The sea is how people travelled to America, how goods were traded and so you ”couldn’t do the Revolution justice” without ship-to-ship brawls. As Connor we command a ship of our own.
It won’t just be forests, rolling plains and colonial towns we’ll be traversing but the harsh mistress of the sea as well. We’ll be called upon to patrol waters and hunt warships.
”We thought, ‘What is it about this period that makes it special?’,” said Alex Hutchinson, ”and it just came up again and again in the history that the navy was such a big part of it. It’s how you got to America. It’s how imported goods got to America. It was a key factor in dictating the outcome of the Revolution itself.”
”All of these things kept telling us that this was a big deal, and you couldn’t do the Revolution justice without the sea.” It was certainly a surprising addition to the Assassin’s Creed arsenal of gameplay. Ubisoft has experimented before with various types of diversions like a metagame where we fight Templar for control of cities or even a tower defence mini-game where we need to protect crucial assets from being retaken.
As Connor we get to captain our own ship and its crew. We’ll be fighting the savage winds and rough waves of the sea as we bring our vessel about and hope to get a scathingly good broadside volley of cannon-fire on enemy ships. There’s always a chance of some ship boarding violence too.
“No one had really done a third-person action-adventure sailing game before,” mirthed Hutchinson.
“You’re controlling navigation and combat at the same time. You can walk around your boat, but once you take the wheel you’re steering the boat almost the same as you would in any vehicle in the game. At the same time, you’re ordering your crew to fire different weapons – whether it’s round shot to sink the boats or chain shot to take out masts. The fun of it is juggling those things.”
We’re promised that these naval excursions are actually a big part of Assassin’s Creed 3 with their own narrative and unique action pulling us in. They wanted something more than just a quick gimmick at sea. Assassin’s Creed 3 releases on Xbox 360 and PS3 October 31st, and on PC November 23rd.
