Oh man of war, HMS Gibraltar, torn from the hands of the English Royal Navy, is my best ship. He was at sea on a mission to deliver in-game goods weeks (12 good hours in real life), and the odds of her succeeding on her perilous journey were only 75% when I sent her on her way. Losing this ship would be disastrous for my Navy SEALs as Edward Kenway in Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag.
The next day, I checked in on my ship after its overnight voyage, and… Success. The good ship Gibraltar has returned from its voyage, my resources and my coffers are full.
But I stop myself from screaming out loudyusssss” Because I am surrounded by commuters on the London Underground, where showing any kind of emotion might drown me in a sea of silent disapproval and side glances. Look, this all 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 flight, every bedtime, every toilet break was spent managing my fleet on this damn app.
Fleet management was part of the game proper, but it felt so well suited to the mobile format that I dealt exclusively with this part of the game through my tablet. It meant that when I came home from work to experience the “big screen” of the main game, instead of fiddling with the fleet roster, I’d be singing huts on the high seas, hunting for treasure, completely ignoring the main mission and all the other cool activities the game was really designed for .
There is a symbiotic relationship between the app and the game. Fleet management felt rather boring in the main game and added little to the pirate cinematic imagination, but to be able to manage ships through plank On the the toilet The train, the bus, or under the table during Thanksgiving dinner was magical. The feature that took you out of the game when used on the console suddenly turned into a feature that kept you engrossed in this world when you were away from the big screen.
The greatest trick this app ever did was make me fool myself into thinking that I was actually saving time, or somehow outsmarting the game, by using it. Of course, the truth was that it made Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag permeate my PS4 and punctuated those little moments of downtime in my day, and in fact I ended up spending a lot more Time in the world of black flag.
I ran my fleet every night before I slept, and then slept easily knowing that as I dreamed of treasure-hunting and gutter-rum-serving wines in Nassau taverns, galleys and frigates sailing all night, and that in the morning I would come back to find my coffers full, And ready to spend on major ship upgrades, I, like Edward Kenway, set sail for 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, depicting enemy ships in real time (on a larger scale than the in-game mini-map), and revealed the location of treasure that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to search, complete with ancient graphics that show you the exact location of the treasure .
Effectively, you can delegate the annoying pause process of checking your map all the time to a supported tablet next to you. It was great, giving you an experience that was one of the main selling points of the Wii U (which came out about a year ago in 2012), but via a free app rather than an expensive piece of hardware.
Ubisoft used to be very busy with these things. Assassin’s Creed: Unity also had a companion app with a real-time continuous map, as well as puzzles that you had to solve via the app to unlock chests in the game. There was also a very strange game for Far Cry 4, called Arena Master, that forced people and animals into battle against those owned by other players. Dodgy ethics aside, this effect didn’t have an Assassin’s Creed effect because it didn’t have that convincing effect on the main game.
The middle of 2010 was full of companion apps of varying quality. Dying Light had a very good game where you can send scouts on missions and if they succeed you can send their loot to your main game. Pip-Boy was a pretty charming app for Fallout 4, but all it really did was give you permanent access to the in-game menu; With that, if you get your hands on a Pip-Boy replica phone case You already tied it on your wristbecame an immersive (if heavy) group.
These days, companion apps tend to keep things simple, serving as a bulletin board for games like Destiny 2 and Call of Duty, but those early efforts to integrate the companion app into the body of the game sounded more ambitious and impressive. Black Flag is no longer available – another victim of Ubisoft’s tendency to exclude online components from its games – but for nearly 10 years it’s still the best of its kind, and I’d like to see more.
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