchise was at" in a moment of transition and needed to be changed to better reflect the modern Assassin's Creed. The 'What if?' scenarios for Kenway replace the older Abstergo sections, similar to rifts in Assassin's Creed Shadows (2025) but are more narrative-driven.
Technology Graphics Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced was developed in Ubisoft's in-house Anvil engine for ninth generation consoles and PC with technology originally developed for Assassin's Creed Shadows. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag was developed as a cross-generation title for seventh and eighth generation consoles. The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions received a resolution bump to a respective 900p and 1080p resolution from 720p on the previous generation consoles. Ubisoft rejected suggestions that Black Flag Resynced is a remaster, instead considering it a full remake that has been rebuilt from the ground up. Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced contains no code from the original 2013 game. While Black Flag Resynced has been built from scratch with the modern Anvil engine, Ubisoft still sought to maintain the original game's visual identity. Black Flag Resynced incorporates modern rendering techniques such as physically based rendering which was not commonly supported in 2013 when the original game released. PBR simulates the properties of real materials such as roughness and depth with parallax occlusion maps and materials more realistically react to lighting and shadowing. The new PBR pipeline required rebuilding assets to be physically based from scratch rather than simply upscaling the original game's assets that weren't created with PBR in mind. Black Flag Resynced uses higher resolution textures, more geometrically detailed character models and increased draw distances. It utilizes the engine's Micropolygon and Atmos technologies, first introduced in Assassin's Creed Shadows. The Anvil engine's Micropolygon virtualized geometry system handles LOD transitions automatically, much like Nanite in Unreal Engine 5. With Micropolygon, artists can make high-quality assets that can be automatically lowered in texture resolution and geometric detail rather than creating multiple versions of the same asset that are swapped in and out for different detail levels. The significant increase in polygon counts brought by Micropolygon necessitated Ubisoft make improvements to their TAA solution and increase internal resolutions to avoid geometric flicker.
Character rendering was modernised such as shading on character skin using subsurface scattering for added realism. The strand-based hair system developed for Assassin's Creed Shadows returns and has been expanded. Ubisoft discovered issues with the hair system in Shadows for how it handled blonde hair. Shading and lighting changes were made for the system for Black Flag Resynced to properly handle blonde hair that is more common is Black Flag Resynceds Caribbean setting than the Japan setting of Shadows. Loading screens from the original when anchoring in a major city have been removed in Black Flag Resynced.
To better accommodate the dynamic time of day cycle in the game, ray traced global illumination (RTGI) was used for indirect diffused lighting instead of pre-calculated lighting to allow more natural color bleeding with interiors being more accurately lit based on the outdoor lighting. RTGI eliminates issues with light bleeding throw walls with Ubisoft taking inspiration from id Software's high performance RTGI solution for Doom: The Dark Ages. Accordingly, Ubisoft retooled their pipeline to reduce the cost of RTGI from Shadows. The use of ray traced specular reflections have been expanded from Shadows across a broader range of hardware. Their resolution was lowered to a quarter of the primary resolution while a fallback to cube maps exists for distant water to avoid excessively long rays. Performance modes on consoles still make use of traditional screen-space reflections and cube maps. The PC version offers options for diffuse-only or diffuse and specularity in ray tracing and more inclusive ray tracing BVH structures.
On PlayStation 5, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced offers three graphical modes, each outputting 4K resolution using TAAU. The Performance mode targets 60 frames per second with a 1080p internal resolution and the Fidelity mode targets 30 frames per second at 1440p internally. A Balanced mode at 1260p internally targeting 40 frames per second is available when the console is connected to a 120Hz VRR display. The Fidelity and Balanced modes feature RTGI and ray traced reflections while the Performance mode only features RTGI. The Fidelity and Balanced modes feature RTGI and ray traced reflections while the Performance mode is limited to RTGI. Nicolas Lopez, technical architect at Ubisoft Montréal, said that Ubisoft "really squeezed the PS5 as much as we could". Black Flag Resynced is enhanced on PlayStation 5 Pro, bringing "a no-compromise experience with advanced ray tracing performance" according to Lopez. All three graphical modes on PlayStation 5 Pro feature both ray traced global illumination and ray traced specular reflections. The resolution of ray traced reflections is increased on PlayStation 5 Pro. PlayStation 5 Pro is the only console to support strand-based hair rendering. This allows hair to exhibit more natural motion and response to weather conditions like wind. Strand-based hair is used for all characters in cutscenes across all three graphical modes on PlayStation 5 Pro but is only available during gameplay in the Fidelity mode. Black Flag Resynced includes Sony's second generation PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) for upscaling to a 4K output resolution.
Xbox Series X is a feature match for PlayStation 5 with the same settings in the respective Performance, Fidelity and Balanced modes. For the weaker Xbox Series S, Ubisoft aimed for a closer visual alignment with the Series X after Shadows received criticism for its significant cuts in presentation. Xbox Series S features only a single 30 FPS mode that is upscaled to a 1620p output resolution. It features ray traced global illumination but no option for ray traced reflections like the 30 FPS quality modes on other consoles due to the console's memory constraints. Ubisoft aggressively lowered RTGI resolution for it to run on Series S rather than eliminating it entirely like Shadows did for Series S.
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