Surprise! Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag is a video game that exists, it's coming out this year and it's all about pirates and boats.
Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag sees Ubisoft follow up on the biggest AC yet with an installment that takes to the seas and we've had a first look...Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, on the surface, looks like Ubisoft’s response to the two major points players and critics raised about Assassin’s Creed 3. While last year’s game received generally positive reviews, it was slammed for its PO-faced protagonist, Connor Ken way, and for its lack of innovation, mechanically and structurally speaking.
One of the only things audiences gave Assassin’s Creed 3 props for, beyond its expected strengths, were the sections set at sea where players had to pilot a galley and use its cannons to send enemies to Davy Jones’s Locker.
At a recent event in London, Ubisoft revealed that the timeline for
their new game kicks off around the 1720s during the post-Spanish
Succession period. A lot of privateers and sailors at the time, we are
told, suddenly found themselves out of work and began to turn to piracy
in order to make a living.Among them was one privateer named Edward Kenway, a brash, brutish, if
slightly intelligent man who captained a ship called The Jackdaw. It’s
this colourful rogue the players will be taking control of as they head
out on adventure that’ll take them from Cuba, to the West Indies, to the
Bahamas and dozens of places in between.
According to Ubisoft, there are 50 unique locations in the game, which include three large open cities – Havana, Kingston and the Pirate Republic of Nassau –, fishing villages, secret coves, jungles, forts, Mayan ruins, islands and more. They’ll even be able to use a diving bell to explore the ocean floor.
Ubisoft said, however, that Black Flag will also feature a lot of figures from the Golden Age of Piracy including Ben Hornigold, the gentlemen pirate, Anne Bonney, one of the rare female captains of the time, Calico Jack and Charles Vane, a pair of unrepentant psychos and Blackbeard, who needs no introduction.
There’ll be multiplayer, naturally, which Ubisoft say will feature “new maps and characters“ (rather than what alternative, I wonder?). There’ll also be a novel approach taken to the present-day time travelling fiction, which Ubisoft described to the audience in a curious way. As the timeline of the series converged with the timeline of the real world at the end of the last game, the creative director patiently explained, we were all now part of the Assassin’s Creed universe. He pointed to the crowd. “You are all in the universe right now,” he intoned ominously, letting the words hang in the air, expecting a cheer, or maybe panic. I patted myself up and down to make sure I was still real, before peering around at all of these new Assassin’s Creed characters: the nice man who writes for the Guardian, my friend who I’d been to the zoo with early that week, somebody else who was wearing an Assassin’s Creed hoodie, which now that he’s an Assassin’s Creed character was even more inappropriate than usual. Would we all need our own Wikia entries?
“You are now the true protagonist in Assassin’s Creed 4,” he continued, revealing that, rather than playing as Desmond, you play as a nameless first person researcher at Abstergo Entertainment Industries, a subsidiary of Ubisoft or somesuch other made up silliness. The important takeaway here is that the dreary, whiny honking of present-day sulk-in-a-white-hood Desmond Miles has been scrubbed, hopefully for good, and that focus will turn to the piracy, where it probably belongs.
In the previous game’s naval battles, you’d bombard a fortress until the mission relented and faded to black, loading up the fort’s interior and chucking you into a cut scene. In Assassin’s Creed 4 however, you’ll smash that fort to bits with your cannon, dive into the frothing, debris-peppered ocean and scale the encampment’s walls in one uninterrupted, beautiful sequence. That’s a fantastic technical achievement, if anything, but if this continuity scales across the entire game — if I can smash my ship into a harbor to frighten an NPC dog — then this will promptly overtake Brotherhood as the greatest game in the series.
It’s certainly a new step for the series, game play wise, and like every Assassin’s Creed game, it looks absolutely gorgeous. We can’t wait to buckle a swash with Black Flag come this autumn.29 October 2013
Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag release date: 29 October 2013
Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag price: TBC
Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag sees Ubisoft follow up on the biggest AC yet with an installment that takes to the seas and we've had a first look...Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, on the surface, looks like Ubisoft’s response to the two major points players and critics raised about Assassin’s Creed 3. While last year’s game received generally positive reviews, it was slammed for its PO-faced protagonist, Connor Ken way, and for its lack of innovation, mechanically and structurally speaking.
One of the only things audiences gave Assassin’s Creed 3 props for, beyond its expected strengths, were the sections set at sea where players had to pilot a galley and use its cannons to send enemies to Davy Jones’s Locker.
According to Ubisoft, there are 50 unique locations in the game, which include three large open cities – Havana, Kingston and the Pirate Republic of Nassau –, fishing villages, secret coves, jungles, forts, Mayan ruins, islands and more. They’ll even be able to use a diving bell to explore the ocean floor.
Ubisoft said, however, that Black Flag will also feature a lot of figures from the Golden Age of Piracy including Ben Hornigold, the gentlemen pirate, Anne Bonney, one of the rare female captains of the time, Calico Jack and Charles Vane, a pair of unrepentant psychos and Blackbeard, who needs no introduction.
There’ll be multiplayer, naturally, which Ubisoft say will feature “new maps and characters“ (rather than what alternative, I wonder?). There’ll also be a novel approach taken to the present-day time travelling fiction, which Ubisoft described to the audience in a curious way. As the timeline of the series converged with the timeline of the real world at the end of the last game, the creative director patiently explained, we were all now part of the Assassin’s Creed universe. He pointed to the crowd. “You are all in the universe right now,” he intoned ominously, letting the words hang in the air, expecting a cheer, or maybe panic. I patted myself up and down to make sure I was still real, before peering around at all of these new Assassin’s Creed characters: the nice man who writes for the Guardian, my friend who I’d been to the zoo with early that week, somebody else who was wearing an Assassin’s Creed hoodie, which now that he’s an Assassin’s Creed character was even more inappropriate than usual. Would we all need our own Wikia entries?
“You are now the true protagonist in Assassin’s Creed 4,” he continued, revealing that, rather than playing as Desmond, you play as a nameless first person researcher at Abstergo Entertainment Industries, a subsidiary of Ubisoft or somesuch other made up silliness. The important takeaway here is that the dreary, whiny honking of present-day sulk-in-a-white-hood Desmond Miles has been scrubbed, hopefully for good, and that focus will turn to the piracy, where it probably belongs.
In the previous game’s naval battles, you’d bombard a fortress until the mission relented and faded to black, loading up the fort’s interior and chucking you into a cut scene. In Assassin’s Creed 4 however, you’ll smash that fort to bits with your cannon, dive into the frothing, debris-peppered ocean and scale the encampment’s walls in one uninterrupted, beautiful sequence. That’s a fantastic technical achievement, if anything, but if this continuity scales across the entire game — if I can smash my ship into a harbor to frighten an NPC dog — then this will promptly overtake Brotherhood as the greatest game in the series.
It’s certainly a new step for the series, game play wise, and like every Assassin’s Creed game, it looks absolutely gorgeous. We can’t wait to buckle a swash with Black Flag come this autumn.29 October 2013
Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag release date: 29 October 2013
Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag price: TBC
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