Salt and pepper, bread and butter, Paul and Barry Chuckle - some things just seem made
to go together.
But one combination we weren't so sure about was Assassin's Creed and pirates, because
it's pretty tough to sneak about when you've got a wooden leg.
But that's exactly the combo Ubisoft have gone for with this year's entry in their mega-franchise,
Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag.
Which sees a new hooded rogue called Edward Kenway doing hits and sailing ships in the
early 18th century caribbean.
And do you know what?
It kinda works.
Black Flag is set during the golden age of piracy, so I've come to the historic port
of Genoa in Italy to experience a bit of the pirate life, play the game and soak up the
very last dregs of the summer sun.
I'm gonna go inside and play the game in a dark room.
Fortunately the weather was much less overcast inside the game, because aside from the odd
tropical storm, there was nothing but beautiful Caribbean sunshine.
Lots and lots and lots of it.
"You know my favourite thing about this game, it's not a single feature.
It's actually the Caribbean open world.
I can say yes we have pirates and the pirate aesthetic that we've put in there is fantastic
and we have great characters like Blackbeard and Charles Vane, but really my favourite
thing is the Caribbean naval sandbox.
We wanted to create something unique and fresh.
We're used to building cities and here we decided to go big and create not only cities
but this sandbox and I think people out their have never experienced this type of world
before.
You know, it's very unique in the way that you travel through this world and the way
you consume the content of this world.
I think people are going to experience a world like they've never touched before.
We told ourselves we wanted to create the definitive pirate experience and we did it
through the narrative, we did it through the mechanics and we did it through the world
itself and I'm excited for people to play it."
From getting hands-on with the game we can safely say that Black Flag is so piratey you
can almost smell the scurvy.
And the open world does provide a unique experience because it's totally seamless, we went from
steering our ship, The Jackdaw, on the open waves, to jumping overboard and swimming to
a tiny island, then hunting ocelots through the undergrowth, skinning them and then turning
them into a fashionable bag or pistol holster.
So basically the average day in the life of Vivienne Westwood.
We also got to dive for loot and dodge sharks in a rather fetching set of long johns, and
engage in tense naval battles that ended with us spectacularly boarding the enemy vessel.
And according to Associate Producer Sylvain Trottier it was this cool mechanic that caused
the biggest headache for engineering team.
"It was essential that we had boarding working perfectly in the game, so to get like two
moving ships with different, the height of the waves and everything and get them together.
Make them get together.
Then make the dynamic nav-mesh so that the NPCs and the player can jump from one ship
to the other, start fighting, the animation.
Get all of this working all together and still have this big open sea behind you all still
working.
This was probably one of the biggest challenges in the game.
At the beginning the NPCs were not going from one ship to the other.
Then one day we went to a presentation of the team and they did us a surprise.
And you saw like the guy send the grapple hook and then you see the NPC go underneath
and cross over onto the other ship and it was like woah that's awesome, so that's very
pirate."
"Did you all cheer, were you like yes!"
"All the time"
But if you've heard all that and are still thinking, none of it sounds very Assassin-ey,
we thought so too, so we asked Game Director Ash Ismail how they've balanced the swashbuckling
pirate pieces with the skulky assassin aspects.
"From the beginning of this game we had this internal debate about is Edward a pirate,
is he an assassin, and so we actually decided you know what?
People are going to ask us this question so we're going to infuse it into the story.
So literally the story we tell of Edward is of a man who starts as a pirate and he starts
learning about the creed, and he has this internal conflict of like do I believe in
the creed which is a selfless philosophy or do I love this fame and fortune life of building
a pirate republic, and this is an internal struggle that Edward has throughout the tale.
So we have fun with it in the narrative as well.
For sure it's an AC game, you are doing a lot of assassinations, we actually have the
most assassinations of any AC game.
You're doing assassinations, you're doing a lot of free running.
The cities are an homage to AC2, which to us as the dev team was really a reference
game for us.
We loved AC2"
So there you have it, tell your reservations to walk the plank, because despite being a
scourge of the seven seas you're still the all-stabbing, all-climbing assassin you always
were.
Looks like it's the pirate life for all of us when Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag launches
later this year.