Naval battles might not be included in Assassin’s Creed V, despite gaining a warm reception after being featured in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.
Black Flag game director Ashraf Ismail said that the gameplay features are dictated by the time period the development team wants to explore, not the other way around.
“With Assassin’s Creed we always say that history is our playground,” he explained. “When we chose the pirate setting, obviously it meant naval battles had to be a core element of the game. The questions are always about what time periods we go into, but that’s a decision based on whether these time periods are interesting for fans, interesting for us as developers, and what it’d mean for the game mechanics,” he told IGN.
“We don’t bind ourselves to game mechanics, but we really look at what is interesting historically speaking, and what game mechanics that naturally brings up. Hopefully then, the fans love and enjoy it. We’re here to enjoy the BAFTAs so I can’t really talk about the future of the brand or where it’s going, I won’t even acknowledge that a game is in the works!
“So I don’t want to talk about what’s the future for naval and all this, but I love that people loved it in Black Flag. It was a risk for us to make it part of the core of an Assassin’s game, but people really took to it and loved it, which is really gratifying for us. As I said though, whatever period in time we choose? That’s what dictates the kind of mechanics we put in the game, not the other way around.”
Naval battles were originally introduced in Assassin’s Creed III but were featured more in Assassin’s Creed IV.
Not that much is known about Assassin’s Creed V yet, other than it’s supposedly going to be set in London during the Industrial Revolution.
