To the casual observer, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag might seem like yet another pretty looking upgrade to a popular game quickly put together for the sole purpose of cashing in on hits of yesteryear, but that’s not how the team at Ubisoft approached this rather ambitious remake to one of the most beloved Assassin’s Creed games. Not only has this seafaring adventure been completely overhauled in the same Ubisoft Anvil engine that Assassin’s Creed Shadows used, but some pretty large changes have been made to combat and other various game mechanics (which you can read about in our preview from last month).
But one surprising area that has certainly not been neglected is the story, and the lead writer of the original game, Darby McDevitt, answered the call when Ubisoft asked him to join the project as a consultant to take another look at the project that scored him a Writers Guild of America nomination. Instead of just retelling the same story, Ubisoft has tried to refine it, fleshing out existing characters, adding new chapters to the story, and even adding new members to Kenway’s crew. For McDevitt’s part, he focused on adding color to Edward Kenway himself, adding three new cutscenes to his story, the first of which we’re exclusively revealing today.
We sat down with McDevitt to ask him about returning to Black Flag after all these years.
IGN: You left Ubisoft, came back, and now you’re revisiting the game that earned you a WGA nomination. What was it like to sit back down with Edward Kenway after all these years? Did he still feel like yours?
Darby McDevitt: I don’t know that he ever was mine, but it felt really great to revisit this story. When the team approached me about the project, we just went back to the original and just started re-examining it, looking for opportunities we missed. It’s really in that interpretation that new things get unlocked.
I have very, very fond memories of shooting the original and doing all that mocap, and all that mocap is exactly as it was [in Resynced], so yeah, it’s just surreal and great. The new scenes that we wrote came out of a reflection of 13 years – at the time I guess it was 11 years – of feeling like there were little opportunities we’d missed to bolster his relationship with Caroline. If you’ve played the original, it ramps up pretty quickly from “I want to go be a privateer.” I think the second scene was him drunk, rolling on the floor with his father-in-law, and his father-in-law saying, “This guy’s a ruined man.” I always felt, after the fact, like I didn’t get to show the sweet side of Edward with his wife, because they really did love each other, and he really, really did want the best for her.
It was very common at the time for men to go to sea for long periods of time to try to make something of themselves. It’s a story even now, right? People will travel long distances, immigrate to a new country, and send money back. We were trying to tell that story, but I think what happened was there wasn’t enough of that sweet Edward to anchor what he was doing and why he was doing it. That was really the goal, especially with the scene you’re seeing here, to tap into that sweetness, that love, and that devotion to Caroline.
IGN: It seems like the cutscenes are being used as an opportunity to expand on the exact nature of how he failed Caroline. In the original we only kind of know that he did, and Resynced expands on the fact that he was in a relationship with somebody above his station and maybe felt like he could never provide adequately for her. Can you walk us through the chocolate cutscene? How do you think this scene and the other new cut scenes help recontextualize him, or help players see him in a different light?
Darby McDevitt: Well, I think you said it. He definitely married above his station, and he wants to be able to provide for her. I think almost everyone has experienced something like this at some point, where you think really hard about what gift you can give someone that really shows something, and the gift turns out to be inadequate in a way you didn’t realize. Purchasing chocolate at this time would have been a bit more expensive, so it would have been something he had to save up for, and in his limited way, he feels like, “This is valuable, this is worthy.” But it’s also definitely him thinking, “Look, if I go out to the New World, I’m going to find wonderful things for us.” I don’t think there’s any element of piracy in his mind at that point. Privateering is very different from piracy. It feels officially sanctioned. But of course, people at this time, especially following the War of the Spanish Succession, fell into piracy because they were all out there with nothing to do. In his mind at that moment, he’s thinking, “I’m going to do something for the British Crown! Something official and legal and noble.” Piracy is pretty far from his mind, but the gains he thinks he’s going to get — “How does it feel to drink like a duke?” — he naively thinks he’ll go out there, make a bunch of money, and come back, and it’s going to be great.
