When game director Ashraf (Ash) Ismail talks about Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, an inevitable sense of pride beams across his face—a trait that immediately displays the passion he and the team at Ubisoft are putting into the blockbuster title due out later this fall. This passion is heavily reflected in the game itself, which displayed an impressively vivid world in the demo at PAX Prime. I recently had the pleasure of playing said demo, and after the experience I sat down and chatted with Ash about the history behind the title, the benefits and challenges of going into the next generation, and Edward Kenway himself.
One thing that you said at the panel that I thought was really cool was that “history is our playground.” With the first Assassin’s Creed we saw that with the Crusades and with the second we saw it with the Renaissance. Those are two extremely distinct and popular time periods. Now you’re getting into the 1700s with the Golden Age of Piracy, a period that hasn’t been explored much. What drew you guys to this time period?
It was two things. One, we wanted to do a pirate game; like really do a pirate game. It’s something we wanted to do for a long time. To do a proper pirate game you need naval, you need land, and you need cities… so we felt that we were at a certain point where we could finally build this world. We also found that because of next gen we needed to create a world that was bigger… something that nobody has played before—at least with Assassin’s Creed, so we pushed ourselves. In doing so we asked ourselves how we could build this pirate game. The Golden Age of Piracy… once we started doing research on it, we thought it was awesome. There are so many crazy events that happen and crazy characters like Charles Vane and Black Beard and we wanted to tell who those characters were.
Black Beard was a guy named Edward Teach who actually created a persona called Black Beard; he was marketing himself to be this really wild and scary guy when actually he abhorred killing. This was a cool detail, and we felt that people needed to know that. We wanted to tell that story from an Assassin’s Creed perspective—the templars and assassins are always involved in important points in history and in this case the important factor was that it was the first real attempt at a democratic society and the new age, if you will. Something big was attempted, but you’ll see in our game that we do play with history. We don’t tell actual history, we kind of tell our version of history. So it’s a really important moment in time and there is a connection to things like the American Revolution as well, where things were learned from stuff like Pirate Republic. Pirates are also rather popular in the mainstream, and there was an opening in the media. You know, this doesn’t really exist, especially in video games. The last great pirate game was a long time ago.
You also mentioned “credibility” over actual historical accuracy. Can you expand on what you mean by credibility in that context?
We say “history is our playground” and obviously templars and assassins don’t exist. We accept the fact that we’re a video game and playing with history in an era is something that I think connects to people. History resonates on a very deep level because it’s the definition of who we are, it’s the definition of how we got here in terms of culture and society. So being able to play in that is quite fun. Being able to play with actual historical figures that people know is cool as well, but then we give it our own spin because we have never attempted to teach history, we’re a video game. So again, we don’t make simulation games, we don’t make realistic games—we make credible games, we make authentic games. So, for example, with the naval combat or sailing a ship, if we wanted to do a real simulation of sailing a ship, it’s super complicated. It’s not that fun. We actually tried to see how far we could push a simulation of sailing. In the end we found that people had the most fun when they knew what was happening—when it was intuitive to play with but still felt like sailing, and that’s what we have today. And it works because it’s credible, not because it’s realistic. It’s meant to give you the feeling that, yes this could have existed like this. I believe I am sailing a ship. I believe I am doing boarding. Is that how it really works? No, but we don’t let that bother us.
Designing the overall environment of the Caribbean is obviously very different than Italy or the Holy Land of the Crusades. What were some of the challenges of making that environment while also making sure it was still playable for an Assassin’s Creed title with the stealth mechanics and things like that?
Well of course we have our major cities, so the comfort or being in a city in an AC game is really important, we’re not going to lose that. But for the more natural environments, ACIII did a huge push on having the frontier and we learned a lot from that, so we’re able to use that knowledge, those metrics if you will, the measurements of how the character moves through the environment. So even if you’re in a city, even if you want to remove all the art and design, effectively what you have are a bunch of different sized boxes and different sized lines and it’s quite abstract. A natural environment isn’t that different. If you remove all of the art, it just looks like a gray box map of an AC game. With the fidelity of next gen and with the physics we’ve been able to add along with a large and talented art team we can make it look like a really beautiful jungle or beach, but still you’ll e able to free-run, you’ll have high viewpoints that you can climb and sync up to. The difference, I think, is going to be the ways people see the environment. I think people will be romanticized by the Caribbean itself and the feeling that accompanies being in this really gorgeous environment and hopefully make you believe that it’s credible.
