"We have multiple development teams, then we have the brand team that sits on top and is filled with writers and designers concerned with the series' overall arc," Ismail explained. "So there is an overall arc, and each iteration has its place inside this.
"We have an idea of where the end is, what the end is. But of course Yves [Guillemot, Ubisoft's overall boss] announced we are a yearly title, we ship one game a year. So depending on the setting, depending on what fans want, we've given ourselves room to fit more in this arc. But there is an end."
"We're now able to seed stuff earlier and earlier in our games," Ismail continued. "So for example in [AC4] we have Edward, who was seeded in AC3. But there's a lot more stuff in our game that is hinting at other possibilities."
AC4's team have now managed to implement this in Black Flag, but found themselves too ambitious in another area.
"The biggest cut we made - which we were pushing hard for but we felt we couldn't achieve at a high enough quality - was multiplayer with naval [battles]," Ismail said.
"We had really cool prototypes but to get it to work and to balance the systems - the balance of naval is tricky - to do that in multiplayer... we just couldn't do it in this iteration."
0 comments: