People are obsessed with pirate ships. Before we sat down to chat proper,
Assassin’s Creed IV
game director Ashraf Ismail told me a story about how one playtester
became so enamoured with the Jackdaw that he spent hours boarding it
from every possible angle. “You know, we kinda needed to get some other
things tested, but we let him at it anyway,” Ismail laughed.
Ismail’s in Sydney to show off a new build of Assassin’s
Creed IV, ahead of its release in November. During a hands on preview,
another Australian journalist spent an hour trying to overtake an enemy
pirate ship. He died dozens of times apparently (because it’s a fairly
high level feat to pull off) but eventually he did it without resorting
to cannons.
People are obsessed with pirate ships. Ubisoft is banking
on this obsession, because Black Flag will usher in one of the most
dramatic changes to the Assassin’s Creed series we’ve seen over the
course of its six titles. Naval combat and navigation is one of the core
mechanics in the forthcoming installment, which releases for PC on
November 22.
PC Gamer: You’re working across six platforms and
two console generations with Black Flag. Is there more pressure on this
title than ever before?
Ashraf Ismail: For sure. As a brand there
is a pressure to bring something new and something fresh, but in terms
of the number of platforms, no – that’s not really an added pressure.
You can argue that with the next-gen stuff we need to raise the game a
bit in terms of visual quality and immersiveness. So, yes there is
multiple angles of pressure rising. But I think globally we deeply know
as a dev team, as a company and as a brand that we need to surprise our
fans. That was the objective when we started Black Flag two years ago:
the key words were fresh and fun. We know we risk going stale, but the
job is on us as developers to surprise people and that’s one of the
reasons we went with a pirate theme and especially with doing a naval
sandbox.
When you think of next-gen people have this notion that you
need to experience something that you haven’t experienced before.
Visual quality goes up, but the games also need to get bigger and
immerse you more, and that’s where the idea of the naval sandbox came
from. Not that it’s unique to next-gen, but it forced us to ask how do
we take the city building that we know and just exaggerate and go much
bigger and create a world that we’ve never had in AC, and hopefully
which gamers have never seen. So yes, there is pressure but it’s a
really strong motivator for us to try something different and to take a
risk.
I remind people that it’s really risky to take a brand like
Assassin’s Creed, which is very successful in terms of sales and
fanbase, and then to say “you know what, part of the core experience now
is naval combat.” I love the fact that Ubisoft went with it and
supported us in attempting to do this. It’s a very risky thing and we
could have totally screwed it up, but because of the pressure we know we
need to take risks. It’s been a positive experience.
Is there a risk there that you’re fragmenting the
series’ core elements – freerunning, stealth, land combat etc – with the
introduction of naval combat?
AI: Again, it’s our job to ensure that the
core of Assassin’s Creed is there. We do have a brand team, which is
outside of the development team. That team is composed of writers,
designers, project managers and so on, and they look at the larger arc
that is Assassin’s Creed. There are people there who pay attention to
what direction the game is going in and whether it is still fitting in
with the brand pillars. Things like freerunning, fighting and stealth:
these are really core and we’re never going to lose those.
I always say there’s a reason there are very few good
pirate references in video games. Actually there’s almost none. The best
in my opinion is Sid Meier’s Pirates. And that’s because if you want to
do a credible pirate game you need to have cities, you need natural
locations, you need to have an insane naval combat system but also a
naval world, and to do that in one shot… I don’t know how any team could
do it. There’s few pirate games because it’s a huge undertaking. We
have such a solid foundation in Assassin’s Creed, because Assassin’s
Creed 3 started pushing the naval navigation and nature, and they
started the naval combat, so we had the ingredients in place. We could
spend a good two and a half years developing something spectacular on
those foundations. So yes, there’s risk involved in whether the naval
stuff fits into the freerunning, but I feel like when people play the
game they’ll feel like it’s Assassin’s Creed, yet the core experience
will be so different and fresh that it will surprise people.
What are the most important elements of an
open-world moving forward, apart from graphical fidelity? What do
consumers want the most?
“We’ll always have an historical element because it’s core to the brand. Mark my words”
AI: For me, at its heart an open world
game is a promise of an experience. The more immersed you are in that
experience the more lost you can get inside the world. We worked pretty
hard on making the world believable and credible. Having NPCs that look
like real people who exist in that world, that’s always been a tenet of
Assassin’s Creed since the first game. I think we can push that further.
Beyond that – and this isn’t a hint of any future mechanics – I
personally feel like there will be some element of connectivity. We’ve
seen games that are single player games that somehow try to integrate
the idea of other people interacting with your world. I’m sure that at
some point with Assassin’s Creed, and with other open worlds, we’re
going to see more of this. Demon’s Souls is a prime example of a single
player game which is very personal which [nonetheless] let’s other
people interact with you. I think that’s the best reference out there. I
think we’ll see more of this, but all in the hope of immersing you more
in the world.
