Picture this: it’s October, 2013. TikTok doesn’t exist. Cloud gaming is still in its infancy. Everyone is still mocking Microsoft’s recent attempt to make games go fully digital. It is the Era of the Midnight Release, that glorious age when hotly anticipated new games dropped at midnight local time at your neighborhood GameStop. And on a chilly Friday night in mid October, I’m standing in line outside GameStop, holding my preorder receipt, excited to pick up my copy of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. After months of waiting, it is at last time to sail the high seas and spend all of my waking hours completely immersed in what history refers to as “The Golden Age of Piracy.”
And that is exactly what I did, for weeks. Aside from that annoying need to go to work every day and be a productive member of society, I spent every other possible moment locked into the game in a way I hadn’t been with previous Assassin’s Creed games. I’d enjoyed Assassin’s Creed III, which had been released the previous year, as well as the legendary trilogy and saga of Ezio Auditore in Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations. But getting to be a pirate? Sailing a pirate ship? Hanging out with Blackbeard? My expectations were already through the roof, and Black Flag did not disappoint.
Set in the year 1715, Black Flag tells the story of Edward Kenway, a Welsh privateer-turned-pirate operating in the Caribbean alongside other notable historical figures such as Edward “Blackbeard” Thatch, Benjamin Hornigold, Charles Vane, and Anne Bonny. At the start of the game, Edward is selfish, arrogant, and painfully naive, believing the pirate code of freedom and self governance to be the only source of truth in his life. His hardline beliefs have led to him abandoning his wife and family in search of fame on the open seas. During the course of the story, Edward encounters the Assassins and Templars, still locked in their centuries long conflict. As he becomes more immersed within that conflict, he is forced to grapple with what freedom and self governance truly means, and that those ideals extend far beyond just himself.
Black Flag’s success can be attributed to a number of things that worked well; a gorgeous in-game setting, fantastic sea shanties, ship sailing and battles that felt seamless on a controller, and characters that evolved over time. Edward was interesting because his evolution was not tied solely to the fact that he became an Assassin. He understood that freedom still requires responsibility and protection, and he realized he wanted it more for the people he loved over himself. Edward felt relatable in a way that previous Assassins Altair, Ezio, and Connor didn’t before that point. His passions were tangible to players who understood the frustration of feeling trapped in a world meant to restrict you and hold you back. Who felt like outcasts, and wanted to surround themselves with other outcasts and create their own way of living. On the open seas, we could feel as free as Edward, and that was liberating as hell.
For me, it’s felt like every Assassin’s Creed after the fact just hasn’t hit the bar that Black Flag set. That’s not to say they’re bad. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was one of my favorite games in the franchise in recent memory. Origins was gorgeous and expansive. Odyssey was all things adventurous and weird. But none of them quite captured the thrill and excitement of a wide open world free for the taking. And Ubisoft’s latest entry, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, seems to suffer from the same problem.
Again, I don’t think that means any of those games, including Shadows, are bad. I am actually very much enjoying Shadows, it feels like my favorite game in the franchise since Valhalla. Naoe and Yasuke are fun and different, they honor the cultural experience of feudal Japan during that time, and there are so many dogs and cats to pet. In many ways, it harkens back to the traditional objective of the franchise, which is being an Assassin taking out Templars and securing the future for the next generation of conflict between the two sides.
I suppose I’m just an aging millennial longing for a forgotten past on the high seas.
