It’s universally acknowledged that there’s little more fun in this world than a long ferry voyage. Ubisoft are tapping into the joy that can be found in hours of wave-rolling travel over a great expanse of samey blue by making the map in their Caribbean-set Assassin’s Creed large enough to take “half an hour” to travel across.
“We don’t talk about it in terms of size, that would be a little bit unfair – there is a lot of ocean in the Caribbean,” game director Ashraf Ismail told Eurogamer. “But it is the biggest game we’ve ever made. […] It will take – [to sail] across the whole game world – maybe half an hour.”
And the campaign itself, “The story and narrative itself will last 15-20 hours, but we’re hoping that people got lost in the Caribbean world, in the toybox we’ve created.”
My immediate response is that 20 hours is going to be largely made up of ferrying back and forth between mission locations. Thankfully the first travel system remains and you can skip all the unnecessary back and forth between islands.
Open ocean will be a large part of the vast map but these sections will be populated by directions to side-quests and sharks. Lots of sharks.
If Assassin’s Creed 4 can have this huge map and keep the action at a steady pace then a large ocean is a good thing. Long sea travels or hopping about the map on fast travel can really kill a game.