The cities in ACIV: Black Flag operate ”very similarly” to the original two games. Edward Kenway was also written ”very differently” from Ezio, says lead writer Darby McDevitt.
Conway isn’t some carbon copy or ‘Ezio 2.0’. He is much more alike in personality to the Italian assassin though than Connor from Assassin’s Creed III.
”The cities operate very similarly to the way Assassin’s Creed 2 did it,” Darby McDevitt told NowGamer. ”We brought it back to an Assassin’s Creed 1/Assassin’s Creed 2 style with open-ended assassination.” Black Flag features the Caribbean with many locations to visit from small fishing villages and outposts to larger port cities.
”…we started developing the game a year before Assassin’s Creed 3 came out, but we were all fans of the open ended quality,” said McDevitt. ”I think we were actually looking back at Assassin’s Creed Revelations and Assassin’s Creed 3, both of which had kind of gone towards a more linear Uncharted style of experience.”
”We wanted to go back to Assassin’s Creed 1/Assassin’s Creed 2 style open-ended assassinations, so even before we saw the result of what Assassin’s Creed 3 was doing, we just knew this was a philosophy we wanted to follow.”
Edward Kenway is his own man: ”A lot of people wondered if he was going to be Ezio 2.0. I don’t think he is. I wrote him very differently,” McDevitt explained. ”He’s welsh but grew up in Bristol, at the age of 10, very poor, so he has the mentality of a kid who never had anything and wants everything, so that’s quite a counterpoint to Ezio who was born into wealth and is kind of a spoilt brat. Edward is not a spoilt brat in any sense.”
The campaign for Assassin’s Creed IV is expected to last around 20 hours, which of course doesn’t calculate the enormous breadth of activities and exploration you’ll be doing. It releases on Xbox 360 and PS3 October 29th in the US, November 1st in EU. It’s also on Xbox One and PS4 in November, with PC Q4 2013.