With Black Flag, we want players to be completely lost in
the Caribbean. What I mean is, you have a mission that is at the top of
the map, but when you move in that direction the game world will keep
inviting you to move off that path without you knowing it. Maybe if you
find yourself, 45 minutes later, nowhere near that mission start, but
you’ve done a bunch of harpooning and found a bunch of treasures and
updated the Jackdaw, this for me is achieving a level of immersiveness
that really only open world games can achieve. Those are the two fronts.
We’re always going to push the immersiveness layer, having systems that
attract you and pull your attention. On a pure feature basis there will
probably be more social stuff, though I’m not entirely sure how yet.
Assassin’s Creed has become more generous with
those distractions you mention. Is there an awareness within the dev
teams that there might be a stretching point for these distractions? Is
it possible to give the player too much to do?
AI: Yes, and I think the balance lay in
what the purpose of this extra stuff is. We wanted to make sure that all
the side missions and activities have a very simple function that a
player can understand. So for example in this game, we’re blessed to
have enemies that are not human: ships, inanimate objects that you can
upgrade, more cannons and hulls, more defenses. All this allows us to
have a progression system, and this system is a really easy way to
reward the player. You need gold to buy the upgrades, therefore as you
start to understand the economy of the game you start to understand what
activities you need to do to get that gold. So you think: I need gold
so I need to do this and this, which is better than selecting from a
bunch of random icons on the map and trying them out.
We run into issues when we just put in activities that have
no real purpose and are just there as content. As a game director I
won’t do that – you can have some really cool stuff but it’s just
meaningless. So the balance is really about the purpose and the
function: if I’m doing this activity because it leads me somewhere, then
it has a place in the game. You’ll see that in Black Flag: almost every
single collectible, activity, side mission has a purpose, whether it’s
to upgrade the ship or to upgrade Edward. There’s a function that’s
clear and simple. We focused on that because we know that people can get
lost in all the extra activities in open world games that are just
there [for no reason].
It’s well known that naval combat and traversal was
a difficult technical achievement. Specifically, what were some of the
more difficult aspects?
AI: There are a million different things!
I’ll start simple: the ship is an avatar. There is this psychological
connection with players where you have a 3D figure on camera and you
start to associate yourself with that character. You understand that the
shadow beneath it places you somewhere inside the 3D world. These are
mechanics that have been developed over years, starting with the likes
of Mario 64. They’d been explored before that, but Mario 64 really
defined a lot of this stuff.
So all of the sudden we have this ship that’s really big:
its dimensions are awkward and we’re not used to it, and so where do you
put the camera? How do you shoot, how do you drive? And at the same
time not only is it a massive 3D ship, but you also need to feel that
it’s a ship and still have it be fun to play and for it to be intuitive.
When we started we had a lot of different prototypes for sailing, and
some of them looked at sailing from a very accurate perspective. I’d say
on some level they were fun, but on another they were completely
unintuitive and unplayable. Just trying to sail and shoot an enemy was
impossible. Finding the balance where it feels like a ship that you’re
sailing on an ocean which has physics and you can feel the waves and
wind, but you can also be in a combat situation: to not overwhelm the
player with too many variables is really tricky. It took a lot of time
with R&D and prototyping and trying different things.
The ocean itself is honestly one of the greatest
achievements we’ve made. It’s fully physics simulated but we have full
control over it. If we want it to go from a calm sea to an intense
hurricane, we can do it. It feels natural and normal and logical and
it’s beautiful visually. The guys who pulled it off, my hats off to
them.
With the Abstergo narrative backdrop Assassin’s
Creed could feasibly go anywhere. Is it possible the series could ever
make a break from its historical settings?
AI: Feasibly, but I don’t think that makes
sense. One of the pillars of Assassin’s Creed is that it’s historical
fiction. I think it’s one of the biggest reasons why the series is so
successful. Everybody in this world can love a certain time period or a
certain historical figure, and I think one of our successes is that we
go to time periods that you’ll never be able to physically visit or see.
We excite people around this concept. To me, it doesn’t make any sense
to have an Assassin’s Creed game that doesn’t have an historical element
to it because it’s core to the DNA. I’ve been asked about whether
Assassin’s Creed will make it to space in the future, and while anything
is possible I think we’ll always have an historical element because
it’s core to the brand. Mark my words.
Users are given the opportunity to rate missions, which will offer feedback directly to Ubisoft. Do you expect conclusive results?
AI: This is a very contentious feature in the game. I
really wanted it in the game but our mission guys really hated it,
which I understand why. We had many avenues of feedback, and one of the
most important things a designer needs to be able to do is take in lots
of feedback, whether its ideas or playtest results or just watching
someone play and writing down notes. You need to absorb this information
and then digest it. You don’t take it at face value – some stuff you
can – but you need to be able to digest and understand what is
happening. For me this is just another avenue of feedback. Of course
when we see a mission is rated extremely poorly then okay, something
went wrong. We’ll ask whether it was the writing, a bug, or was it just
not a fun mechanic that was being used. On the other hand if something
is rated really well, then for future games we can look at that and
analyse why this mission was great.
