Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag

If you loved the naval battles in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag and AC3, you are not alone.

However, naval battles will not necessarily be there in the next AC game, according to IGN, which got a chance to catch up with Black Flag game director Ashraf Ismail at the BAFTA Game Awards 2014.

Ismail indicated that a lot of choices regarding what to be included in each game depend on the game's setting and the time period. So, for the Pirate theme, naval battles were a must.

"With Assassin's Creed we always say that history is our playground," he explained.

"When we chose the pirate setting, obviously it meant naval battles had to be a core element of the game. The questions are always about what time periods we go into, but that's a decision based on whether these time periods are interesting for fans, interesting for us as developers, and what it'd mean for the game mechanics."

He added that it's history that matters first, everything else is designed to suit it, gameplay mechanics included.

"We don't bind ourselves to game mechanics, but we really look at what is interesting historically speaking, and what game mechanics that naturally brings up. Hopefully then, the fans love and enjoy it. We're here to enjoy the BAFTAs so I can't really talk about the future of the brand or where it's going, I won't even acknowledge that a game is in the works!"

"So I don't want to talk about what's the future for naval and all this, but I love that people loved it in Black Flag. It was a risk for us to make it part of the core of an Assassin's game, but people really took to it and loved it, which is really gratifying for us. As I said though, whatever period in time we choose? That's what dictates the kind of mechanics we put in the game, not the other way around," Ismail added.

Assassin's Creed