Interview: Talking To The High Seas Of AC IV With Jean-Sebastien Decant

As I came back ashore after my adventures in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, I had the opportunity to sit down for a talk about the game with Jean-Sebastien Decant, the Lead Game Designer on the game.

Read on for spoilers of the ending of Assassin’s Creed III, (you have now been warned!) the controversy behind the ship handling and the differences between the current and next-generation versions of the game.

TSA: Let’s just start off with you giving us a little introduction to Assassin’s Creed IV?

Jean-Sebastien Decant: So Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is set in the golden age of piracy, and it’s basically the story of Edward Kenway, a pirate looking for fame and gold who stumbles across the Assassin’s and Templar’s fight. We discover that there might be better and more noble causes than just being a mercenary and plundering ships.

TSA: How important was it to have an authenticity to the game, environments and location for this story to be set in?

JSD: Assassin’s Creed has always been historically accurate, or trying to be, with the stories the characters, the historical figures and also the locations. So obviously we put a lot of attention into the details of recreating the Caribbean.

TSA: I believe you mentioned earlier that this extends to the casting?

JSD: Yes, yes.

TSA: Is it an actual Swansea man who’s playing Kenway?

JSD: Oh, I don’t know… you should ask Darby [McDevitt, Lead Script Writer].

No, actually it is a Welsh actor, I think, and then he does an accent to cover it up a little bit!

(Turns out that Swansea born Matt Ryan is the actor behind Edward Kenway)

TSA: [laughs] What was the thinking behind the decision to go after this setting and shift from Assassin’s Creed 3?

JSD: When developing AC3, the Singapore studio created this naval package that was used in some missions, and during development, the ground team saw an amazing opportunity to create a new kind of open world, where we could mix naval and ground. So, they started to look into what we could do with this idea of ships, and the piracy came very quickly.

You know, we all kind of grew up with this kind of fantasy; it’s one of the biggest fantasies in the world at the moment. So we jumped on it, and actually it was matching the family line of the heroes of AC3. So we were looking to have a connection to AC3, and wanted to explore the piracy with the grandfather, or potential grandfather of Connor, and realised that it’s exactly at the same time period, so it would match.

TSA: How does this tie into the overworld at Abstergo, where there’s no longer that particular blood relation to Desmond?

AC3 Spoilers

JSD: That’s a good point actually, and we do follow up with what happened with Desmond. So at the end of AC3 he died, and uh…

TSA: Spoilers! [laughs]

JSD: Well the game was released a year ago, so… he died – I’m sorry if you didn’t know! – and we follow up on that. How you access the memories of somebody from the past, without having his DNA, is something that we answer in the present day. In the new present day you have access to the Animus, so there is something there which you can uncover.

AC3 Spoilers End

TSA: Is being able to step out of the Animus and wander around the building a key part to the story unfolding? Because you can do this at any time, it feels like.

JSD: We really wanted to give as much freedom as we could in the game, even more than in previous ones, so we let you do lots of activities in parallel. You can do a fort and an assassin contract and a main mission at the same time, and everything is going to work together in parallel. This wasn’t the case before, where you had to do one thing at a time.

In order to go towards that freedom, we decided to have this big building which is a work place, in which you can walk around and hack computers of your fellow workers to discover secrets of Abstergo and the Templars, but also the Assassin’s Creed lore.

TSA: Even with so much freedom, how have you tried to control the pacing of the story, and variety of things which people can do?

JSD: First, there were tremendous opportunities, just with being a pirate. A pirate does whatever he wants, whenever he wants, however he wants. So it was very cool in the open world way of attacking the game. Then for the story, it’s a bit like going on the righteous path. The story is about Assassins versus Templars, so when the pirate feels like doing something a bit better, he goes on the story. That’s how we justify it.

For the rest, one of the biggest challenges was to ensure that sailing on the sea was going to be fun and stimulating. Not finding ourselves with empty vast spaces, where there’s no action and you’re bored. So we invested a lot of time and effort into finding everything we could cram in, be it a tiny button press to save somebody stuck in the water, or fighting forts and ships.

There is also a system to have special events, like the larger waves or the water spouting. I don’t know if you’ve seen that.

TSA: Yes, there was one point, where it was really quite stormy, and another where the wind just picked up and tried to blow me off course!

Is the whole world open to you right away? How area you managing the difficulty levels?

JSD: The world is segmented into 11 regions, and each region is related to a naval fort. So when you take down that fort, it becomes yours, and you get all the info about the region, and unlock the naval contracts.

For the difficulty and locking of the world, there is 50% of the world which is available at the beginning of the game, and then very quickly we also open up the second part. But, because of the RPG upgrade system, there are some places you shouldn’t venture until you’ve upgraded, or you’re going to be destroyed!

TSA: What have you done to evolve the ship combat and how ships handle from AC3?

JSD: I think there was a big focus on accessibility, and making it as fun and rewarding as the ground combat. The ground combat is quite spectacular, but at the same time it’s easy to master and very satisfying, and we tried to apply the same logic to the naval fights.

So instead of having weapon select, you just look in the direction you wish to shoot, and the weapon will be selected automatically. I think that’s quite a fluid way of fighting in a simple manner. You see later, as you start to understand the weapons and how to fight, that it becomes very fun to combine attacks, to maximise the damage.

TSA: Was it deliberate to let people really throw their ships around a little like a car, going as fast as possible, before slowing right down and almost doing handbrake turns?

JSD: [laughs] Oui, oui, I see what you mean! It’s actually quite fun to use that in battles, to avoid the cannon balls, and things like that.
This was a highly controversial point on the team. Some people didn’t want to have it in the combat, and felt it was like cheating. In fact, it’s quite cool to use it to accelerate and do this.

TSA: Did it come into the level design, with some missions and how tricky they are to navigate in time?

JSD: It’s more like, that at the beginning [of development] fast travel was very limited in its access, and I wanted to have it all of the time. I just wanted to try it and see how it went, so we tried it and it was like, [in a crazy high pitched voice] “Oh, cool!” and it stayed.

TSA: [laughs] How are you finding tackling both next and current generation hardware? It almost feels like you’re unwilling to show the PS3 or Xbox 360 versions.

JSD: Oh yeah, it’s a really tricky moment, because we are in the transition times; everybody wants to know about the next-gen, and it’s the big topic. As is, for instance, the pirate is such a vibrant and fun subject that everybody is focussing on the naval combat too.

On our side, the current gen is absolutely gorgeous, and it’s an amazing version, and I think people will really enjoy it and be happy to play it on current platforms. We’re just not communicating that much about it, because of the new platforms that everybody is obsessed about, and in terms of development, we’ve always though about it as being cross-gen. So we could not go for very specific stuff that would only exist on the next-gen, so we focussed on making it like a high-end PC for graphics, and continued to use our Anvil engine for the main game.

TSA: So, all of the gameplay is the same across all platforms, and the only difference is with the graphics?

JSD: Yes, it’s just the graphics.

Thanks to Jean-Sebastian for taking the time to sit down and talk to us. You can read more about my time with the game in my preview, and the game is hitting our little island’s shelves on November 1st, or on launch day for next-gen consoles.