Interview with Julien Koch: AC Black Flag Resynced Level Design Director

We are proud to release the first interview in our new series dedicated to the development of Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, featuring Julien Koch from Ubisoft Singapore, who works on the project as Level Design Director!

Originally recorded as an episode of Rally the Creed Live on Location at the Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced Preview event in Paris, we have decided to release the transcript instead due to the noise levels at the event.

Col: Hi there Assassins & welcome to a very special episode of RTC, Live on location.

I'm Col, Team Leader for The Ones Who Came Before, and I'm also one of the Assassin's Creed Community ambassadors for the United Kingdom.

We are an Assassin's Creed Community Podcast, focussing on content creators within the community, news coverage & everything else relating to the franchise.

We're here today in Paris at the Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced preview event, where we've had an exclusive first look at the game, and I'm here today with the Level Design Director, Julien Koch.

Welcome to the show Julien, it's great to have you here today.

Julien: Thank you. As the lead Design Director on this project, I do touch everything in the world, making sure that all of the new gameplay breaks we push for this game are well assembled.

That’s why we remain faithful to the original game.

Col: How did you approach rebuilding the Caribbean world—did you prioritize historical accuracy, player freedom, or environmental storytelling?

Julien: We did a bit of everything actually: there was a first pillar and the most important pillar was the faithfulness. We are not going to rediscuss some decisions that were made thirteen years ago, like the castle of Havana. That is a bit early for its time. I think it’s iconic to the location and how we wanted to portray the Spanish Empire. So we allow this little inaccuracy. They are part of the game. The second pillar was seamlessness. We really wanted Havana to be in the Caribbean, not behind a loading wall. And that’s something we really wanted to push, and all of the environment or storytelling, it’s something we finally do because we are nearly, I’m not going to say unlimited budget because the technical artist would kill me, but we could add so many new props, and these props , add dynamism , like stuff that you can knock around , like all of the debris in Havana you probably saw

How the wind impacts everything, so it’s really adding all of this life , like the stuff you knock out when you do parkour on the balconies , that was something I really wanted to push , because it adds life, it reinforces the fantasy of parkour, combat and stuff, so we pushed a bit on every front, but we remained faithful first, it’s original. 

Col: How dynamic is the world now? Are there systemic events or emergent gameplay moments that didn’t exist in the original?

Julien: So most of the systemic moments are actually on the sea. Where we have like enough space to explore a lot of things. We decided to be a bit more craft heavy on the new events that we introduce in location, like for example Edward always has something to say about every island he visits. There are new, what we call micro-events, in every location. Some of them allow like way more. They allow us to push , like all of the story, like how we tell more about Havana without betraying what it was originally. And again, explore how Edward feels about all of these locations. And yeah, obviously some small secrets here and there. Yeah, can’t wait for you to discover all of them.

Col: In the showcase, we had our first glimpse at Parkour in Resynced. Are there more Parkour Opportunities in the new world and has Edwards speed changed?.

Julien: You will find. You played Havana right? But, be reassured that Nassau and Kingston receive the same amount of love. To make sure, like all of the parkour lines that existed are still there, sometimes slightly modified. We use the opportunity to be a bit, like, cheeky, reintroduce the zipline , that we feel like match the setting, and all. 

The speed, I think you saw some video already. People comparing the speed. Edward is quite fast, he has all of these new opportunities to go all around. Yes, I would say so.

Col: How have the Tailing missions evolved?

Julien: You saw it as well in the preview, immediately, We don’t want the failing on stealth to be our failure. We want to treat it as an opportunity to do something else, so sometimes combat, like the guy can directly attack you and maybe even find a note about the next step of the quest on him. Sometimes it will be like, chasing, Like a bit of old AC feeling of chasing using parkour, sometimes it's something else. It’s just failing the stealth gives more opportunity. I don’t want to encourage you to fail the stealth, but don’t worry, you won’t get like a hard failure.

Col: Did the team ever consider moving away from classic eagle vision to the RPG style eagle drone?

Julien: Not really, again that’s not something we feel fits Edward, so what we took is actually the observe mechanic from Shadows that we feel is very nice, because it allows you to spend more time looking at the world, so like, for more long range. You would be encouraged to use observe . Eagle vision is still very useful, especially for stealth, but in shadows I think , did like this very good separation of why you use the one or use the other, and it really helped you to look at all the love we poured into this project.

Col: Did the team ever consider adding horse mounts to the game?

Julien: Again, no, such wouldn’t really not fit the game, so Jackdaw is your trusty companion, like the second character of the game, behind Edward so no, the Jackdaw is the second star of the show.

Col: What improvements have been made to naval AI and enemy behaviour to make ship combat more engaging?

Julien: This part we learn a lot from all our experience. We went through Skull and Bones as well. It’s kind of like, the circle is finally complete. We also added like a lot of new opportunity for combat, which is like a secondary, secondary abilities, the abilities brought by the officer, so we had to ramp up some, some setting, I won’t go too much into detail  about how aggressive they might be, but we took advantage of everything we added to make sure AI can react as well.

Col: Amazing, Thank you so much, congratulations on the reveal. Assassin's Creed Black Flag resynced launches July 9th.

Julien: Thank you so much.