Assassin's Creed IV - details on open world gameplay, design tweaks, new tactics and more
The following info comes from lead writer Darby McDevitt...
- "seamless open world"
- transition from land to sea without load screens
- big cities and jungle islands require loading screens because of the number of assets
- chase a character from land onto a boat before starting a boat chase
- this can lead to a naval battle
- leap from your ship into the enemy's and perform a series of swift assassinations
"The thing with making an open world game is you always want to make these systems link in such a way that surprising things happen. I was playing [the game] one time and I had an assassination contract on a small jungle island. I saw that a massive Man-Of-War was guarding it, and I knew that my ship wasn't upgraded enough to accomplish the mission.
So I parked it around the corner and, even though it was a pain in the ass, I jumped off my ship and I swam all the way to the island. It probably took about two and a half minutes to get there because it was so far away. But, because of this, the Man-Of-War never saw me, I snuck onto the island, I killed my target, and then I took a rowboat back to my ship and sailed away.
That's something that can happen when you have systems that are integrated in a very friendly way where they work together and not against each other."
- main path is around 60-65 percent set on land
- 35-40 percent of the time spent at sea
- no scripted scenarios in the game aside from within missions
- no scripted encounters at sea
- engage in battle with a much more powerful ship and it could chase you up and down coasts
- use coastlines and islands to hide from fire
- lure your enemies into storms
- try to make the enemy ship cross paths with a different ship
- features open-ended assassination missions
- AI has been tweaked to be less aggressive
"We tweaked it in such a way so if there's a huge sugarcane plantation and the guards are chasing you, you can run into the sugarcane field and the guards will follow you, but they will be confused because they don't know where you've gone, so you can double back on them and take them out and hide their bodies.
The key components to good stealth as the guard AI, the tools available to the player to be stealthy and, oddly enough, the tools not available to be stealthy."
- development team removed the brotherhood
- can't sneak through an area and and call on the brotherhood to just kill everybody
- added a sleep dart in place of the quick poison dart
"We want to give players to tools to feel like even if things do go crazy and they find themselves in a confronting situation, they can maybe kill a few guys and get back into stealth mode right away. We removed the tools that made stealth irrelevant."
Link
- "seamless open world"
- transition from land to sea without load screens
- big cities and jungle islands require loading screens because of the number of assets
- chase a character from land onto a boat before starting a boat chase
- this can lead to a naval battle
- leap from your ship into the enemy's and perform a series of swift assassinations
"The thing with making an open world game is you always want to make these systems link in such a way that surprising things happen. I was playing [the game] one time and I had an assassination contract on a small jungle island. I saw that a massive Man-Of-War was guarding it, and I knew that my ship wasn't upgraded enough to accomplish the mission.
So I parked it around the corner and, even though it was a pain in the ass, I jumped off my ship and I swam all the way to the island. It probably took about two and a half minutes to get there because it was so far away. But, because of this, the Man-Of-War never saw me, I snuck onto the island, I killed my target, and then I took a rowboat back to my ship and sailed away.
That's something that can happen when you have systems that are integrated in a very friendly way where they work together and not against each other."
- main path is around 60-65 percent set on land
- 35-40 percent of the time spent at sea
- no scripted scenarios in the game aside from within missions
- no scripted encounters at sea
- engage in battle with a much more powerful ship and it could chase you up and down coasts
- use coastlines and islands to hide from fire
- lure your enemies into storms
- try to make the enemy ship cross paths with a different ship
- features open-ended assassination missions
- AI has been tweaked to be less aggressive
"We tweaked it in such a way so if there's a huge sugarcane plantation and the guards are chasing you, you can run into the sugarcane field and the guards will follow you, but they will be confused because they don't know where you've gone, so you can double back on them and take them out and hide their bodies.
The key components to good stealth as the guard AI, the tools available to the player to be stealthy and, oddly enough, the tools not available to be stealthy."
- development team removed the brotherhood
- can't sneak through an area and and call on the brotherhood to just kill everybody
- added a sleep dart in place of the quick poison dart
"We want to give players to tools to feel like even if things do go crazy and they find themselves in a confronting situation, they can maybe kill a few guys and get back into stealth mode right away. We removed the tools that made stealth irrelevant."
Link
