It’s all about little episodes within an ever-expanding universe now…” Black Flag has a beginning, middle and end to its past and present day stories, but it will feel like it belongs as part of the bigger Assassin’s Creed storyline. We want to keep Assassin’s Creed games feel more self-contained both in the past and the present. It’s in our best interests-and in our fans’ interests-to keep the modern day stuff more open-ended. “We are changing the way that we unfold this story, though. Juno, in particular, has a clear next step, so that stuff is still there,” says McDevitt. So is all the first civilisation stuff getting swept under the carpet, or are we getting more Juno and Minerva? “That’s ongoing. After all, Desmond is ‘gone’ and the world didn’t end in 2012. Speaking of a ‘modern point of view’-we wanted to know how Black Flag was handling the modern day setting of Assassin’s Creed. "I think we've been very honest about slavery, and honest about what people's opinions of it were at the time" I don’t want it to feel like I’m settling debts or anything.” It was a really difficult subject to tackle, and I hope I’ve done it as interestingly as possible. There are explicit conversations between Templars and Assassins on slavery.
Although, our Assassins and Templars are both on the side of abolition, so it’s through them that we get to include a more modern viewpoint on slavery. I couldn’t have written a whole abolitionist narrative running through the game, because that wouldn’t have been historically true. I think we’ve been very honest about it, and honest about what people’s opinions would have been like. “That’s a hard thing to do in such a mainstream game. “What I tried to do in Black Flag was seed it into the background of every day life, but there’s no scene where the game tries to explicitly draw out sympathy for one side or the other,” continues McDevitt.