It’s like anyone today who says, “Oh, just invest in the stock market, it’s so easy,” or “Go to Vegas, it’s so easy.” Get-rich-quick thinking has always been around. He hasn’t fully thought through the trials, tribulation, turmoil, and labor that being at sea will actually cost him. I actually reread Moby Dick just a year ago. I love that book and it’s the same kind of thing: just go to sea, just work for a while. But it’s actually incredibly arduous. Nobody in Moby Dick turns to piracy, but it’s a rough life, and you don’t come out of it unchanged. That’s kind of where Edward ends up. There’s also the reason chocolate was specifically chosen: in the very final scene of Black Flag, when Edward is back in London with his family, he actually says to Haytham, “I’ll take you to White’s Chocolate House for some chocolate.” So it’s bookending the whole story. Chocolate houses were a new thing at the time — a bit of a luxury. Originally I wrote the scene with little chocolate bonbons, hard chocolate, but the historian pointed out that didn’t come for another couple of decades. It was always liquid chocolate at that point, so we changed it to sipping the chocolate.
IGN: Let’s talk about Caroline in the original game. She’s mostly defined by her absence — we just know her as someone Edward failed, rather than someone we really get to know. Why give her a bigger role in the story? Is it mostly for the players’ benefit in understanding Edward, or is there a role you wish Caroline had played more in the original?
Darby McDevitt: Way back when we were first conceiving of the story, we were actually thinking about planning playable sequences with her. The difficulty was always that when you plan something quite far removed from the core mechanics of being a pirate, you tend to struggle with how to handle it. We didn’t want it to be just walking around interacting with objects. We never really found the right way to make those sequences interactive. But I did feel that if you look at the distribution of moments across the game, Caroline is always on Edward’s mind even when you don’t see her. He’s always writing a letter to her. There’s a moment where Anne Bonny comes in and asks what he’s doing, and he says, “Oh, I’m just writing a letter to my wife. She’s probably past caring anyway.” Caroline is always on his mind, but I felt there was a lull in the middle of the game where her presence starts to evaporate a little, and I wanted to bring it back.
All three scenes I wrote are about Caroline. There’s this one, then later there’s a letter in Black Flag where Edward says he’s finally sending word to his wife asking her to come be with him. Now we actually get to hear the contents of that letter. Then we reformatted the final interaction with Black Bart Roberts: in the original, the modern-day story and the historical story are interlinked through Bart Roberts’ identity. Since Resynced doesn’t have the modern-day framing, we wanted to bring Caroline back into that final exchange as well. It was really about making her presence felt across a greater portion of the story. In the original there were roughly five flashback scenes with her. What we did was push some of those back and insert the chocolate scene earlier, so all the other ones land at different points and extend further into the game. The sum total feeling should be that you feel her presence throughout his entire journey.
IGN: Speaking of the modern-day story — which I know isn’t in this one — were you involved in writing the original, and how do you feel about it not being here anymore?
Darby McDevitt: Yes, I wrote all of the original modern-day content. As for how I feel about it not being in Resynced, Assassin’s Creed’s modern-day was always trying to tell a story running in parallel with the present, so when you play the original, it’s happening in real time: 2013, dealing with the death of Desmond. If you hacked all the computers in the modern-day sequences, it’s about what the Templars did when they recovered Desmond’s body and scanned his DNA. That particular story isn’t relevant to the modern-day narrative they’re telling now. I’m not involved in the framing for this version. That’s a separate team, but it does make sense from a meta-story perspective that the Black Flag modern-day has already happened in the past, and there’s new content for the current storyline. It’s almost as if Resynced is someone now, 13 years after Desmond’s story, re-experiencing Edward’s memories through the Animus with a new pair of eyes.
IGN: There was a twist at the end that’s pretty directly tied to the Edward story, so I’m wondering, how is that going to feel with that beat missing?
Darby McDevitt: I tweaked that final scene with Black Bart Roberts to reflect more of the historical story rather than building toward that twist. The twist is still there for people playing the original — it hasn’t been decanonized in any way. It’s just not as directly relevant to this Resynced version. And John from IT is dead anyway. He died in the first game. It’d be interesting to see if they find a fun way to address it, but I’m not working on the modern-day content for this one, so I honestly don’t know what they have planned.
IGN: Something I notice when I go back and read my old writing is that I wince. Did that ever happen to you on this project?
