A Critique of AC4: Black Flag's sailing system and how to improve it.

Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag is pretty much the best pirate game out there (arguably Rogue is better from a gameplay perspective). It gives you that pirate vibe in its story, and its gameplay lets you do all the pirate things. You have a sailing system that lets you explore an open sea, you can leave your ship at any point to go out to the sea or on lands, fight other ships and board and capture them and more.

But I feel that, despite all these praises, the sailing side of the game is too mechanically and gameplay-wise shallow. The result is that the sailing gets stale long before the game ends, especially if you decide to do lots of side content.

Sailing takes less effort than parkour and most of the seas look the same. It's not like a survival game where the lull between encounters can be used for tension or breathing. There are no random encounters or events or stories you can stumble across that mix up the sailing. You can't leave the ship on autopilot while you walk across the deck and engage in events on the ship. Combat and interactions between ships is the same every time with very few variations. As a result, the whole ship aspect feels undercooked. I didn't feel this in AC3 because in that game, the navel aspects were their own missions and focused on just the important set pieces to make up for the lack of depth. They were quick and cool enough and used sparingly enough that they stayed fresh throughout the experience. With AC4, it feels Ubisoft just took the navel stuff in AC3, plopped them down into an open world ocean and called it a day without really taking the time to fully flesh out that feature enough so it can stand in an open world environment (just to be clear, I don't mean Ubi literally did that. Obviously they added things like scoping, guns, boarding, being able to leave your ship, legendary ships etc that. But that isn't enough,). When Ubisoft released the iOS game; Assassin's Creed Pirates. while they still kept it open world, they made more mission based like AC3 was and that kept it fresher to me longer than AC4's version. Future games like Origins made it even more reaction based with counter-attacks you can do by bracing at the right time.

It kinda reminded me of Need for Speed Rivals. Like, once the initial high of the cool world wore off, I realized there was nothing new in the world to see. After the first few hours, I saw pretty much everything the game and its map had in store. BF has that same feeling to me. After being 25 hours in, I found I was hunting the same, I was fighting ships the same, I was navigating the same, I was doing the same as I was back when I was say 6 hours in. What really changed was my co-ordinates on the map and the stats telling me my ship was this good. There were very few twists, surprises and shakeups to the formula throughout the entire playthrough given the length of the game.

If it weren't for the Foot sections and the story, I feel AC4 would be the worst in the series as soon as the pirate novelty started wearing off. Because that novelty was designed for quick missions, not as the basis for an entire open world game.

On the other hand, it is kinda serene and cool and I still found it enjoyable to kick back and put on a podcast and just take it all in. I suspect many people that love BF were really into that aspect. Personally, I felt I needed more than just that to ever consider replaying the game, especially now that I've played Rogue to 100% completion and had my fill of this type of gameplay.

So if Ubisoft or any other company ever wants to make a new pirate game and use BF as an inspiration, I have a few requests or advice that I want to see;

-1- Make land-based gameplay important and a consistent part. Black Flag had the usual AC gameplay on land. This kept the game fresh for much longer. Sea of Thieves and AC: Pirates didn't have much luck there. Have an interesting story in there to keep people engaged.

-2- Give me a reason to explore using sailing.
As it is in BF, sailing doesn't really feel like exploring. The islands you find have no story or side missions on them (collectibles don't count). You don't find random shipwrecked sailors that you can interact with as people rather than as a number on your crew meter. You can't interact with your crew. You can't hear of a rumoured area and have to use your on board tools to travel into a foggy area to find it with your crew about to stage a mutiny.

Basically, imagine Red Dead 2, but you can only ride around a desert only map on horseback. There are no towns, houses or friendly NPCs with cool stories and you get the ocean stuff in AC4.

-3- More varied options in combat.

One of the first things I did when I was playing AC4 was to try and hijack a ship by swimming up to it. I was killed automatically by invisible means.

This highlights a problem with Ship combat in AC4. You have to fight using your ship. And you can only fight the same way. You steer around, you fire cannons, maybe use some of your other weapons. repeat the process until the ship is damaged, then choose to board it or sink it there. Boarding consists of the same "get in and kill x people and remove their flag" every time. You can change how you board the ship as you can swing in, use the guns, swim etc. But these options are limited and before long, you'd have done everything loads of time over.

So change up how fights are done. I know realism can limit what you can do but I play AAA Blockbuster video games for fun. If I want realism, I'll go play a simulator instead. Rogue improved a bit with puckle guns, icebergs you can shoot and you can be boarded. AC: Pirates had minigames that required different inputs.

I'd like things to be a step further. How about during ship combat, enemies can launch projectiles you have to intercept like in AC Pirates. You do this while managing your supplies and getting your crew to counterattack. The different responses can keep defence more fun than occasionally pressing square when you're in the line of fire of enemy cannons.

Have your crew also play a part. Maybe you have to manage your crew as they make repairs, put out fires, get supplies and fight back. Maybe you can choose to send some of your crew on a boat to attack the enemy ship to take pressure of your ship but limit what you can do as you have fewer hands on deck. Hell, let me send spies on board a ship beforehand and a percent chance of a random event happening like a mutiny, betrayal, a fight, a fire etc.

Maybe let me hand the ship over to my crew while I jump across and attempt to fight with my raiding party.

Let the environment play a bigger role. Expand Rogue's iceberg mechanic. Maybe, make it so I can shoot the sides of cliffs to trigger a rockslide to a greater effect. Maybe I can feign a surrender to lure in ships. Maybe I can leave an abandoned ship for a portion of my crew to use as a bait (I once stumbled across a burning ship that had some loot on it. Didn't really have much).

-4- Keep the game shorter than average.

Like, maybe make the world smaller, or have fewer missions needed to complete the game. This limits the fatigue that comes from having to do all these things with such a 1 trick pony kind of gameplay. Don't have lots of collectibles everywhere on your map shown. Make the rewards cool and interesting.