Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag PS3 Preview

Flag At Half-Mast
by Shelby Reiches

I was hoping against hope when it came to the latest Assassin’s Creed game. Ubisoft, at this point, has a solid, canonized formula. They’re not going to do a tremendous amount in the way of innovation or alteration. Therefore, what little is new in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag smacks of expansion and refinement.

Those aren’t inherently bad things, but we’re four main series games deep on this franchise, plus two full-length pseudo-sequels, and it’s all starting to grow tiresome.

The single-player campaign, the keystone of the Assassin’s Creed experience, was not actually playable at E3 this year. That didn’t stop them from showing it off, in real-time, during Sony’s press conference. It crashed, but that’s a fairly minor foible: The game isn’t done yet, and it was running on devkit hardware. The private booth showing went much better, and it expanded upon what was at the press conference. We had the initial betrayal, and then the invasion and destruction of Edward Kenway’s pirate town.

The battle is bombastic and cinematic, neither of which are attributes I really feel comfortable associating with an Assassin’s Creed title. After the town’s destruction, the action moves seamlessly to the water, where Kenway’s ship takes on the British armada in a heroic last stand.

New concepts were demonstrated in this part of the demo. Two of these new concepts were foliage that aids in stalking and smooth transitions from land to sea.

From there, we skip ahead to where Kenway has been trained as an assassin. He can accept contracts. There’s a chase, and the Ubisoft representative fumbles at the docks and struggles to get from the water back to his ship. Kenway gives chase in the sea. There is a battle with expanded weaponry; the enemy ship is boarded and its captain killed. The player is given the option to claim the crew, repurpose the ship for their armada, or salvage it for parts to repair Kenway’s own, the Jackdaw.

It’s at this point that a second glitch rears its ugly head and we get stuck with the two ships still locked in boarding positions. Our presenter jumps the action ahead.

There will be buried treasure and stunning, Caribbean vistas; all of which is on a seamless world map. You can interact with this map in real-time via tablet connectivity, such as through SmartGlass. This was demonstrated, and its use allowed for the easier hunting of the aforementioned treasure. From a gameplay perspective, though, this is an Assassin’s Creed game in which the original draws—the hidden blade and fluid swordplay—are diluted by the increased prominence of gunplay.

As much as some have complained that the swordplay has fallen on the simplistic side (some even call it rote), it always served as a satisfying complement to the stealth gameplay in the first few titles. Not once was it demonstrated in anything more than trailer form at E3; our Ubisoft rep was all about making it through situations either undetected or with a burst of gunplay. In fact, the sword only came out during boarding, but it was used for one-hit kills of preoccupied sailors as the rep made his way way to the captain.

The swordplay isn’t any more prevalent in multiplayer, which is almost a wholly different experience.This we were allowed to tackle hands-on, PS4 controllers at the ready. (They feel lightweight and oddly stiff, in my opinion.) Multiplayer is, as in the past, a dolled up version of hide and seek. You are given a target who you must seek out and kill stealthily, even as another player is doing the same to you. To aid you, you can change your appearance to better blend with groups of NPCs that travel the map in slow patterns.

While this has made sense in the past, though, it feels out of place in Assassin’s Creed IV. The map on offer did not feel like a natural locale in which one would have well-dressed crowds milling about, which lent the proceedings a strong sense of cognitive dissonance.

At its most basic level, this is more Assassin’s Creed. And it’s beautiful Assassin’s Creed. Even taking the new hardware on which it was being shown out of the equation, the bright seas, lush foliage, and intricately detailed frigates all come together in a way that screams “Yo-Ho-Ho!” and gives me cause to reach for the rum. I can’t help but feel that the market has been saturated, though, over the last few years.

Besides, after the disappointment that was the third game, particularly its DLC, Black Flag feels like a knee-jerk reaction in the opposite direction. It draws more from pre-ACIII triumphs, especially with regard to its main character—the game screams of blatantly attempting to ape Ezio and his charm. Edward, unlike Connor, is a flirt and a raconteur, a man who seems morally unassailable even when he is being objectively reprehensible. I would like to point out that, in one of the more cynical PR maneuvers I’ve seen yet, Ubisoft is listing his personality as one of its core selling points.

It’s not that Assassin’s Creed IV looks like a bad game. It just doesn’t look like the next step in the Assassin’s Creed lineage, and it comes across feeling more like AC fan-fiction than a true sequel. We’ll see if they can sway me when the game is actually released.