If you were one of the many who disliked Assassin’s Creed III and its seemingly endless number of bugs, join the club. However, one of the bigger criticisms the game faced was the total disregard for stealth. This has however been fixed for Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, according to director Ashraf Ismail.
Speaking to Official PlayStation Magazine UK, Ismail stated that Ubisoft had, ““A lot of feedback: people loved the naval [combat], people really enjoyed the fight, but we knew that the stealth element was something that we needed to push”. The team has “put effort into the system to make stealth really viable gameplay” and “if you really wish to play the game completely in stealth then you can.
“I think this was something that was hard for players to deal with previously; that they didn’t understand all the rules or the feedback wasn’t strong enough. [AC4] really simplifies how you get detected, how you escape detection, how you sneak up on a guard. All this stuff has been really simplified and made much more intuitive. The feedback itself has also been improved, so now we really focus on what the player needs to know. And that’s the feedback we get.
“We’ve given Edward a bunch of new stealth tools. I won’t go into too much detail, but having tools that work in range, having tools that work in close combat, but have a stealth element to them. So, we’ve given Edward a bunch of new tools as well”.
Some of the enemies also require a stealthier approach for taking them down. For example, when speaking about the gunners in the game, Ismail says, “They’re really, very deadly. So these are characters that you pretty much want to sneak up on. You don’t want to run towards them, because they’re very deadly, very powerful, they’re always on high ground, so they have a bit of an advantage on you, so you really have to use the stealth to take them out”.
Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag is currently slated to release on October 29th for Xbox 360, PC, Wii U and PS3 in North America with releases for PS4 and Xbox One due later this year.