Speaking to Official PlayStation Magazine, Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag lead game designer Jean-Sebastien Decant stated that while the main game will require roughly 20 hours to finish, you can effectively spend up to 60 hours exploring the open world. Decant broke it down as, “20 hours to finish the main story, 50 or 60 hours open world stuff.”
As for the game’s overall scale, Decant stated that, “I wouldn’t be able to give you any numbers, but what I can tell you is we have three big cities, compared to the other games, there’s three huge cities and then fifteen unique locations – like continents – throughout the world, and then lots of [islands where] you can find buildings, stuff like that. The size of the map is like fifteen, twenty minutes, if you were just to sail without stopping, so that’s huge.
“We really tried to increase the feeling of adventure. At the same time it has to be easy to use so we added a number of teleports, in fact every [objective] you do becomes a teleport. So as you soon as you win somewhere, you can send people there.”
Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag will release on October 29th in North America for Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii U. An Xbox One version is due on November 22nd, with the PS4 version releasing on November 15th in North America and November 22nd in Europe. The PC version releases on November 19th in North America and November 22nd in Europe.