Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag‘s director, Ashraf Ismail, has said that stealth has been “one of the biggest things that we’ve worked [on] to address people’s concerns”.
Ismail told OPM that, after Assassin’s Creed 3, Ubisoft received “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”, so the developer “put effort into the system to make stealth really viable gameplay”, continuing, “if you really wish to play the game completely in stealth then you can”.
One of the ways stealth is improved is that they will “really simplifying the rules of the system. 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”. The game “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.
He continued:
I think Assassin’s Creed 3 was really a great game, it had its faults for sure, but there was a lot of people that truly loved the game. I think there are some elements that we are pushing in AC4, for example stealth being one of them, that we are making sure that we are really paying attention to what people have to say.
Do you trust that Ubisoft will improve the series’ stealth, or is this just PR-speak? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
