Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is Coming to Switch

Earlier this year, Ubisoft ported Assassin’s Creed III Remastered to the Nintendo Switch, and visually, it featured a mix of graphical techniques and assets from the original version and the newer PS4/Xbox One remasters.

It didn’t review that well but I thought it was cool.

Now, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Assassin’s Creed: Rogue, and all their DLC packs are coming in a collection to Switch this December. It was surprise-announced around a month ago…and I’m not sure as much work has gone into it.

You see, like AC III, Ubisoft had two base versions to pick from as a basis. Both games released as cross-generation titles…though Rogue took a while to get to the modern platforms.

The 360/PS3 versions of these games looked great on their own, pushing those consoles as hard as any third party studio ever had. But AC IV also launched on the newer machines and PC, and came along with dramatically improved visual effects.

Individually-lit rain particles. Moving, simulated foliage. Physics-based water for the seas. Dynamic water ripples on the ground when it rains. Improved shadow resolution.

The moving foliage in particular makes it easy to spot that you’re playing one of the later-generation versions of the game, and I had hopes that this would be the basis for the Switch conversion…but the only footage we have leaves me with doubts.

This trailer shows a lot of exciting action moments…but also carefully manages to avoid showing any scenes that might have the telltale “next gen” effects in them. There’s no scenes where wind or characters interact with foliage. There’s no rainy moments where you can see the lighting or the puddles on the ground. The brief ship moments are too short to tell whether it’s based on the simpler 360-level physics or not.

I suspect, then, that the Xbox 360 version was the basis for these new ports. Perhaps the rough launch performance of AC III lead to this decision, or perhaps this collection was turned around quickly after the sales success of the last one. I don’t have any inside information but I think these are both plausible scenarios.

I’m sure that these games will still run fine on the Switch, but it’ll be a little bit weird at first to go back to their slightly-older visuals. I fired up the 360 version of Black Flag to take the images for this article, and was both struck by how well it held up and by how much the enhancements for those next-gen versions really made the game come alive.

Assassin’s Creed IV was one of the games that made me want to upgrade my console/PC back in 2013, and Assassin’s Creed Rogue is also a video game. It’s great that they’re both coming to Switch, and hopefully they’ll surprise me and include some of the more modern visuals that the PS4 version offered.

I was personally happy with how AC III performed on the Switch, and I look forward to playing this new collection.