|
Ezio, my friend! How may I be of service? This article is in desperate need of a revamp. Please improve it in any way necessary in order for it to achieve a higher standard of quality in accordance with our Manual of Style. |
| This article is about the video game. You may be looking for the novel. |
Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is a 2013 action-adventure game, and the sixth main installment in the Assassin's Creed series. A sequel to 2012's Assassin's Creed III, the game has the player take on the role of an Abstergo Entertainment research analyst as they explore the story of Edward Kenway – father to Haytham Kenway, grandfather to Ratonhnhaké:ton, and an ancestor of Desmond Miles.
Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is set primarily on and around the islands in the Caribbean Sea during the Golden Age of Piracy in the early 18th century, with the three major cities consisting of Havana, Nassau, and Kingston.
Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag producer Martin Schelling and Mission Director Ashraf Ismail both stated that they began the project in the summer of 2011, with a pirate game as their focus.[3] Ismail also stressed that they aimed towards a more historically accurate take on the era, including staying away from the stereotypical image associated with pirates, such as parrots, Krakens, and plank-walking.[4] The pair also explained that because the game was so radically different from its predecessor and that the scope and open-world gameplay was so different from the previous game, they opted for the project to be a numbered sequel as opposed to a spin-off that followed in the footsteps of the last numbered game, Assassin's Creed III.[3]
Ubisoft's Montreal-based team, in conjunction with 7 other studios from Singapore, Sofia, Annecy, Kiev, Quebec City, Bucharest and Montpellier – accompanied by a band of developers of Far Cry 3 – contributed to the completion of the game, with each studio focusing on different elements.[4]
Writer Darby McDevitt began writing the game soon after completing Assassin's Creed: Revelations, after being suggested to do a game expanding the "Kenway family saga", instead of Connor's life story as they did with Ezio Auditore da Firenze. He considered beginning the story with Edward as a boy during the William Kidd and Henry Morgan era of piracy, but decided he felt skeptical as to whether Assassin's Creed II convincingly portrayed a similar span of time, and so opted to simply focus on the Blackbeard era towards the end of the Golden Age of Piracy.[5]
McDevitt stated the game's primary history resources were A General History of the Pyrates (1724) and The Republic of Pirates (2008). As a homage to the former book, the game's subtitles rendered each noun with capital letters. Republic author Colin Woodard was invited to consult on the game.[6]
Lorne Balfe, who was the sole composer for Assassin's Creed III and secondary composer for Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and Assassin's Creed: Revelations, did not return to score the soundtrack for Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. The score was instead composed by Brian Tyler, the composer of Far Cry 3.
About 60% of the game takes place on land; players can explore 50 locations ranging from fisherman villages, plantations, jungles, forts, islands, Templar hideouts, Mayan ruins and exotic Coconut Islands. Furthermore, there are around 75 beaches and sandbanks, which can hold various treasures and marooned sailors to add to Edward's crew.
Other activities include hunting, harpooning, and exploring underwater environments. The game aims to blend between its land and aquatic experiences seamlessly, to the point where players can simply dive off Edward's ship, swim to the shore and explore the land, as well as dive under the surface to loot underwater ship wrecks.
Viewpoints are also in Black Flag. As in the previous games, viewpoints have to be synchronized so as to reveal information about an area and its surroundings. Furthermore, they now also serve the function of fast-travel locations. Synchronizing with a viewpoint unlocks more loot and area of "interest" to Edward and can also be used as a faster way of locating a specific target.
Black Flag's combat has been upgraded to include free aiming. While previous installments relied on the game's built-in auto aim, in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, players are able to just aim and fire, similar to third-person shooters.
Dual-wielding weapons has also been implemented, with Edward being able to carry four flintlock pistols and be able to use them all together, chaining up to four gunshots into a combo of attacks to take down more enemies. Aside from the pistols and his Hidden Blades, Edward can equip dual cutlass swords and chain their attacks together. Other weapons include a blowpipe with multiple effected projectiles and rope darts. Accompanying this, the stealth system has been remade and is encouraged in-game.
Combo attacks are achieved through chaining multiple attacks in a row while uninterrupted. The game includes many different ways of combo moves, with some available through running towards an enemy or jumping onto an enemy from the high ground.
