Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced Director Reveals Why Ubisoft Ditched Edward's Hidden Blade Combat

Richard Knight, director of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, explained why Edward Kenway is missing some of his most beloved fighting moves — and why fans shouldn’t lose hope that they’ll never come back.

Black Flag Resynced features a whole host of differences from its predecessor, the most glaring of which are combat-related. For instance, Resynced gave enemies visible health bars and a defense bar, which players need to break before they can deal any damage.

Resynced reworked the OG’s counter chain-kill system, which allowed players to breeze through groups of enemies with almost hilarious ease — not to mention the huge host of weapons, including muskets and hidden daggers, that players could choose from to end their opponents in endlessly creative ways.

Speaking with YouTuber JorRaptor, Knight explained why the team eschewed this style in favor of dual cutlasses, saying all those extra animation flourishes for so many different weapons and kills were simply lower on their priority list.

"During development, if you looked at Edward — he's so powerful right now and has so many tools, and so we prioritized core combat because we needed to nail that,” he said.

"Something like throwing weapons, while it's cool, it's just like, ‘He already has ten ways to kill somebody.’ So, given the cost to reinvent the feature and rebuild it from the ground up with today's characters, rigs, and animations, there's a lot more that goes into it. It was just lower-priority for us."

That being said, King assured the community that they’re paying attention to feedback.

"We can't make any promises [but] we're listening to the community. We're interested in what people want the most.”

Black Flag Resynced was met with high praise from fans and has proved an extremely profitable venture for Ubisoft, with its day-one DLC earning $1 million on Steam, alone on the back of two million copies sold on the first day alone.