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Draw your sword as we prepare to sail the seven seas in Black Flag.

Ah, that joke is so old now. Anyway: Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is all piratey! That means boats and leaping about on tropical islands, which you can see happening the first gameplay footage from E3, below. I’m sure I’d be at least 70% more upbeat about this if I wasn’t having to suppress my general cynicism towards this series of games.

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Sweet-looking gameplay from Ubisoft's highly anticipated pirate-themed title.

Get a glimpse of what Ubisoft's swashbuckling adventure has in store for players in this CG trailer for Black Flag.

- steal enemy ships and add them to your own fleet
- fleet missions on mobile
- send these ships out
- any money your fleet has earned in these missions can then be applied to your main game
- serves as an alternative to the pause menu
- see the map, take a look at important data, view progression stats, and more
- interact with the game's map via the app
- updates in real time based on where you are in the main game

Forget that pretty Errol Flynn stuff. The vision of pirate life that Ubisoft’s selling with Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is a rowdy, ruthless roundeau of bloodletting. But it also looks like it’ll be lonely and pensive at moments, too.

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."

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It better be sea salt Bashir Sultani is using to recreate the piratical Edward Kenway from the upcoming Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. What a fascinating process. I especially like the tiny additions he makes at the end on the guns. It took him two hours to create this salt art, only to wipe it away into oblivion. Art With Salt - Assassin's Creed IV [YouTube] To contact the author of this post, write to gergovas@kotaku.com

I say “conspicuously” because the latest Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag trailer contains all other pirate things. Boats, poofy beards, vast seas, tropical settings, gruff voices chattering, cannons, SHAAAAAAAAAAAARK, dead men floating, black flags, a different SHAAAAAAAAARK, and magnificent hats. No sea shanties, though. That is the crying-est of shames. Oh, hm. No shoulder parrots either. And hey, where are all the eyepatches and peg legs? Jeez, this doesn’t look like a realistic pirate game at all. So much for historical accuracy, game series about cyber memory men who survive physics-defying leaps into hay bales and murder pretty much everyone who died between the years 1189 and right now. What a sham.

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Best Buy - The Lost Treasures Pack

- cache of weapons players can use to customize their pirate ship
- also weapons to wield in the game's multiplayer mode
- includes the Ivory Wheel, Spyglass Relic and other items
- grab yours here

GameStop - Double-sided poster



Grab yours here
Link

Get a nice history lesson in this detailed analysis of the latest Assassin's Creed trailer.

Edward Kenway set out to earn his fortune in the West Indies, but you’ll see first-hand how he (like so many other sailors of his day) turned to a much more brutal, ruthless and lucrative life in Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag. We’re very pleased to deliver yet another glimpse into this world and further define our vision of The Golden Age of Pirates with this new gameplay trailer!

Captain Edward Kenway is a complicated guy with simple objectives: get money, honor the crew and live a life unbound by the laws of remote sovereigns. His story will take you all around the Caribbean, plundering, pillaging and generally leaving a wake of mayhem behind you.

But there is also a larger tale involving Edward’s contemporaries, and despite their commonly-known roles as thieves and brigands of the sea, there were pirates of the age who worked to create a truly free society. Edward will become embroiled in their struggle, and that of a much more inconspicuous and clandestine group…

As you can see from the trailer, you can expect a wide variety of new and exciting activities in AC4, including: dynamic boarding raids, incomparably smooth free-running in both natural and city environments and multi-pistol fighting that makes sense in the Assassin’s Creed melee style.

Also, you’ll learn that if a shark attacks you, the best thing to do is to punch it in the gills (and that is really true).

Today, Ubisoft revealed a new Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag figurine, Blackbeard the Legendary Pirate, to be released in October 2013 along with the Edward Kenway: The Assassin Pirate, already available for pre-order on Uplay.

Based on the infamous legendary pirate, this high quality figurine features Blackbeard in Mayan Ruins, swords at the ready. Additional digital content for Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag is also included in this premium collectible now available for pre-order via Uplay here: http://shop.ubi.com/promo/93024600



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In order to give you a sense of what it was like to be a pirate to get you prepared for Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag, Darby McDevitt, Scriptwriter of Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag answers some questions.