The game also includes naval combat, with 40% of the story taking place on the water, which includes numerous side missions. After checking out a ship with Edward's spyglass from the Jackdaw's crow's nest and evaluating the information and statistics, players can launch an attack using various scenarios; one can simply shoot the opposing captain, board the ship by leaping from mast-to-mast and performing an air assassination, or charge into the fray to cut down foes using Edward's swords. Once the objectives for each boarding process, all of which include killing a certain amount of soldiers, are completed, the player has three options - reduce the Jackdaw's notoriety, send the ship to Edward's fleet, or salvage the ship to repair the Jackdaw. Players are also able to exploit weather patterns, luring the opposition into less than ideal conditions, such as rogue waves, to their advantage. Naval combat also features a trajectory-based aiming system that requires knowledge of distance and the speed of an enemy.
Players are also able to upgrade Edward Kenway's Jackdaw through pillaging, taking over enemy ships, and completing missions, granting the Jackdaw new weapons and abilities. Of these, weapon upgrades include round shot, heat shot, chain shot, fire barrels, mortars, swivel guns, and a ram. Edward can recruit crew members for the Jackdaw via side missions that include bar fights and battle missions. It is also possible to simply rescue them while just sailing across the map. However, the crew members are also expected to die in the game while braving storms and boarding enemy ships, forcing Edward to continuously recruit more members. The game also has six different enemy archetypes at sea that all behave in vastly different ways and require the player to have different upgrades to deal with them.
Instead of Desmond Miles, the modern day portion is centered around the players themselves, who act as Abstergo Entertainment research analysts that are reliving the memories of Edward Kenway. The Animus no longer constrains the players with its barriers whenever they attempt to interact with an environment the ancestor has not; instead tougher enemy ships will block the way, with the only way around them being to actually explore the world, and finding things that can go towards upgrading the Jackdaw. In addition, players are able to connect with other players in the modern day, which will allow them to interact and share information with each other.
Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag includes many historical figures such as Benjamin Hornigold, Jack Rackham, Anne Bonny, Charles Vane, and Edward Thatch.
The notoriety system featured in previous Assassin's Creed games was remade in Black Flag, as a "worldwide alert" for a pirate sailing between islands was deemed illogical. In its place, a system of pirate hunters were introduced, with four tiers of increasingly difficult ships appearing to attack the Jackdaw depending on how many robberies Edward has committed.
The new "Horizon" open-world system dynamically creates side missions, such as merchant ships to rob, whales to hunt, or pirates to rescue, dependent on an individual's playing style.
Edward will put his hood on when in a restricted zone or in a city, and take it off when on the open seas or as soon as he is incognito.
The multiplayer aspect of Black Flag includes cooperative and competitive multiplayer modes, some of which that are reused from previous games, along with all new maps and new characters.
To date, the characters are as follows:
Adding to this, the locations are:
Furthermore, players can create custom game modes alongside default and Game Lab modes and share it to their friends.
Samples taken from Desmond Miles' body in the moments after his death have enabled Abstergo Industries to continue to explore his genetic memories using the Animus' newfound cloud computing abilities. The unnamed player character is hired by Abstergo Entertainment, from their Montréal headquarters, to sift through the memories of Edward Kenway, an eighteenth-century pirate, the father of Haytham Kenway and the grandfather of Ratonhnhaké:ton. Ostensibly, this is to gather material for an Animus-powered interactive feature film, but in reality, Abstergo—the Templars of the present time—are searching for a First Civilization structure known as the Observatory, and are using the memories of Edward Kenway to find it.
As Kenway, the player must unravel a conspiracy between high-ranking Templars within the British and Spanish empires who, under the guise of cleaning up piracy in the Caribbean, have used their positions to locate the Sage—later identified as Bartholomew Roberts—who is the only man that can lead them to the Observatory, a First Civilization device which can monitor anyone anywhere in the world when provided a blood sample, which they intend to use to spy on and blackmail world leaders. Kenway becomes an unwitting player in their plot when he kills a rogue Assassin, Duncan Walpole. Seeing an opportunity for profit, Kenway takes Walpole's place at a meeting of Templars in Havana, where he meets Woodes Rogers as well as Cuban Governor, and Templar Grandmaster, Laureano Torres. His recklessness endangers the entire Assassins' Order, prompting him to pursue the Sage and the conspirators from the Yucatán Peninsula to Jamaica, eventually catching Roberts on the island of Príncipe off of the African coast.
