After 11 years, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag finally gets achievements (but good luck getting 100%)
Whether it's because they haven't been bothered or because they're clinging onto whatever they can to make Ubisoft Connect the go-to PC platform for their games over Steam, Ubisoft has always dragged its feet about rolling out Steam achievements for its games. It's like a teenager who completes the task of taking the bins out but then can't be assed to take that final step of putting a new bag in the bin. Well done. You've brought the games to Steam Ubisoft, but can you just finish the job?
To give credit where it's due, Ubisoft has just added Steam achievements for games we'd long lost hope of ever seeing updated, with both Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag and Assassin's Creed Unity finally getting the achievement treatment 11 and 10 years after their respective releases.
Unfortunately, Ubisoft implemented the achievements with all the precision of a blunderbuss, as one player on Reddit pointed out that they left multiplayer achievements in the game. While the multiplayer servers are still live, you'll probably need to befriend some fellow buccaneering achievement hunters if you want to actually find someone to play with. You might want to be quick too, because Ubisoft's been decommissioning a lot of older games in recent years, so you never know when Black Flag might walk the plank.
Even though it's small news, it's heartening to see that over two thousand people gave this tiniest of updates the blue thumb of approval on Black Flag's Steam announcement page. There's a lot of love out there for Black Flag, which for my money is one of the best Assassin's Creed games (and I'm pleased to see that the PCG hivemind agrees); the sea shanties, the lovely wave system, the ramshackle port towns, and the story that almost breaks away from the trotted-out memory-trawling assassins-vs-templars nonsense—the whole thing just screamed 'adventure.'
And while I'm chuffed that a Black Flag remake is apparently in the works, I'm still hoping that it just drops the Assassin's Creed labelling and raises the flag for a dedicated new pirate-themed IP. Unlikely, given Ubisoft's phobia of experimentation, but we can always hope…