14 DAY TRIAL // Jean-Sebastien Decan, the lead game designer working on Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, says that his team required another six month of full development time on the title in order to integrate naval battles.
He tells VG247 that, “Naval multiplayer would have been to open a whole new world of crazy design and system issues and I think we would have needed more time.”
The developer believes that respect for deadlines and launch dates is more important than integrating some new features because it shows how much the team values the player base that’s expecting a new Assassin’s Creed experience.
It’s unclear whether Ubisoft will give the team resources to add naval multiplayer battles via a patch at a later point or deliver them as DLC or if the feature will be used for the next title in the series.
Black Flag will be out on October 29 in North America and November 1 in Europe, on the PlayStation 3, the Wii U and the Xbox 360.