Meanwhile, a band of notorious pirates—including Edward "Blackbeard" Thatch, Benjamin Hornigold, Mary Read (under the alias "James Kidd") and Charles Vane, among others—dream of a pirate utopia where man is free to live beyond the reach of kings and rulers. With Kenway's help, they seize control of Nassau and establish a pirate republic. However, poor governance, a lack of an economy and an outbreak of disease bring the pirate state perilously close to collapse, with the founders divided on the best way forward. Kenway attempts to resolve the dispute, but is too late to stop the Templars from exploiting the situation for their own ends.
Eventually, Kenway and Roberts uncover the location of the Observatory and retrieve the artifact powering it, but Kenway is betrayed by Roberts at the last moment. After a brief stint in prison for the crimes of piracy, Edward escapes with the aid of Ah Tabai, the Assassin Mentor, and elects to join their Order. Chasing down and eliminating Roberts and the Templar conspirators, Kenway retrieves the artifact and returns it to the Observatory, sealing it away for good. He is left facing an uncertain future with his newfound convictions until he receives a letter informing him of the passing of his wife and the imminent arrival of his hitherto unknown daughter, Jennifer Scott. Kenway travels back to England, promising Ah Tabai that he will continue the fight against the Templars back home in England. Some years later, Kenway, Jennifer (using her mother's surname in her memory) and Kenway's young son Haytham are about to watch a play in an English theatre.
In the present day, the player is contacted by John, Abstergo Entertainment's information technology manager. John convinces the player that their employers know more than they are telling, and encourages them to investigate in more detail. He convinces the player to hack several Animus terminals and security cameras, and then has them deliver the information taken to Shaun Hastings and Rebecca Crane, who are working undercover to infiltrate Abstergo. When the facility is locked down after the hackings are discovered, John arranges for the player to access the Animus' core, at which point Juno materializes into an incorporeal form. She reveals that although it was necessary to open her temple to avert disaster, the world was not ready for her, and she is unable to affect it or possess the player character as her agents intended. John is unmasked as the reincarnated form of the Sage and attempts to murder the player to cover up the failed attempt at resurrecting Juno, but is killed by Abstergo's security before he can do so, thus implicating him as the one responsible for the hacks. As Roberts, the Sage admits to Kenway that he owes no allegiance to the Assassins or the Templars and instead uses whoever he thinks represents his best chance of achieving his ends. With the Sage dead, the player is contacted by the Assassins as they continue their infiltration of Abstergo, but neither side is able to explain the Sage's presence or identify his followers, the Instruments of the First Will.
As with its predecessor – Assassin's Creed III – Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag features an additional 60 minutes of downloadable gameplay for Sony's PS3 and PS4 consoles, which features Aveline de Grandpré.
During the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con, Ubisoft hired the Star of India to stand in for the Jackdaw.
McFarlane Toys' action figures of characters from Black Flag and Assassin's Creed III come with unique codes to unlock in-game weapons, outfits, and sails for the Jackdaw.
A Japanese manga adaptation of the game, written by Takashi Yano and illustrated by Kendi Oiwa, began serialization in Shueisha's Jump X magazine on 10 August 2013.[7] The manga however contradicts many points of the game's actual storyline in both the modern times and the 18th century.[8]
After this screenshot (right) was released, PETA issued a statement condemning Black Flag as "disgraceful" as it "glorified" whaling.
A Ubisoft spokesperson provided this response to IGN.
Ubisoft later established Susan Drayton, a character in Assassin's Creed: Initiates, as being anti-whaling.
Ubisoft announced several collector's editions of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.
The Jackdaw Edition is practically the Game of the Year Edition of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. It includes all available downloadable content released so far for Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. They are mentioned below:
| Characters | Creatures | Events | Locations | |
| Organizations and titles | Sapient species | Vehicles | Weapons and technology | Miscellanea |
Characters
|
Creatures
|
Events
Locations
Organizations and titles
Sapient species
Vehicles and vessels
Weapons and technology
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
ar:أساسنز كريد IV: بلاك فلاغ
de:Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
es:Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
fr:Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
he:אמונת המתנקש 4: דגל שחור
hu:Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
it:Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
ja:アサシンクリードIV:ブラックフラッグ
ko:어쌔신 크리드 IV: 블랙 플래그
nl:Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
pl:Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
pt-br:Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
ru:Assassin's Creed IV: Черный Флаг
uk:Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
zh:刺客信条IV：黑旗
