Ubisoft put out a deep dive yesterday on the HUD system in Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, and the short version is that you can turn off basically everything. Every HUD element in the game can be individually enabled or disabled, giving you full control over how much information is on screen at any given moment.
The system works similarly to what Ubisoft did with Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Out of the box, you get four presets. Default shows most HUD elements for maximum clarity, button prompts, combat feedback, and navigation guidance. Simple strips out some reminders and highlights while keeping enough on screen to guide you through fights and exploration. Minimal shows only the essentials like Edward’s health, interaction prompts, and cannon aiming arcs on the Jackdaw. Disabled removes nearly everything for a pure immersion experience with no prompts and no indicators.
Beyond presets, you can go granular. Combat HUD elements like defense indicators, parry prompts, health bars, and attack indicators can all be toggled independently. Stealth elements like the visibility meter, awareness indicators, outlines, and perception indicators are all separate toggles. Naval gameplay lets you keep aiming arcs for cannon fire while stripping everything else off the screen. You can even adjust blood effects, VFX visibility, and in-game notifications individually.
The combat HUD is where this gets interesting. Resynced’s reworked combat adds a defense mechanic where enemies have a defense bar on top of their health bar. Well-timed parries, strong attacks, and sustained pressure deplete that defense, which opens enemies up for powerful takedowns. Different enemy archetypes respond differently to different combat actions. Some crumble fast under sword pressure. Others need a gunshot to break their defense. The health and defense bars make that system readable on default settings.
For players who don’t want those bars on screen, Ubisoft added a visual tell: an enemy’s defense is broken when their hat or headpiece falls off. That’s a smart design choice. It means you can play with a clean screen and still read the combat system through animations instead of UI elements.
Ubisoft was also clear about something that needed to be said: Black Flag Resynced is still an action-adventure game. No levels, no gear scores, no progression gates. The health and defense bars are optional visual feedback, not a signal that the game has turned into an RPG. That distinction matters because the RPG creep in the Assassin’s Creed franchise turned a lot of people off, and Resynced is explicitly not going in that direction.
Their recommendation for launch is to start on Default or Simple to learn the reworked combat, stealth, and naval systems, then dial the HUD back as you get comfortable. That’s good advice. Learn the new parry system with the training wheels on, then take them off once you’ve internalized the timing.
More deep dives on combat, stealth, and naval gameplay are coming in dedicated articles, and additional accessibility and customization details will be shared in May. Black Flag Resynced launches July 9 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
Thoughts on the HUD options? Drop a comment below or come talk about it in the Vortex Effect forums.
