A portion of an EDGE interview with Ubisoft's Darby McDevitt...

“The email thread that’s in the game (Assassin's Creed IV), I wrote that very swiftly in an afternoon but I didn’t realise that Kotaku would write like two huge articles about it. What a lot of people don’t realise is that the time periods I picked were not necessarily the ones we were considering, it was just me parodying the ones that the fans had asked for back to them. So the fans generated that list, we didn’t generate that list. I will say that fans definitely think alike. We have the same goals for the series, let’s say. I’ll leave it at that. We always want to surprise.”

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