A successor of sorts to the brilliant Assassin's Creed Black Flag, Rogue was somewhat overlooked when it was released back in 2014. In that difficult 'cross-gen' period, Rogue was designed to take care of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owners, but the key focus for the series was the technologically ambitious, but ultimately flawed, Assassin's Creed Unity - Ubisoft's series debut for PS4 and Xbox One. Rogue didn't really deserve its second tier status - it was a great game with a lot of visual highlights and with the release of this week's remaster, the game gets a second chance to shine.
Of course, the key question is straightforward enough: to what extent has the game actually been remastered? Ubisoft's PR describes 'enhanced graphics with improved environment rendering, upscaled shadow resolution, denser crowds and more'. Certainly, after playing the opening hours on PS4, Xbox One, and the two enhanced consoles, it's true that it's not a simple res bump. Let's not forget that Rogue has close ties to Black Flag, a cross-gen game that did receive PS4 and Xbox One upgrades - all of which are present and correct in this Rogue remaster.
However, there is evidence that Ubisoft has pushed the Black Flag engine on. To begin with, both the standard PS4 and Xbox One consoles run at 1080p resolution (up against Black Flag's 900p on the Microsoft console). The only aspect to distinguish the two is in anti-aliasing quality, where the base Xbox One pushes a rougher looking frame, despite the shared pixel count. It's a similar situation on the enhanced machines; both Xbox One X and PS4 Pro deliver native 4K - a 4x resolution bump over the base models, but with the X model producing slightly rawer edges by comparison. In all cases, the improvement in image quality over the last-gen versions is tangible, especially going from Xbox 360's circa 1200x688.