How much research went into bringing to life the Golden Age of Piracy?

I cracked open my first book about pirates in the summer of 2011, just after finishing my work on AC Revelations, and for the following 6 months I read dozens of primary and secondary sources. I researched as broadly as I could, to get a good sense of the entire period, which meant reading books and articles on the sugar trade, slavery, politics, and sailing, in addition to the best books on Piracy. I also brushed up on some popular pirate fiction – books like Treasure Island and the Pirate King, and various films – to get a general sense of what made up the standard “pirate yarn.” I found these sources less interesting in general, though, as they were typically too narrowly focused for the needs of an assassin’s creed game.

Lastly, we contacted Colin Woodard, author of The Republic of Pirates, and asked him to help steer our ship in the right direction. Colin’s book had provided us with the answer to one crucial question we had worried we might not be able to resolve: How do we get all of the most famous pirates in history together in the same story? It turns out that the Republic of Pirates – AKA Nassau in the Bahamas – was the answer.

All told, it took almost a year of aggressive research and writing to feel like we had arrived at a confident understanding of the time period and its people, and I am confident that it will show. Naturally there are always concessions that must be made when creating a playable video game, but the over-all “feel” of this world is astounding, and far richer than any pirate themed experience ever made.

Why settle for this particular timeframe in the wide era of “Piracy”?

Read the rest of the story...

Every Assassin’s Creed game is based in an actual historical setting, with a sense of place and time that provides the backdrop to amazing adventure fraught with peril and political intrigue. The setting for Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag is no different! Contrary to popular belief, pirates didn’t suddenly decide to become a scourge of the seas out of the clear blue sky.

The emergence of piracy was the result of decades of violent and brutal privateering that was not only sanctioned, but also bankrolled by warring naval powers of a size and scope never known before. All of this will have already happened in AC4, so we thought it would be a good idea to bring you up to speed.

The wild, nearly lawless and verdant islands of the West Indies and the towering ships that ruled them present some of the most unique and exciting stories we’d ever encountered, so we couldn’t wait to show them to you in AC4.

Behind the tales you’ve heard, lurking in the shadows of history, the Assassins are always working to ensure that people live free. For a time, that belief aligned with those who plied the seas from Kingston to Nassau… let us reveal the truth.

Black Flag comes to PlayStation 4 this fall. What does Ubisoft think of Sony's new console?

We’re always trying to push the envelope with the Assassin’s Creed series, but with Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, we have new, advanced technology to help us accomplish our lofty goals.

PlayStation 4 is enabling our teams to deliver more graphical detail, a new dimension of social connection and the kind of seamless gaming experience we’ve always dreamed of offering. Join Creative Director Jean Guesdon and Associate Producer Sylvain Trottier as they discuss advancements we’ve been able to harness for AC4 on PS4.

It’s a new generation of gaming on PlayStation 4, and the AC4 team is dedicated to pushing these new boundaries beyond anything fans have seen before!

Join us under the Black Flag of Assassin’s Creed IV!

The following comes from a Polygon interview with Black Flag's lead scriptwriter Darby McDevitt...

"Edward Kenway is a raucous and bawdy chap, but he's also a married man, and one of his primary motivation in Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag is to get rich and prove himself a ‘man of quality' to his family and betters. So there is a special woman in Edward's life, but there are also other not-so-special women as well."

- use NPCs to achieve certain goals
- direct female NPCs to seduce and distract targets

"While this scene in the reveal trailer was clearly designed hint at the pirate lifestyle, there is a gameplay element here, to show that you can use certain NPC characters to more effectively achieve your goals. You might have noticed that the woman in the foreground seduced his target at the end of the trailer (eagle-eyed fans have already pointed out that they are the same woman)."

- cannot choose who Kenway can have a relationship with
- gameplay will be "more open and free than ever before
- protagonist will also have a few significant close relationships with other women
- this includes the infamous Anne Bonny
- the Templar consortium would be made up of a "diverse" cast of characters from three different empires