Alright, I decided to talk about Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag - Freedom Cry. I couldn’t stand to handle AC: Rogue without first handling the DLC to Black Flag, it just didn’t feel right. So, I’ll talk about what I enjoyed the most about Freedom Cry by itself, and in comparison to Black Flag.
The Rebellion meter is a feature that took crew recruitment missions in Black Flag and turned them into a thematic, interesting story mechanic. In Black Flag, you could acquire crewmates by freeing people from oppressive soldiers, saving shipwrecked sailors, capturing ships and so on. But the only real benefit of this was that your crew count would increase, which made it easier to board ships in the ship combat sections. Freedom Cry takes this concept and expands it; now, rather than freeing people for the sake of expanding your ship’s crew, you can help to free slaves. Whenever you free a group of slaves, they are added to one of three separate manpower counts: there is the ship’s crew, exactly like it was in Black Flag, then there are the freed slaves, which is just a list of civilians who do not wish to get involved in your fight, and finally we have the Maroons. The Maroons are a group of freedom fighters that are central to the game, and by increasing their numbers, you can see their HQ increase in scope and scale in a really immersive way. As an extra incentive, there are specific milestones for the amount of freed slaves and Maroons that you gather, allowing you to carry extra ammo or call on Maroons to help you when you’re freeing Plantations. This system is the closest combination of the crewmates of Black Flag and the Brotherhood Assassins of a game like AC: Brotherhood or Revelations that I think we’ve ever gotten, and I personally think that it was genius in how it did this while staying thematically relevant to the story at hand.
When it comes to other aspects of the DLC, a lot was confined and paired down in order to make the gameplay work as well as it did. Your weapon selection is limited and cannot be purchased, you only have the armor you start off with, and your ship (given the badass name of Experto Crede) is much larger than the Jackdaw but with fewer upgrade options. The gameplay’s more streamlined nature works perfectly with this type of DLC experience, but I am glad that the following game took a step back to the extensive economies and upgrade options of Black Flag. Freedom Cry is exactly what it needed to be when it comes to the gameplay, and for that, I appreciate it.
The story is where the expansion lost me. Don’t get me wrong, the story is not bad: I enjoyed it quite a lot. My problem comes from my own expectations, as a scene at the very beginning of the questline gave me the impression that a major character in the story was a Templar in disguise, so I spent the entire game waiting for a betrayal that never came. No, not a Templar...just a weirdly written character. It felt like this character was building up to a betrayal that would have shaken the game up, but it never happened. As a result, my experience was muddied and I came out of the end credits with a profound lack of fulfillment.
My favorite thing about Freedom Cry, when taken out of the expansion’s own context, is the way that the Rebellion meter provided a thematic purpose behind the randomly generated “save these people” missions. Giving the player milestones to reach made completing them not only functionally worthwhile with the incentives and the increased crew size, but also narratively worthwhile as they work harder to reach the end of the line. AC: Rogue, which follows up Black Flag and Freedom Cry as the last Assassin’s Creed of the Xbox 360 and PS3 generations, did something very similar to the fleet missions from Black Flag, but simultaneously refused to incorporate the improvements that Freedom Cry made to the crew recruitment mechanics. Had Rogue pulled forward the concept behind the Rebellion meter, when paired with the improvements it made to the fleet missions, I believe the game would be all the better for it.
My next post will be, you guessed it, an Assassin’s Creed: Rogue discussion. Specifically the Remastered version on Xbox One. I’ll see you all then, and have a good one!
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