Amid the great teal sea of the Caribbean, where the dolphins bound beside the ship named the Jackdaw; where the sails and the rigging twang and flap in a calming rhythm; where the men carry a song on the wind, “It is time to go now, haul away your anchor”; and where there is nothing else but a horizon, I know I am home. Assassin’s Creed is returning to its series high point, and it’s made me realize how much we’ve missed from games we played 13 years ago, both technically and emotionally.
There are many ways that Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced reminds me that games today have become too bloated. Rysynced’s world is sprawling, with the same 16 x 16-kilometer map as the original Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag. However, the developers at Ubisoft Singapore (and many other Ubisoft studios besides it) have added more islands and off-the-path locations to explore on this slice of the Caribbean. You can dive practically anywhere (though only areas close to shore will have any treasure of note). And not to put too fine a point on things, but it all looks absolutely gorgeous in 4K with all the ray-traced lighting settings turned up to near max. The light reflecting off the sea alone had me floored. © Ubisoft; screenshot by Gizmodo And yet, Black Flag Resynced demands only 65GB from your drive. The rest of the game’s PC requirements are relatively modest by today’s standards. Publisher Ubisoft claims you’ll need an Nvidia RTX 4090 or AMD Radeon 7900XTX (both cards with quite a lot of VRAM) to play on Ultra settings with all the ray tracing options and to rely less on upscaling. I had the chance to play through nearly three hours of the game on a system with an RTX 5080, and it was full of wonderful lighting, particle, and sea effects. While I won’t be able to tell how well the game scales for less-performant systems until closer to release, the game should also make use of the PlayStation 5 Pro’s PSSR upscaling for enhanced lighting. But the fact that I can get it on my PC without having to delete two other games is already a plus in my book. Ubisoft has not revealed if it reused any assets from the original Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag from 2013, but that game rounded up to around 30GB. For comparison, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Ubisoft’s previous game in the franchise, takes up 115GB in your dwindling drive.
