E3 2013: Assassin’s Creed IV: The Pirate Game You’ve Always Wanted?

June 19, 2013

Just when I think I’m out, they pull me back in.

Like many, I fell hook, line, and sinker for Assassin’s Creed III’s refreshing Revolutionary War-era setting, only to be turned off by the Haytham switcheroo during the game’s opening hours. Thus, I should be wary of the next installment, but then dammit, pirates happened.
Yes, Ubisoft has me again with the early 18th-century-set Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, which I saw running on a high-octane PC meant to mimic the PlayStation 4 – it was even demoed with a DualShock 4 controller. It’s going to look glorious on a next-gen console or sufficient PC thanks to the wide-open West Indies cities and Caribbean waters, complete with wind-blown trees, ambient wildlife, and a massive seamless world that features almost zero loading times.

Eye candy aside, what about the gameplay? After all, as Assassin’s Creed III proved, place does not a great game make. Here, the team at Ubisoft wants to break away from the hollow AC3 feeling that you weren’t really playing but instead a participant in a semi-interactive production.
To do that, lead writer Darby McDevitt says the team sought to return the game to its multiple-choice origins: “We went back to Assassin’s Creed 1 to see those [open-ended] setups.”

To demonstrate, Ubi fired up a mission in which Assassin member Edward Kenway – first mentioned in a journal entry in AC3 – is tasked with hunting down a pair of brothers who are Templar associates. Kenway wanders through a seaside city plaza, finds the first target, and takes him out in full view of everyone. People scream, panic, and scatter – including the other brother, who runs away. Edward pursues him to the dock. The surviving sibling leaps aboard his boat as it leaves port.

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...[U]sing his body like an emergency brake as you plunge your blade into it.

Undeterred, Kenway dances across a rope line above the water to his ship, the Jackdaw, and takes the wheel. You can steer your vessel yourself and command attacks as well – which I saw firsthand as the Jackdaw caught up and ran parallel to the brother’s boat. Cannon fire is exchanged, sending up a cloud of volumetric fog that obscures your vision temporarily. Be careful, though: you can simply sink the ship if you want, but seeing how Edward is a loot-hungry pirate and putting it on the bottom of the ocean would negate any potential salvage or cargo value it has. And so Edward takes his foot off the gas, to use a thoroughly anachronistic term, and boards the ship.

You'll get random objectives when you board enemy ships.

His crew joins him and suddenly an equally massive and impressive fight is waged on the deck of the burning, battered vessel. Your goal is still to kill the remaining brother, but you’ll be assigned random objectives when you board ships, too – in this case, killing 15 crew members.
The alpha target is terminated after Edward takes out a few snipers in the crow’s nest, then walk along suspended ropes and leap down onto him from above, using his body like an emergency brake as you plunge your blade into it.
With the battle won, you’ll have the option of sending the wounded ship to your fleet, or salvage it for materials in order to repair your boats.

Meanwhile, myriad sunken ships mean you can swim around searching for underwater treasure, and you might find loot on the corpse of a half-crab-eaten sailor on a random sandbar. Plus, appreciated tweaks like no more hard desynching from the Animus if you’re spotted and a renewed emphasis on stealth (“Stealth is a major part of this game,” McDevitt says. “We really want to encourage infiltration and using your tools.”) should help Black Flag get Assassin’s Creed back to realizing its full potential.
Black Flag is an especially exciting proposition for pirate fans that were let down by the unfulfilled potential of 2012’s Risen 2: Dark Waters and the cancellation of Propaganda Games’ similarly open-world Pirates of the Caribbean: Armada of the Damned in 2010. If Assassin’s Creed IV can put the “open” back in “open-world,” then the venerable memory-plumbing franchise might just reach its tallest heights yet.