- Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced creative director Paul Fu says the team "expanded" Edward Kenway's story with new content
- Fu says the team wanted to stick to the original "as much as possible"
- The team further explored the theme of "greed"
Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced creative director Paul Fu has confirmed that Ubisoft didn't alter Edward Kenway's story in the upcoming remake, but did expand on the character with additional content.
Speaking in an interview with TechRadar Gaming at a Black Flag Resynced preview event in Paris, Fu explained that the team didn't feel required to change any of Kenway's introduction to make him more fleshed out and that they wanted to stick as closely to the Black Flag writer Darby McDevitt's original vision "as much as possible."
The story of Black Flag starts with Kenway already equipped with his athletic parkour abilities as a pirate, before he joins the Brotherhood as an official assassin. Although Fu understands why some would think his abilities should be explained, he said the team didn't feel the need to do so.
"We didn't toy with the idea of changing the leap of faith or anything like that," Fu said, "because I understand that there is a train of thought, 'Why could Edward do all these things despite the fact that he wasn't an assassin?' But it was beautifully explained in the original game, where he says, 'Everything is permitted'. I think that line is really, really famous. And we decided, okay, that's enough for us. We're going to stick to it."
Fu is referring to the core tenet of The Brotherhood, "Nothing is true, everything is permitted," but in the story, Kenway initially interprets it selfishly as "Everything is permitted? I like the sound of that," before later finding more meaning in the words.
While Kenway's story hasn't been changed, the developers did explore the theme of "greed" from the original game and "expanded on it with the new content."
"I won't spoil too much of it for you, but we thought that that was a strong juxtaposition to who he is, who his inner self is, deep down inside, he's a really nice guy who wants to provide for his family and he loves his friends, but because of greed, things happen not to his advantage," Fu explained.
"And we felt that that theme was very, very strong, a little bit dark in the original Black Flag. [We] wanted to expand on it, and we did."
Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced launches on July 9 for PS5, Xbox Series X and Series S, and PC.
