I know weapon pickups aren't returning in the Black Flag remake, but I desperately hope that muskets are still included.
I was disappointed when I heard that weapon pickups aren't coming back to the remake, but I'm overall not too upset about that. Mostly cause the double swords are so effective and efficient for combat, that the only reason to pick up enemy weapons is just for a cosmetic change during combat. There may be other reasons why people pick up weapons, but me personally, I never really found them useful.
Except for muskets.
I recently started playing Assassin's Creed Rogue since it's one of the few Assassin's Creed games I haven't played yet, and also cause I wanted to re-experience what Black Flag's gameplay was like before the remake, without doing a replay of Black Flag. Cause I didn't wanna play Black Flag twice in a row.
And what my playthrough reminded me of is how useful muskets actually are. Unlike other weapon pickups, muskets have a practical use. They allow a long range shot without using up any ammo for your pistols, which is especially useful if you don't have any ammo, or your pistols aren't loaded.
An especially good use for them in Black Flag is when you're boarding a ship and need to kill a scout from the opposite mast. You use the rope to grapple up, kill the one closest to you, grab their musket, and shoot the other one. But this is just one of the ways muskets stay useful to gameplay.
The thing is that, hidden blade combat, unarmed combat, picking up weapons. I understand why Ubisoft didn't include these in the remake. I don't like it, I wish they had included these anyway, especially since it's built off of Shadow's Anvil Engine, and Shadows has a lot of weapon types. But I can see why they removed them. Cause they're overall not as functional and practical as dual swords.
But the musket isn't like other weapons. It's not something we pick up when we're bored of swords, or bored of using pistols. It's not just a reskin of pistols. It's a completely unique gameplay tool that has a function above just being a simple reskin of the weapons we already have.
All I'm saying is that muskets are an extremely useful tool during gameplay. And although it's confirmed that picking up weapons won't be included at launch, I just hope that muskets are anyway. And if they're not, that we can start discussing them more so that Ubisoft could see the mistake and hopefully add them back in post launch.