Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced creative director explains why the modern-day scenes are gone

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced’s creative director has explained why the modern-day scenes from the original game are missing from the remake.

In the early games in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, players would split their time between playing as a historical assassin and modern-day sequences, which centred around a mysterious company named Abstergo. In more recent entries, these sequences have been phased out, a change that has split the Assassin’s Creed fanbase.

In Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, players are hired by Abstergo Entertainment to examine the memories of Edward Kenway. One of the reasons the player is tasked to do this is to gather material for a potential feature film about Kenway.

However, in the upcoming remake of the game, these sequences have been removed. When asked about the decision to remove the modern-day elements, the game’s creative director Paul Fu explained that it may be jarring to keep them in the game when compared to how the modern-day element is handled in the rest of the series currently.

“We felt that the right thing to do was to go in the direction of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows,” Fu told VGC during an interview earlier this month. 

“The Animus has evolved so much in the past few years that it would be odd for us to shift the direction.” The game does feature the rifts that appeared in Shadows, showing “what if scenarios,” according to Fu.

VGC recently spent four hours with Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced and called it “a perfect summer jaunt back to the Caribbean in a game loved by so many.”

The gameplay elements that made the original beloved are still great, and where Ubisoft Singapore has gone in and touched things up, they’ve done it subtly. Things like the epic visuals and new perfect parry system are the headline additions, but director Paul Fu’s approach has been one of someone who’s clearly extremely reverent to the original.

Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag Resynced releases on July 9, 2026, for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.