This will make Ubisoft treat the open world aspects as ”much more like a platform” that’ll need maintaining for years. Decant agreed it would take its cue from Watch Dogs in this respect.
Watch Dogs is the new IP at Ubisoft that was delayed into next year and has a significant layer of social and multiplayer integration within its open world.
”I think we’re going toward a gaming place where the open world will be shared with other players. More and more. Socially speaking, but also maybe multiplayer stuff,” Jean-Sebastien Decant told Gamereactor.eu. ”And we will have to consider the open world much more like a platform that we could sustain for years.”
”…Watch Dogs is kind of showing us the path for the future. Absolutely. But we have to create a… We have to respect our brands. So if we have to go that way with Assassin’s Creed we have to think about how it could fit into Assassin’s Creed.” Watch Dogs can excuse a lot of those features because of its subject matter; hacking.
Still, Decant affirmed the core of Assassin’s Creed will remain the same, albeit improved over time.
”The core pillars are still social stealth being able to blend into the crowd and finding a way to reach your target without being seen. There is this idea of having the parkour - you can jump around - and then the notion of freedom that combines everything. These are the roots of Assassin’s Creed. We will try and work and build upon them,” he said.
”We cannot tell you that we’re happy and this is how we want the game to be and we’re going to do ten more games with exactly that same gameplay. No, we are unhappy. We want to do more. There are lots of things we want to refine on the combat side, on the parkour, on the stealth. Of course. We managed I think to bring back the stealth in Assassin’s Creed, which was something that was a bit put on the side in the previous episodes.”
”So on that we’re very happy and I also think we kind of totally exploded the limits of the game by bringing the naval and the ship customisation and the ship battles. So we made progress, thanks actually to the thematics that we chose. Next time we will have to find thematics that will help us also to expand the game once again.”
Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag releases on PC today in the US, Friday in Europe.