Maybe that Black Flag remake really is happening?
Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot says the publisher is looking to release new Assassin's Creed games "more regularly" in the future, and remakes of older games will be among them.
Ubisoft has famously struggled with remakes. The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake (which is no longer officially dubbed a remake) has been floating in limbo for four years and still doesn't seem to be anywhere near completion. The Splinter Cell remake, meanwhile, has seen even less daylight. It was announced in 2021 and, well, that's it: Hopes that an update of some sort would be made during the Ubisoft Forward showcase earlier this month were dashed when absolutely no mention of it was made.
Still, it seems like Ubisoft isn't giving up on going back to its deep well of older games. "Players can be excited about some remakes, which will allow us to revisit some of the games we've created in the past and modernize them," Guillemot said when asked about the future of the Assassin's Creed series in a promotional Ubisoft interview. "There are worlds in some of our older Assassin's Creed games that are still extremely rich."
Guillemot gave no hint as to which Assassin's Creed games are up for a remake, but Black Flag seems an obvious choice—it's the big fan favorite. The first Assassin's Creed would also make sense, and an update of the Ezio trilogy (Assassin's Creed 2, Brotherhood, and Revelations) would probably do well too.
Regardless of which way it goes, there's a lot to pick from. Assassin's Creed has been around since 2007, and it's one of Ubisoft's flagship titles—a major, successful franchise by any measure. But there have been some serious ups and downs over those years. We said way back in 2014 that Ubisoft's insistence on annual sequels, and on sticking to a strict formula, was doing more harm than good, an opinion that Guillemot seemed to take to heart in 2016 when he indicated that annualized releases might be a thing of the past.
And so they were: After the middling Assassin's Creed Syndicate, Ubisoft took two years to deliver the much stronger Origins, and while Odyssey came out the following year it offered the change we'd longed for: "Odyssey is a lot more than just another Assassin’s Creed," we wrote in our 90% review. "It’s an RPG of unparalleled scale supplemented by satisfyingly layered and deep progression systems that each play their part in bringing ancient Greece to life."
An even bigger gap of three years led into Assassin's Creed Valhalla, which was brilliant, and then one year later we got Mirage, which was good but not up to the level of its recent predecessors. So it's not exactly a hard-and-fast rule, but you can definitely see a pattern: More time, generally speaking, means a better game.
Guillemot said in the interview that Ubisoft's goal "is to have Assassin's Creed games come out more regularly, but not for it to be the same experience every year." He cited Assassin's Creed Hexe, a supernatural-themed game that we otherwise know nothing about, as one example that's "going to be a very different game from Assassin's Creed Shadows."
Kotaku reported in June 2023 that a remake of Assassin's Creed: Black Flag is already in the works, and while that remains unconfirmed, Guillemot's words do help float the hope it's actually happening. First, though, is Assassin's Creed Shadows: The next mainline game in the series is set to launch on November 15.
