You can remake a great game, but you can never truly replace it. That's been my stance all along, especially as I've enjoyed the more dramatic reimaginings, like the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy. Even when a remake hews more closely to the original title, and seeks only to "improve" it across the board, it will exist to supplement the initial realization.
Obviously, this is just my personal opinion on the subject. But it's one that's at least shared by Assassin's Creed producer Justin Ng, whose work on Black Flag: Resynced has been vital to the project's upcoming completion. On Twitter, the dev himself admits that he doesn't see Resynced as replacing anything; it's more of an homage, and hopefully, a respectful one.
There it is. Justin Ng gets it. His reply is making the internet rounds for a reason—it's this respectfulness toward source material that's not always present when teams set out to remake classic games (or other forms of media, for that matter). "You never replace the GOAT," Ng answered a fan on Twitter who wondered whether the goal was to do just that, so long as Resynced is as faithful to the original Black Flag as possible....
