A Polygon writer argues that Ubisoft's new remake, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, undermines the 2013 original by removing its present-day storyline. While praising the remake's respectful gameplay touch-ups — from naval battles to island treasure hunting — the author contends that stripping out the modern-day sequences leaves the narrative feeling incomplete and less coherent. Having played Black Flag for the first time through Resynced, they were struck by a sense that a layer of the story was missing, a suspicion confirmed after watching the cut sequences.

In the original, players took on the role of an employee at Abstergo Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Templar-linked Abstergo megacorporation, which uses the series' Animus device to mine ancestral memories and turn them into blockbuster films. The author sees this framing as sharp satire: pirate Edward Kenway's 1715 adventure is repurposed as raw footage for a second-rate Pirates of the Caribbean knock-off, complete with clueless executives, a deliberately melodramatic trailer, and a chief creative officer wanting to make the hero a Bond-voiced "ladies man". Without this meta-layer, the writer argues, Resynced simply becomes the corporate crowd-pleaser the original was mocking — and suggests Ubisoft may have cut it because, 13 years on, the company now resembles the very megacorporation it once parodied.