After years worth of all of that, and this, and that, and the other thing, they’ve just randomly decided now’s the time to acknowledge it. Via a Tweeter reply containing that GTA: San Andreas meme no less. I may be a weathered old sailor with cannon fuses tied into my beard and more trips up the rigging than I can count to my name, but I didn’t foresee this being how Ubisoft finally acknowledged that Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag remake.

That’s what they’ve done, though. Years of silence, and then like a well-timed broadside, boom:

Why now, in response to a seemingly random bloke selling an Edward Kenway-shaped plastic trinket on Vinted? Well, a man of the sea can only assume the publishers’ recent raft of cancellations and delays, which reportedly included the Black Flag remake being pushed back into the financial year ending March 2027, factor in.

Those have been quickly followed by redundancy plans and unions calling strike action against Ubisoft, with the real toll taken on folks lives rightly taking precedence over chatter about a pirate game.

Perhaps this just the way things have to go these days. The sobering reality of workers being chucked into the sun punching you right in face. Then, when you open your eyes again, the surreal sight of a corporate social media account finally tipping its cap to a long-rumoured remake’s existence ages after it’d have made sense to do so is there. Immense and unforgiveable brutality, intercut with the promise of goods people might treasure conveyed in a manner so strange you can scarcely believe. Yo-ho. A pirate’s life indeed, I guess.