Ubisoft Singapore spoke to EDGE, and revealed a myriad of things about the team's upcoming title, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.
One of the interesting revelations that came out of this discussion was that this iteration would be created on a higher-end PC, which meant that the team had, over time, garnered a greater respect for “more social, more connected” play.
Ubisoft Singapore's senior producer Hugues Ricour is helping to build the game, and notes that developing for both the current generation and the next generation of consoles can be a tough challenge. However, he also says that some features offered by next-gen consoles, such as the Playstation 4, make social tools all the more viable.
“So we do work on a high-end PC, and that helps, that simplifies things,” said Ricour. “We are discovering these opportunities for Assassin’s Creed in general so we know games are becoming more social, more connected, and we know this next generation is going to help us.”
"What’s particularly exciting about this specific year is that in the life of a developer it only happens a few times,” Ricour told us. “So it’s a year of transition where you’re still actively engaged with the current generation because that’s where your audience is and you’re still pushing the limits with little optimisations. There’s a constant struggle to make a game visually stunning on the current generation.”
Ricour continues, saying that Assassin's Creed has generally been a single-player driven series. He says that while Black Flag will look to innovate as much as possible on the online infrastructure, that this will in no way affect the quality of the single player or campaign portion of the game.
“Assassin’s Creed, originally, was a very singleplayer focused game but we have a section of our audience that loves the multiplayer. However, a lot of our fans are very engaged with the story, and the narrative, so how do we combine this with a connected experience? It’s still to be defined and we have a few good ideas. The game will remain true to its roots, and its roots are in the narrative and immersing the player into an experience and a story.”
With Ubisoft so dead set on creating immersive experiences in both areas of game development, it will be very interesting see what they can cook up. This is compounded by the fact that Ubisoft has stated that they wish to make Assassin's Creed titles release on an annual basis. Black Flag will be a very worthy guinea pig in determining whether or not all of these new design and development philosophies will pay off.
