Once upon a time, "assassin" meant somebody who kills people for a living. Thanks to Ubisoft, it has come to enclose pretty much every vocation that involves the use of your arms and legs - small business owner, fencer, diplomat, thief, blacksmith, archaeologist, fashion model, big game hunter and, nowadays, sailor, with reality TV host and Olympic high jump medallist presumably on the menu for Assassin's Creed 5.
What does "pirate" mean? Well according to (Captain) Jack Sparrow it (more or less) means freedom. The ability to go anywhere and do anything you damn well please, come hell or high water (or both). A savage antipathy to any sort of restriction, however well-intended. The great hope with Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag is that Ubisoft hasn't simply plucked freebootin' posterboy Edward Kenway from a historian's hat, but settled upon the so-called "Golden Age of Piracy" as a corrective to the landlubberly fussiness that's cramped the franchise's style in recent years.
The comparison outside the franchise is to Far Cry 3, a shooter built around similar open world tenets that's far more graceful and accommodating in its articulation of core conceits and tasks. Within the series, the natural reference point is probably Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. The latter has been criticised for treading water with its story, but in some ways this was for the best - while Ezio muddled around in plot limbo, players were more at liberty to experiment with the abilities they'd picked up in Assassin's Creed 2.
Black Flag is more of a clean break from its predecessor, as any screenshot will tell you, but there are overtures towards Brotherhood's system-driven approach in the new ship battles, which in theory allow you not simply access to a sandbox, but the chance to structure the sandbox itself. That's thanks to boarding actions, which apparently do very impressive things with the second game's already scintillating water physics.
Once you've closed the distance to (and, in all likelihood, blown seven shades out of), your target you can order your crew to grapple it - whereupon they'll yank the two vessels together in real time. Factors like the violence of the weather and where you are relative to the other ship will affect the layout of the combat playpen thus created, and once you've let go of the wheel the options are myriad. You could swarm up the mast and rope-dart officers from the security of the other ship's rigging, or snipe using Kenway's blowpipe (for which there are several kinds of ammunition). Alternatively, you could lead your men in a glorious charge over the side, filling gaps in your swashbuckling cutlass combos with point-blank pistol shots.
Guesdon's follow-up remark that Black Flag will consist of roughly 40 per cent naval action, 60 per cent land-based missions creates the impression that it snaps neatly into differently styled pieces. On the contrary, he says, "our main ambition with that game is to deliver a true pirate game, which means one, single, unified game using both naval and ground gameplay". Ubisoft wants players to switch from the Jackdaw's helm to on-foot exploration as naturally and fluidly as you'd hijack a jeep in Far Cry 3, before abandoning it to investigate a likely-looking cavern - and ship controls aside, the same old "core pillars" of free-running, social stealth and combat will persist throughout.
On the subject of social stealth, players can once again enlist the services of prostitutes as camouflage while wandering the streets, and you can persuade drunken sailors to start highly distracting barfights. Exactly how Kenway blends into the crowd may vary by city - or rather, culture. There are three main settlements in Black Flag, the piratical republic of Nassau, Spanish-speaking Havana and Kingston, Britain's colonial HQ for the West Indies. As with past games, the world emphasis is on fidelity rather than the "glossy sheen" of historical clichés, in a bid to demonstrate that "the truth is stranger and more bombastic than fiction".
That's certainly true of Blackbeard, one of several real-life period celebrities to make the cut - as Black Flag's lead content manager gleefully points out, this infamous pirate used to stuff lit fuses beneath his hat for added drama when raiding merchant vessels. I'm enjoying the good Captain's company already. The same can't be said, alas, of Kenway himself - Ubisoft marketing materials refer to him as the franchise's most "conflicted" hero, but what we know of his backstory suggests that he's just another of the series' loose cannons, taught to aspire higher by the Assassin Brotherhood.
Character trailers show Kenway in various states of macho excess, bashing drinking partners round the head with bottles and walking smugly away from glistening piles of naked woman. Ezio featured in similar scenes, but Ezio at least had the death of his family to avenge. Kenway, by contrast, got thrown out by his wife for being a job-shy waster, joined the navy and spent a brisk few years robbing people on behalf of the British Empire, before starting out as an "independent". I can see how all this would make a man "conflicted", but I'm not sure how it makes him a character I want to inhabit.
http://www.oxm.co.uk/50881/previews/assassins-creed-4-black-flag-sailing-away-from-assassins-creed-3s-problems/?page=2
