About this filter

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is Ubisoft Montreal's pirate-era entry in the series, and Edward Kenway's crew talk like the sailors and privateers they are — profanity, blasphemy, and tavern-floor insults run through both the spoken dialogue and the on-screen subtitles. This filter is for players who want to keep Kenway's story, the open Caribbean, and the naval combat intact while taking the harshest language out of it — streamers who need clean audio, parents playing where kids can hear, or anyone who just prefers a calmer playthrough. It runs only on your own installed copy of a game you already own, on Windows or Steam Deck.

The filter covers English on-screen text and English voice-over. On the text side, up to 474 flagged words across 425 base-game subtitle and UI lines are masked with same-length asterisks, so the sentence structure and spacing stay intact. On the audio side, up to 519 English voice lines are silenced at the flagged word — 421 in the base game plus 98 in the Freedom Cry DLC — while the rest of each line and the performance play normally at the original length. You choose what gets filtered from four categories (Strong, Medium, Mild, and Religious Oaths) at apply time, and the pass is context-aware: a genuine prayer, a blessing for the departed, and the game's in-fiction reproductions of Poor Richard's Almanack are left in their original period wording rather than censored.

The patch was built by reading and rewriting the game's own file formats directly: the base subtitle archive is re-censored and repacked with the game's own compression, and the base and Freedom Cry voice packages are edited with a word-level silent splice that preserves each clip's exact length and format. Every change is backed up before anything is written, and the result was confirmed in a live playthrough on both Windows and Steam Deck: subtitles render censored, and flagged voice lines go silent with no audible leak into the surrounding speech. One hard limitation remains: the Freedom Cry DLC's subtitle archive carries an integrity check that blocks any rebuild, so its written text stays as shipped even though its voice-over is filtered. Everything else — the story, the performances, the music, gameplay, saves, and non-English audio and text — is exactly as Ubisoft Montreal shipped it.

What Was Changed

  • On-screen text (base game): up to 474 flagged English words across 425 subtitle and UI lines are masked with same-length asterisks, preserving spacing and sentence structure (e.g. the pirate line "Bloody ******* Pirates!").
  • Voice lines (base game + Freedom Cry DLC): up to 519 English voice lines have the flagged word silenced — 421 in the base game plus 98 in the Freedom Cry DLC. The rest of each line and the performance play normally, at the original clip length.
  • Choose what's filtered: four selectable categories — Strong (the F-word and C-word families), Medium (the S-word and anatomical terms), Mild (the A-word family and light insults), and Religious Oaths (blasphemy / religious swearing used as expletives). All four are on by default; untick any you'd rather keep.
  • English only. Single-player scope — the offline multiplayer client (its servers have been offline since 2022) is untouched.

What Was NOT Changed

Freedom Cry DLC subtitle text is not censored — the DLC package's integrity check rejects any rebuild of its text archive, so this one surface stays as shipped, while the DLC's spoken profanity is still silenced. Reverent religious references (a prayer, a blessing for the departed) and the in-game reproductions of Poor Richard's Almanack keep their original wording. Non-English text and audio are left exactly as shipped, the multiplayer client's own files are untouched, and the story, voice performances, music, and gameplay are exactly as Ubisoft Montreal made them — only the flagged English words change. Saves and achievements are not modified.

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