You Can Now Play as Blackbeard in Black Flag Resynced

Thanks to a new mod, Blackbeard is playable now in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced. Slipping into the boots of the most famous pirate who ever lived sounds like a dream, but the real Edward Teach led a life far grislier than the swashbuckling fantasy, and it is worth knowing what you are signing up for before you set sail.

The mod comes from creator Kamzik123, whose playable Blackbeard is up on Nexus Mods now. On paper it is a blast: light some fuses in your beard, capture a few galleons, and swagger around port spending your booty as a living legend, exactly the pirate power fantasy the series sells. Rock Paper Shotgun's Mark Warren flagged the mod, then pointed to the part that history buffs might want to sit down for.

Blackbeard is not a stranger to this game. In Black Flag, Edward Kenway rubs shoulders with a crew of real historical pirates, and Teach is among the most memorable, so handing players his likeness is a natural fit. The mod just formalizes a fantasy the game already dangles in front of you.

About a decade ago, archaeologists picking through the wreck of Blackbeard's flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge, turned up some deeply unglamorous kit. As documented by CNN and mentioned by RockPaperShotgun, the finds included a urethral syringe that still carried traces of mercury, the era's common and useless treatment for syphilis, along with a pump used for medical enemas. The ship itself had started life as a French slave vessel before Blackbeard took it, and it ran aground off North Carolina in 1718.

"We just have to understand that these people were suffering."

— Linda Carnes-McNaughton, archaeologist

She framed it as the era of mystical medicine, when symptoms got treated rather than causes. The Queen Anne's Revenge had even carried three surgeons in its earlier life as a slave ship, and they stayed on to patch up Blackbeard's crew.

The wider picture is not much kinder. Per the BBC, the man behind the myth was Edward Teach, born in Bristol, who wove burning tapers into his beard to look like the devil himself, apparently leaning on that terrifying image more than actual bloodshed. He likely had syphilis, demanded mercury while blockading Charlestown in 1718, an event Black Flag itself depicts, kept up to 14 wives across different ports, and reportedly downed rum laced with gunpowder. For all his fame, he was his own captain for only about two years before soldiers killed him in November 1718, leaving him with five gunshot wounds and around twenty sword cuts. His head then went on tour, displayed on a ship's bowsprit.

The gap between the myth and the man is the whole point. Games and movies love to romanticize pirates the same way Westerns romanticize cowboys, sanding off the disease and the short, desperate lives behind it. Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the few that leans into the grim reality, letting its hero slowly die of tuberculosis; most pirate fiction would rather you not think about the syringe.

I love that modders keep turning this sandbox into a dress-up box, and getting to swagger around as the most notorious pirate alive is exactly the daft freedom I boot up an open-world game for. Still, I find the history underneath a useful gut-check, because the romantic pirate fantasy quietly skips the mercury syringes and the two-year life expectancy. And I can't fully enjoy the record sales without remembering that the Barcelona team who built the game's underwater missions is fighting layoffs while the thing prints money.

It helps that the remake has been a real phenomenon. Black Flag Resynced sold 2 million copies in its first 24 hours, pulled in $35 million on Steam within five days, and became the first game in the series to pass 100,000 concurrent players there. The launch was the best any Assassin's Creed has managed on Steam, and cosmetic DLC alone added another million in revenue. It holds an 84 on Metacritic and a user score near 8.7, tying Assassin's Creed II as the highest-rated entry in the series, and Ubisoft has since confirmed 3 million copies sold across platforms in under two weeks.

That success is exactly why the mood at one of its studios is so sour. Ubisoft Barcelona, which spent more than two years building the underwater diving missions Resynced became known for, is now facing cuts of up to 51 jobs as the company narrows the studio to Rainbow Six work. Staff have staged a strike in Barcelona, calling the severance on offer below any reasonable standard, and around 90 walked out under a banner reworking the series logo into "Corporate Greed." The Barcelona cuts are part of a broader Ubisoft squeeze that has already closed studios in Winnipeg and Belgrade and put 380 jobs at risk across the company.

"Ubisoft Barcelona did all the underwater levels. And that same team is being fired right now because Ubisoft thinks that's what we deserve:)"

— Manel Cota

Ubisoft, for its part, is treating the remake as a long-term project. Game director Richard Knight has said the studio plans to support it for at least a year with bug fixes, quality-of-life tweaks, and a New Game+ mode, and he has openly hoped the game won't be forgotten after GTA 6 release this November, even teasing a possible story DLC digging deeper into Edward Kenway.

Dataminers have already found reasons to look ahead. Files inside the game hold what fans read as a possible teaser for the franchise's next title - Codename Hexe, a Gothic cathedral tucked among references to past entries, pointing toward the announced but still mysterious game set in 16th-century Germany during the Holy Roman Empire. Leaks tie it to a new protagonist named Anika and a Gamescom 2026 reveal, though Ubisoft has confirmed none of it.

Ubisoft gave Assassin's Creed Shadows its send-off with Black Tides, the final expansion that arrived June 16, wrapping up Naoe and Yasuke's story with about two hours of content, a new Domains feature, and a Horizon Rift, plus Animus Hub projects that thread directly into Black Flag Resynced.