Windrose Nails the Pirate Fantasy Ubisoft Couldn't

Sailing through the Caribbean, crew belting out shanties, wind filling the sails before you spot a vessel on the horizon and open fire with chain shot to shred its rigging. That's not a scene from Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. It's Windrose, an open-world pirate RPG from a small studio called Kraken Express that has become one of Steam's latest breakout hits. The developers have openly named Black Flag as a direct inspiration, and it shows in practically every system the game has.

The timing here is almost comically bad for Ubisoft. Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced, the publisher's full remake of its 2013 pirate classic, is reportedly launching on July 9 according to Insider Gaming's Tom Henderson, who says select media and content creators saw roughly 30 minutes of the project on April 16. Ubisoft hasn't officially confirmed the date yet, but an early key art leak via the Ubisoft launcher and a PEGI rating from December 2025 have already stripped away most of the surprise. So right as Ubisoft gears up to sell players the definitive version of Black Flag, an indie game is already delivering that fantasy on Steam for a fraction of the price.

And Windrose isn't just aping Black Flag's vibes. The lead shanty singer is Sean Dagher, who performed the same role in Assassin's Creed IV. Ships handle with the same weighty-but-responsive feel. Naval combat uses directional aiming with visible guidelines, ramming, and boarding sequences. You can walk away from the helm and stroll your deck while the ship sails onward. If you played Black Flag a decade ago and loved the sailing, this is going to feel like slipping on an old coat.

Where Skull & Bones Failed

The comparison that stings Ubisoft most isn't actually with Resynced. It's with Skull & Bones, the publisher's own attempt at a spiritual successor to Black Flag's naval gameplay. That game launched in early 2024 after years of delays, stripped out on-foot exploration entirely, and Ubisoft later cancelled previous plans to add on-foot combat. Players couldn't leave their ships to explore islands, fight enemies on land, or do much of anything that made Black Flag feel like a pirate adventure rather than a boat simulator.

Windrose does all of it. You can stop your ship anywhere, hop off, and explore islands on foot. There's melee combat the developers describe as soulslike, with blocking, parrying, dodging, and lock-on targeting. There are pirates, wildlife, and supernatural enemies like zombies. The whole thing can be played in co-op. It is, in almost every meaningful way, the game Skull & Bones should have been.

I've been saying for years that indie studios consistently take bigger creative swings than the publishers with the biggest budgets, and Windrose is a perfect case study. A small team looked at what Ubisoft spent nearly a decade failing to deliver and just built it.

There are caveats. Windrose is also a survival crafting game, and the early hours lean hard into that genre's worst tendencies. You're collecting wood, mining copper, smelting ore, and getting killed repeatedly by boars that can drop you in two or three hits. The pirate fantasy doesn't truly kick in until you push past the opening tutorial quests, build your first ship, and set sail. That survival crafting loop is going to bounce some players who just want to be pirates, and I think the developers would be smart to smooth out that onramp in future updates.

But once you're past it, the game clicks. The naval combat, the shanties, the island exploration, the co-op boarding actions where one player storms the enemy deck while the other picks off sailors with a musket from their own ship. It captures something that Black Flag's original release nailed in 2013 and that no AAA studio has managed to replicate since.

Resynced's Awkward Entrance

Black Flag Resynced reportedly won't be an RPG. According to Henderson, the presentation included the line: "This remains a solo adventure and character-driven experience. It is not an RPG." Combat is said to be closer to Assassin's Creed Shadows, the world will feature dynamic weather, and the modern-day storyline has apparently been cut entirely. Those all sound like smart decisions. But Resynced is still a single-player remake of a 13-year-old game arriving into a market where an indie title is already delivering a multiplayer version of the same fantasy with base building, co-op, and ongoing updates.

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said back in June 2024 that "players can be excited about some remakes, which will allow us to revisit some of the games we've created in the past and modernize them." The irony is that a studio with no Ubisoft budget modernized Black Flag's formula before Ubisoft could ship its own modernization. Resynced will almost certainly look better and tell a tighter story. But Windrose already exists, it already works, and it already has Sean Dagher singing shanties on your deck. Ubisoft's remake needed to arrive two years ago. Instead, it's showing up to a party someone else is already hosting.