Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag builds on the foundations of its predecessor to set its story in the Caribbean and put the focus on pirates and naval warfare. Black Flag’s many mistakes are old ones in the franchise, with the game being dragged down by clunky stealth, weak combat, and a repetitive mission structure, but this time the story could have used a little more ambition as well.

The protagonist this time is the pirate Edward Kenway, who one day gets stranded on an island with the rogue Assassin, Duncan Walpole. When Edward learns Walpole is carrying money, a quick chase and a furious brawl follow, which end up with Walpole’s death. Edward, then, decides it’s a good idea to steal the man’s identity and travel to Havana to meet with the local governor and collect Walpole’s prize. What he learns from the governor, however, is much more interesting than a simple bag of coins: Edward discovers that somewhere in the Caribbean there’s a secret place called the Observatory, which can provide a man with the means of surveilling all the people on Earth. The governor – a Templar – believes it to be the perfect tool to gain power, but Edward sees the Observatory as a chance to make a lot of money.

Edward’s main drive is a simple one. He wants to become rich enough to return to England and live a happy life with his wife:  “Do you ever dream of the big score? A ship so full of gold and silver you just split it and sail home?” Edwards asks his quartermaster.

One of Black Flag’s main narrative problems is that it reserves all the good stuff to the characters’ backstories – which can be read in the “animus database” inside the menu. During cutscenes, they’re simple, shallow characters with predictable responses: Edward, for instance, only cares about money, so people constantly need to offer him some kind of reward for his services. Twenty hours in and he’s still the same guy. He’s the complete opposite of Assassin’s Creed 3 protagonist: while Conway had strong beliefs and personal vendettas driving him forward, Edward is just there, sailing, being a pirate, and trying to turn a profit.

There’s little conflict in his arc. There’s a comment in the Animus database, written by an Abstergo employee that, besides sounding like a cry for help from the writers, also perfectly exposes the problems of Black Flag’s narrative: “I certainly don’t want us to feel conflicted about Edward’s choices. He’s the hero. Let’s avoid scenes of him drinking and gambling.” In other words, Black Flag plays it safe, never daring to craft interesting, challenging characters, which inevitably leads to a boring, one-note protagonist. The game’s narrative has bloody pirates as the main characters but even so manages to be one-dimensional in their construction: Edward’s friends are all good people, and his enemies are all evil, cruel men. There’s the occasional backstabbing, yes, but the characters that betray Edward were never fully fleshed out beforehand.

That’s a big problem in Black Flag. The story shows the pirates at their prime and then proceeds to tell their downfall. But these pirates are all flat, static characters. There’s the courageous female pirate that pretends to be a man to fit in and, unlike Edward, believes in a cause, and that’s all there is to her – and she’s still the best character in the game by a long shot. There’s Blackbeard, who can appear fearsome, but shows few characteristics beyond this menacing aura: he cares for his little social experiment of an anarchist society, but that’s it. And the list could go on. There are too many characters in the game: a more focused story on the female pirate and Blackbeard would have given them more room to breathe. But missions have Edward jumping from one pirate friend to another, never allowing the protagonist to spend much time with them.

The villains are also utterly forgettable.  A consequence of Edward being ideologically empty is that the whole Assassins versus Templars thing becomes muted. One of Edward’s friends says, “It’s about power really. About lording over people. Robbing us of liberty,” and the discussion ends there: Templars are bad because they want control and order, and pirates are all about freedom. In other words, gone is the thematic complexity of Assassin’s Creed 3.

Edward’s character arc, of course, is all about this problem. He doesn’t care about anything and events will push him to finally care about what’s happening around him. But this change happens far too late in the narrative and is not even convincing: the player will be left wondering if Edward really joined the Assassins because he believed in their creed or simply because it felt the right thing to do at the time.

When it comes to piracy, Black Flag also has one fatal flaw: it doesn’t give you a crew to care about. Yes, Edward’s ship, Jackdaw, has a crew, but they are all nameless NPCs that, for some bizarre reason, all sheer every time you come aboard, making the moment very silly when it happens for the thirtieth time.  When you board an enemy ship, sometimes you watch some of them die and you just receive a simple message saying “crew – 1”, which tells you everything you need to know about how the game treats Edward’s crew. The only character in Jackdaw’s entire crew is the quartermaster Adéwalé, who only appears in a few cutscenes and does nothing of substance – there’s DLC about him though. That makes Jackdaw feel less like a ship and more like a sluggish bus overcrowded with people who like to chant. Because he has no palpable crew, Edward feels more like a driver than a captain.

