Commanding a ship in Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag is a sublime experience to this day – you'd hope so in a game about pirates – but I don't remember the sailing-based missions in Assassin's Creed 3 being nearly so mechanically refined. As it turns out, Ubisoft felt the same way, as Assassin's Creed 3 creative director Alex Hutchinson has revealed the studio wasn't confident enough in the tech to make it a bigger part of the game.
Talking to PC Gamer, Hutchinson said "there was a whole fear that the tech [for the ships] wouldn't work" during the development of Assassin's Creed 3. "So it couldn't be a huge part of the main story, because we weren't certain it was going to work."
It's been many years since I played Assassin's Creed 3, but I distinctly remember not gelling with the ship-sailing mechanics. Thankfully, it seems the feature was well-received enough to satisfy the top dogs at Ubisoft, as the studio would go on to make a whole game based on sailing a pirate ship around the open ocean in Black Flag, my personal favorite in the whole series.
"When it was cool, then you're like, 'This is great,'" said Hutchinson, adding that "the old AAA model" meant Ubisoft didn't get an alpha build of the game until two months before its release and that the beta and final builds would arrive shortly thereafter, making it hard to know what the complete game looked like until launch was imminent. Although I could personally do without the naval missions in Assassin's Creed 3 entirely, I'm ultimately profoundly grateful they were added because they were the catalyst for one of my favorite open-world games ever.
Find out where your favorite landed on our list of the best Assassin's Creed games ever.
