Ubisoft's reimagining of Assassin's Creed Black Flag isn't simply a graphical refresh. The developer has enlisted the original game's lead writer, Darby McDevitt, to revisit and deepen one of gaming's most beloved pirate tales, and his work focuses on a relationship that was always central to Edward Kenway's arc but never fully explored: his marriage to Caroline.
McDevitt, who earned a Writers Guild of America nomination for the original Black Flag, spent months examining where the story fell short. What he found was a gap that had bothered him for years. Edward's relationship with his wife existed largely in the background, referenced through letters and brief scenes, but the emotional weight of his choices and their impact on Caroline remained underdeveloped. The remake gives McDevitt a chance to correct that.
"I always felt, after the fact, like I didn't get to show the sweet side of Edward with his wife," McDevitt said. The original game moves rapidly from Edward's desire to become a privateer to darker consequences, with little time spent showing why he made that choice or what he stood to lose. "There wasn't enough of that sweet Edward to anchor what he was doing and why he was doing it."
One of three new cutscenes McDevitt wrote for Resynced depicts Edward purchasing chocolate for Caroline, a simple gesture that reveals the depth of his motivation. In the early 1700s, chocolate was a luxury item requiring careful saving. It represents Edward's determination to provide for a woman he married above his station, his belief that a voyage to the New World will yield the riches he needs to give her the life she deserves.
"He wants to be able to provide for her," McDevitt explained. "Almost everyone has experienced something like this, where you think really hard about what gift you can give someone that really shows something, and the gift turns out to be inadequate in a way you didn't realize." Edward's naivete about privateering, his conviction that it's an official and sanctioned venture unlike piracy, underpins his entire justification for leaving. He hasn't grasped that life at sea is arduous, transformative, and rarely kind to those who undertake it.
The chocolate detail also bookends the narrative. In Black Flag's final scene, set in London years later, Edward mentions taking someone to White's Chocolate House. McDevitt intentionally wove that thread backward through time, grounding the story's emotional arc in a single, repeated image. It's the kind of layered writing that transforms a character study from plot mechanics into something resonant.
Beyond the single cutscene already revealed, McDevitt rewrote the distribution of Caroline's presence throughout the game. The original featured roughly five scenes with her; the remake extends and repositions them to ensure her memory haunts Edward across his entire journey, not just in clusters. A letter he writes asking her to join him in the New World now includes her response. Even the climactic confrontation with pirate legend Blackbeard has been reformatted to bring Caroline's emotional presence back into focus, replacing thematic material tied to the original game's modern-day narrative framing.
That modern-day storyline, set in 2013 and dealing with the aftermath of protagonist Desmond Miles' death, won't appear in Resynced. McDevitt wrote all of the original modern-day content, but Ubisoft made the decision to remove that layer for the remake. Rather than viewing it as a loss, he sees it as a logical consequence of how remakes function within the Assassin's Creed universe. "It's almost as if Resynced is someone now, 13 years after Desmond's story, re-experiencing Edward's memories through the Animus with a new pair of eyes," he said.
When McDevitt returned to the original script after more than a decade, he found himself generally satisfied with the work, though certain passages would take a different shape if he were writing them now. His approach to Black Flag was heavily influenced by the HBO series Deadwood, which inspired his use of stylized, archaic language designed to evoke a historical period without necessarily mirroring how people actually spoke. "Language can give you a flavor of the past," he noted. "An obscure, archaic word can add a kind of salt to the chocolate."
The decision to have McDevitt focus exclusively on Caroline material allowed other narrative designers to expand tangential storylines involving Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet. It was a deliberate division of labor: McDevitt returned to the emotional core, the relationship that drives Edward Kenway's choices, while the rest of the team built outward from there.
Author Emily Chen: "What makes this remake interesting isn't that it's prettier, it's that it's taking time to make you care why the protagonist fails, and that's worth the effort."
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