I'm in Italy checking out Ubisoft's swashbuckling, ship sailing, sea shanty Assassin's Creed
4 Black Flag, try saying that ten times fast... and while I'm here, I'll be chatting to some
experts to find out just how authentic the pirate experience in the game is.
Swashbuckling ship sailing sea shanty, swashbuckling ship - ah forget it.
Anyway for Assassin's Creed 4 Ubisoft were not just content with fighting their way through
different periods in history, they wanted to give players the entire Caribbean to explore.
And to do it they give you a ship and an entirely new assassin.
"In Assassin's Creed 4 we follow the life of Edward Kenway, he's a pirate, very early
in the game he comes into contact with the assassins and templar, he kind of crosses
paths with the Assassins and Templars conflict and being a pirate with selfish motivations
of his own he thinks he can kind of work this conflict to his advantage and become a man
of sort of riches and infamy.
"
But while the order of assassins in the game has strayed into fictitious territory, pirates
were very, very real but probably struggled to write down their history with their hook
hands - so where did Darby go to get his information?
"The first place to go when you research the golden age of piracy, this is the period from
1650 to about 1725, is a guy named Charles Johnson, Captain Charles Johnson, his book
the General History of Pirates.
This book came out literally 6 years after Blackbeard's death.
It's a collection of kind of fantastical reports, rumours and newsclippings of actual real pirates.
In terms of media I didn't watch too many pirate movies, I found them a little too fantastical,
a little bit too campy.
Even books like Treasure Island and Peter Pan those kind of begin the Victorian age
rehabilitation of pirates as dashing rogues."
So pirates didn't buckle swashes or have improbable love triangles with Keira Knightley and Orlando
Bloom, but according to historical weapons expert and sword fighting ninja Mike Loades
they used plenty of weaponry - just like the assassins from AC.
"Pirates used a whole range of weapons cause they had a whole range of jobs to do.
You need big artillery when you're chasing a ship down from a distance, you need muskets
when you're trying to clear the decks from relatively close by, you need pistols as you
go over the side, you need boarding pikes and boarding axes when you're really laying
about them, or cutlasses or daggers when you're below deck and there's no space at all.
So they had to have this wide arsenal of weapons."
So plenty of weapons is a pirate staple, but apparently most of them weren't all that interested
in killing.
Just ask one of the most infamous pirates ever, Blackbeard.
"I'm not a man accustomed to murder Captain, and if you'd taken quarter you'd not be seeping
now"
I actually meant the guy playing Blackbeard in the game, but whatever.
"A lot of people say, or think of him as the scourge of the seven seas, but he invented
this kind of persona which enabled him to, a very clever thing to do, enabled him to
be successful as a pirate.
But keeping the body count to a minimum by using his reputation.
He understood the power of reputation, if you're reputation precedes you and people
are absolutely terrified then they'll more than likely give up whatever booty they have
to save their neck."
So whether you see them as dashing rogues, vicious killers or poor souls with terrbile
depth perception it's hard to deny the simple fact that people love pirates.
"People like them because they fall squarely in the middle of freedom fighters slash criminals,
it's the same reason I think we like gangsters today.
I think pirates are actually kinder than gangsters.
Pirates weren't that interested in murdering people.
There were certainly a few dastardly pirates, but most pirates were just bank robbers on
the high seas.
I think we can all kind of, with the passage of time we can all accept some robberies,
especially when it's against empires, you know."
One man's cutthroat is another man's captain.
And it's this level of ambiguity that seems to lie at the heart of Black Flag's motley
crews.
And in that way the pirates of Assassin's Creed 4 are way more authentic than a certain
Mister Sparrow.