Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is a masterpiece because it understands that a pirate’s life is a mathematics of desire. is the weight of history, ideology, and sacrifice. 270 is the shimmering, deceptive promise of individual profit. Edward Kenway’s entire arc is the subtraction of one from the other—learning that the treasure map leads nowhere until one accepts that the real treasure is the Creed. He stops counting coins and starts counting on his brothers and sisters. In the end, the numbers do not add up to a fortune; they subtract to zero—the only honest sum for a man who finally realizes that nothing is true, and that is precisely what sets him free.

270 is the siren call of the horizon. It is the price of a new hull, the cost of a better pistol, the bribe for a wanted level reduction. Throughout the first two-thirds of Black Flag , Edward operates entirely within the orbit of 270. His map is not marked by Assassin bureaus but by Spanish treasure fleets. His loyalty is not to a mentor but to the next heist. This number embodies the game’s central critique of unbridled capitalism: Edward believes that 270 units of freedom (money) will buy him a quiet life in England with his estranged wife. He fails to see that the pursuit of 270 is a hamster wheel. Every time he reaches it, the next upgrade costs 540, then 1,080. The number metastasizes, consuming his humanity. His friends—Mary Read, Blackbeard, Stede Bonnet—all fall because they, too, chased a version of 270, mistaking currency for liberty.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is often celebrated as the series’ most successful anomaly. It is a pirate game that happens to feature the Assassin-Templar war, rather than the other way around. Yet beneath its shanties and broadside cannons lies a deep structural and philosophical framework, anchored by two numbers: 622 and 270 . These figures represent not dates or statistics, but the two opposing gravitational pulls on the protagonist, Edward Kenway: the ideological birth of the Assassin Order and the relentless pursuit of profit. Together, they chart his journey from a reckless privateer to a disillusioned, then enlightened, killer.

For Edward Kenway, 622 represents the unseen, historical scaffolding of the world he stumbles into. He does not seek the Assassins; he stumbles upon their robes and their hidden blade by accident after killing a turncoat. The number 622 is the ghost at the feast of the Golden Age of Piracy. It signifies order, sacrifice, and a long war fought in the shadows—concepts Edward initially finds tedious. He scoffs at the Assassins’ rituals, their insistence on a “greater good,” and their disdain for personal wealth. To Edward, the year 622 is irrelevant; it is ancient history. But over the course of the game, as he watches friends die for nothing more than gold, he begins to understand that the principles born in that distant year—the defense of free will, the rejection of control—are the only things that give meaning to the bloody chaos of his life.

The number 622 is most recognizable as the year of the Hijra —the Prophet Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina—which marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar. In the lore of Assassin’s Creed , this date holds an even more specific weight: it is the traditional founding year of the Hidden Ones, the precursor to the Assassin Brotherhood, as established by Bayek and Aya in Origins . By invoking 622, Black Flag subtly reminds us that the Creed—"Nothing is true, everything is permitted"—is not a medieval invention but an ancient response to oppression.

He sees the Assassins not as cultists but as the only people who have a plan to prevent the world from becoming a prison of greed. He formally joins the Brotherhood, not because he wants power, but because he realizes that “nothing is true” (the gold has no ultimate value) and “everything is permitted” (he must choose his own moral path). He takes the number 622—the ancient tradition of the Hidden Ones—and integrates it into his piratical soul. The game ends with Edward Kenway returning to England, not as a rich man, but as a father and a Master Assassin. He has traded the finite, hollow pursuit of 270 for the infinite, difficult responsibility of 622.

If 622 looks backward to ideology, looks forward to greed. This number refers to the 270 reais (or the approximate value in any currency) that a sugar plantation owner might have earned from a season’s labor, but more broadly, it represents the average profit margin of a single successful pirate raid in the Caribbean as modeled by the game’s economy. More poetically, 270 is the number of ships Edward must plunder, the number of chests he must open, the number of “R” (real) units required to upgrade the Jackdaw from a sloop to a man-of-war-killing machine.

The genius of Black Flag is that it forces Edward to choose between these two numbers. The climax is not a naval battle but a funeral. When Mary Read dies in a Jamaican prison, Edward finally understands that all his 270 could not save her. The gold he piled in the Jackdaw’s hold is worthless against the Templar order’s systematic cruelty. In that moment of grief, he looks past 270 and sees 622.