Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag Had The Best Companion App

My man o’ war, the HMS Gibraltar, torn from the hands of the English Royal Navy, is my finest ship. It’s been out at sea on a mission to deliver cargo for in-game weeks (a good 12 hours in real life), and its odds of success on its dangerous expedition were only 75% when I sent it on its way. Losing this ship would be disastrous for my naval operation as Edward Kenway in Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag.

The next day, I check in on my ship following its overnight journey, and… success. The good ship Gibraltar has returned from its voyage, and my resources and coffers are full. 

But I restrain myself from shouting an audible ‘yusssss,’ because I’m surrounded by commuters on the London Underground, where displaying any kind of emotion could get you drowned in a sea of silent disapproval and side-glances. See, all this happened in 2013, when I was obsessively using the Black Flag Companion app on Android to manage my fleet of stolen ships in the main game. Every commute, every bedtime, every sedentary toilet break was spent managing my fleet on that damn app.

The fleet management was part of the game proper, but it felt so well suited to the mobile format that I pretty much exclusively dealt with this part of the game through my tablet. It meant that when I’d get home from work back to the ‘big-screen’ experience of the main game, instead of diddling around in the fleet menu, I’d be singing shanties on the high seas, hunting for treasure, totally ignoring the main quest, and all the other wonderful activities that the game was really designed for.

The app and the game had a symbiotic relationship. The fleet management felt kind of tedious in the main game and added little to the cinematic pirate fantasy, but to be able to do ship admin from your tablet on the toilet train, bus or under the table during Thanksgiving dinner was borderline magical. A feature that pulled you out of the game when used on the console suddenly turned into one that kept you embroiled in that world when you were away from the big screen. 

The greatest trick this app pulled was making me delude myself into thinking that I was actually saving time, or somehow outsmarting the game, by using it. Of course, the reality was that it made the Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag permeate out of the PS4 and into those little moments of downtime in my day, and in fact I wound up spending much more time in the world of Black Flag.

I’d manage my fleet every night before I went to bed, then sleep easy knowing that as I dreamt of treasure hunts and tavern wenches serving me gutrot rum in Nassau taverns, my schooners and frigates were sailing through the night, and that in the morning I’d return to find my coffers full, ready to spend on upgrades to the main ship I, as Edward Kenway, sailed in the game itself.

That wasn’t all you could do with the Companion App. It was also a map that dynamically tracked your place in the game world, depict enemy ships in real-time (on a bigger scale than your in-game minimap), and revealing the location of treasure that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to find, complete with old-timey drawings showing you the treasure’s exact location.

Effectively, you could delegate the annoying process of pausing to check your map all the time to a tablet propped up by your side. It was brilliant, giving you an experience that was one of the main selling points of the Wii U (which came out around a year earlier in 2012), but via a free app rather than a cumbersome and pricey piece of hardware.

Ubisoft used to dabble quite a bit in this stuff. Assassin’s Creed: Unity also had a companion app with a persistent real-time map, as well as puzzles that you had to solve via the app to unlock chests in the game. There was also a pretty bizarre one for Far Cry 4, called Arena Master, where you forced people and animals to pit-fight against those owned by other players. Dodgy ethics aside, this one didn’t quite have the impact of the Assassin’s Creed ones as it didn’t have that compelling impact on the main game.

The mid-2010s were rife with companion apps of varying quality. Dying Light had a pretty good one where you’d send scouts out on missions, and if they were successful you could send their loot to your main game. The Pip-Boy was a pretty charming app for Fallout 4, but all it really did was give you permanent access to your in-game menu; with that said, if you got your hands on the Pip-Boy replica phone case that you actually strapped onto your wrist, it became an immersive (if clunky) piece of kit. 

These days, companion apps tend to keep things simple, acting as bulletin boards for games like Destiny 2 and Call of Duty, but those early efforts to integrate the companion app into the body of the game felt far more ambitious and impressive. The Black Flag app is no longer available – yet another victim of Ubisoft’s tendency to cull online components from its games – but nearly 10 years on it remains the best of its kind, and I’d like to see more.