There’s more on the future of Ubisoft’s flagship franchise here.

Ubisoft Montreal’s Jean Guesdon worked as a designer on Assassin’s Creed II and as part of the team overseeing the larger franchise before joining Black Flag as its creative director. Here, we discuss the ways in which this pirate epic charts new ground in the post-Desmond era.Black Flag’s world opens up for exploration much earlier than ACIII’s did. What inspired that?
We knew we wanted to get directly into the action. ACIII ended the Desmond cycle, so he’s gone, and we thought it would be a good thing to start Black Flag directly in the past without delaying the moment at which the player will play what he wants to play – what he’s been sold for months on the marketing side. So there’s roughly a 20-minute prologue, and there’s a technical reason behind that in terms of the link to PS4, allowing it to install that first package at the start of the game and be able to download the rest while playing.Sailing across the open ocean and exploring islands recalled some of our favourite moments from The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker. How did that game inform Black Flag’s design?
We had several games like that as references. So, yes, Wind Waker was one of them. Sid Meier’s Pirates! was another. They were really interesting, because they were successful naval games, which is pretty hard to achieve, and we quickly came to understand why. It’s hard to do. How do you keep sailing interesting and not boring? Especially in our case, because we wanted to keep the AC style of being realistic, so we had a lot of challenges. Wind Waker is probably closer to our game than Pirates!, but the opportunity to use fantasy elements that pop up in front of the player was something we couldn’t use. Those games were inspirational in terms of knowing a good pirate game was feasible and [they] helped us identify the areas where we needed to focus.

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