This tiny detail in Black Flag Resynced took the developers longer to recreate than to build originally

A lot of what people love about Assassin’s Creed Black Flag came from what the original 2013 hardware couldn’t manage. Physically based rendering didn’t exist yet, volumetric fog was new enough that Black Flag was one of the first Ubisoft games to use it, and water rendering was far simpler than it is today. Those limitations became part of the game’s identity, similar to how fog in a game like Silent Hill went from hiding draw distance to becoming the reason the world feels the way it does.

You can’t copy a limitation directly, so the Black Flag Resynced team looked instead for the intention behind it — something engine architect Nicolas Lopez says was possible because so many of the original artists were still around to consult.

The clearest example is a detail almost nobody will consciously notice: the curve of the Earth. In the original game, ships and islands sink below the horizon as players sail away, rather than simply shrinking, giving the world a sense of real scale. Modern hardware could easily render the world without that effect, but doing so would stop feeling like the same sea, so the team rebuilt it on purpose. Lopez says recreating the effect was actually harder than making it the first time — in 2013 it was a simple formula applied to every mesh, but in Resynced it has to work through virtual geometry and GPU-driven pipelines that didn’t exist when the original game shipped.