Assassin's Creed 3's lead developer Alex Hutchinson says that the studio never anticipated how popular the naval battles would prove to be when they were first developing it.
The battles, he says, could've been spun off into an Assassin's Creed game of their own had they known how popular they would be with the public.
“When we looked into it we realized too that no one had done third-person action-adventure sailing, you know in this period. So we’re like, great, it’s brand new; it’s probably too risky to do as it’s own game,” he said in a recent interview with Ausgamers.
“Although now I think it’s been successful enough that we probably underestimated it. But it felt like an appropriate and exciting risk to take.”
A large portion of the game will take place at sea, with the game's protagonist Connor commandeering a seaworthy vessel of his very own.
“When we looked at the history of this period of America we realized that sailing ships were so important. It’s how you arrived there if you were foreign, it’s how all imported goods arrived there,” he said.
“The French fleet at Yorktown basically blockaded the port; stopped the import. Stopped the British resupplying their soldiers, which leads directly to the surrender of the British in the American Revolution. So it was part of the history of the time and the history of the Revolution. And once we got that we thought, well it’s really something we should do.”
Assassin's Creed 3 will be out for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in October with a PC version planned for a November release.
