A portion of a Canada.com interview with author Colin Woodward...

Q: I’ve always had an interest in history and video games so I’m thrilled to be able to talk to you about your work on Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. I was wondering, from your perspective, is the game historically accurate. I know it’s a video game so some stuff needs to be played around with though.

Colin Woodward: … I haven’t played through it. In fact, I’m only familiar with the script stuff which I worked on. In terms of seeing the actual completed game with the visuals and the like, I was at a media event in Europe and I’ve seen some sequences watching over the shoulders of media while they played (and I’ve played a little bit of multiplayer).

I don’t have a comprehensive view of the entire thing yet. What I can say is from what I have seen, and especially my work with Darby McDevitt (AC IV’s lead script writer), I was amazed. I was brought in to be a script consultant to try to improve the historical accuracy of the script. They already had the basic shape of the script when I got involved, I was amazed at how accurate it already was and the depth of research that they’d gone into (Ubisoft) and digging into sources and understanding the times and the technology and stuff….

The general world, with the caveat that they’re creating a video game, I was really impressed with what a good job they did with that. They’ve captured something about the real story about these golden age pirates…