Back in the present, you control an Abstergo’s employee recently hired to work on the memories of “Subject 17” for entertainment purposes. The game shifts to first-person to hide the character’s identity and make them serve as the player’s avatar in that universe. This part is full of meta-commentary – you find emails about the themes the company could tackle in future projects, such as Egypt, and the French Revolution – and has the character working with a very shady employee to hack other people’s computers in the company – why do the character agree to that is beyond me, though – and meet familiar faces from past games. The proceedings grow to become nonsensical, however, and things don’t go anywhere, which makes this part of the game a bit of a letdown.

Moving on to gameplay, the stealth is clunky as it has always been. Since there’s no crouch button, Edward moves only between two extreme states: walking straight up in front of everyone and being completely invisible inside bushes, tall grass, and other similar environmental elements. Therefore, this is how things usually go: the enemy soldiers see Edward sneaking inside a restrictive area and become alert until he suddenly gets inside a haystack in front of them and everyone just forgets he was there a second ago and goes on with their business, rarely bothering to check even the haystack.

Naval stealth is a thing on Black Flag and the execution is even worse, as on the ocean there’s nowhere to hide and enemy ships usually have vision cones similar to humans, which doesn’t make much sense: it basically works as if the ships’ crew is a single entity that can only see forward and not a bunch of people scattered around the ship looking at every angle – it’s just silly to enter a restricted area and pass very near a crowded enemy ship without being noticed.

Black Flag, as it’s usual with the franchise, is incredibly easy, which hampers some of its systems. Why bother to keep upgrading Edward’s equipment and his ship if both quickly become murder machines capable of blasting through everything without giving a second thought? Let’s take naval warfare as an example: you can have an enemy vessel that is incredibly powerful and resistant, but the AI is too slow to respond to your actions, so you can ram Jackdaw into it to do the initial damage, and then quickly align your ship and keep firing heavy shots that take a huge chunk of that ships’ health bar, and the battle will be over in the span of a single minute. Only the “legendary ships”, which are a side activity, require more resources to be beaten.

And to make things even easier – and a little silly as well – when you deplete a ship’s health bar, you have the option to “board” it, which means that your ship will automatically align with it so you can jump aboard it and kill the necessary – usually ten or fifteen – enemy guards and complete an easy objective, like also eliminate some officer or shoot at a barrel. When this mission is complete, you have the option to repair your ship, lower your wanted level, or send that enemy ship to “Kenway’s fleet’, which is a useless minigame. In practice, what does this system mean? It means that during hectic naval battles, you will fire at just one ship, board it while all other enemy vessels hilariously just stand there, waiting for you to kill everyone in the boarded ship, and then magically repair Jackdaw mid-battle and proceed to fire at another ship, board it, rinse and repeat.

In gaming criticism, there is this big term, “Ludonarrative Dissonance”, which basically means that a game suffers from a disconnection between story and gameplay. In Black Flag, the story often assumes a serious tone – despite its outlandish premise – but the gameplay is just bizarrely silly. On the one hand, the narrative wants to present pirates grounded in reality, showing Black Beard fabricating his legendary fame. On the other hand, it allows the player to partake in very silly naval battles and single-handed defeat more than thirty enemy soldiers with ease. But Black Flag doesn’t suffer from a dissonance between gameplay and story alone, since the realistic tone of the story also enters in conflict with itself, as it alternates between drab characterizations and the plot revolving around an alien artifact.

The mission structure is also very repetitive. Edward will have to “tail” enemies and eavesdrop on conversations for a bazillion times, and the bland level design usually offers no unique, interesting way of performing these activities.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag’s story is too lifeless to make up for its banal gameplay loop. It offers players the chance to sail through the Caribbean and plunder the same enemy ships over and over again, with little to no difference between battles, and do some useless side activities. In short, it’s just Assassin’s Creed, but certainly not at its best.

September 25, 2020.