Darby McDevitt: Not as much with this one! I’m pretty proud of it. But yeah, there are certain chunks I’d probably take in a different direction now that I have more experience. I’ve written novels, I’ve written other games. Generally, though, I’m quite pleased with it. I was deeply enamored with Deadwood when I wrote Black Flag, and I really wanted the game to have a stylized sense of language like Deadwood had, because when you hear someone like David Milch talk about his approach, language can give you a flavor of the past even if it’s not exactly how people spoke. It can give you a feeling that helps you stay in that world, just like the art or the music does. An obscure, archaic word can add a kind of salt to the chocolate, to extend and abuse the metaphor.
IGN: You worked on three new scenes for Resynced. Did you ever discuss doing more than that?
Darby McDevitt: I’m pretty busy, but honestly I would have done whatever they asked. Our initial discussion was about what we each thought was missing. Joel, the narrative director, and Paul, the creative director, told me what they thought was missing; I told them what I thought; and we landed on: let Darby fill in the Caroline material, address the core of Edward’s motivation. They told me about some of the other things they wanted to do, like extending Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet’s story, but that was new content, tangential threads off the main story. I didn’t feel a particular need to chase those. I was comfortable saying, “I’ll expand on the story that’s there and address the missed opportunities I see now, but anything new and tangential. That’s their game and their stories to tell.” Black Flag was definitely a project where I felt I learned a lot in the writing of it. It’s my best early example of what I thought I was capable of. I’d written Revelations before it, and many other games when I lived in Seattle, but Black Flag was the one I felt was a complete package that did almost everything I wanted it to do. There wasn’t much of a feeling of needing to keep digging.
IGN: Do you still engage with Assassin’s Creed as a franchise? Have you played Shadows?
Darby McDevitt: No, I’m a professional Assassin’s Creed community troll! (laughs) I like our fans a lot and will answer their questions on Bluesky. Sometimes they want me to canonize things — they’ll ask an obscure question that’s unclear in the game and want me to officially post about it so it becomes canon, but I remind them I don’t get to canonize things outside the games. I like to engage with the community at arm’s length, because I have to be careful, but it’s a great community with a deep passion for what we’ve been building, and so many of them have been doing it for so long: keeping the wiki up to date, making content, dissecting every possible story and lore beat. The last game I worked on — I’m still at Ubisoft, by the way; I left briefly but came back — was Valhalla, and I made sure it was chock-full of lore for the community to dig into. Channels like Access the Animus made something like 20 videos dissecting the lore, and I’ve committed to that for future installments.
IGN: I wanted to ask about editing something that’s 13 years old. Threading that needle so it doesn’t feel like a patch sounds tricky. How do you make sure it feels like it was always meant to be there? Is this the first time you’ve ever gone back to an artifact like this and amended it, and how did it feel?
Darby McDevitt: There’s a saying I always use, I think it’s attributed to the French writer Valéry: “a poem is never finished, only abandoned.” If you give me an opportunity to rewrite something, even something that’s been on shelves and in people’s hands for years, I will still do it. I’ve written novels I put in a drawer and pulled back out ten years later thinking, “You know what, I think there’s something here,” and just started again. I’m in the Walt Whitman camp. He never stopped writing Leaves of Grass, just kept putting out new versions. It was the only book he ever wrote, in a sense. There are specific lines in Black Flag that have become favorites. It’s a pretty quotable game, and people have quoted it back to me, so I know the top five quotes I probably wouldn’t touch, because I’m not sure I could improve them. But otherwise, any time I’m given the opportunity, I’ll probably keep going. You’d have to take the pen out of my hand and tell me to move on to the next thing.
IGN: Favorite shanty?
Darby McDevitt: Favorite shanty! Oh man. My favorites were always the tavern songs more than the shanties proper. “Here’s a Health to the Company” and “Part of a Glass,” obviously. I’m actually an amateur musician. I recorded my own version of “Star of the County Down,” which is on my SoundCloud, with my wife singing on it.
IGN: Seriously? I’m definitely going to include a link to your SoundCloud at the end of this article, for sure.
Darby McDevitt: Go for it! My SoundCloud has all kinds of random scraps. I just published a novel, and I’m making a soundtrack to it, so yesterday I published a soundtrack to my novel.
P.S. As promised, here’s Darby McDevitt’s Soundcloud.
Travis Northup is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @TieGuyTravis and read his games coverage here.