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Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
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Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is the fourth main game in the popular Assassin's Creed series, developed by Ubisoft Montreal and released in October 2013 for PS3 and Xbox 360 and November 2013 for Wii U, PS4, Xbox One and Windows PC. The plot is a rather complicated meta-fiction in which the unnamed player character is a playtester for fictional game studio Abstergo Entertainment, working on their flagship project to use the series' fictional "Animus" past-reading technology to make a videogame set in the Caribbean during the last years of the Golden Age of Piracy in the 18th century (the game appears to be specifically set in 1718, since it includes Blackbeard's blockade of the town of Charleston in South Carolina in May of that year).
The majority of time is spent in this game-within-the-game controlling a pirate captain named Edward Kenway, grandfather and father of two of the protagonists of Assassin's Creed III. Following a battle at sea, Kenway takes on the identity of a defecting Assassin, Duncan Walpole, and soon finds himself in command of a pirate brig he names the Jackdaw and involved in both the real-life politics surrounding the pirate stronghold at Nassau and the war between the Assassins and the Templars, while outside of the simulation the player character finds Abstergo's plans might be more sinister than just poor post-release support for the PC version.
The present-day segments of the game are played in first-person mode, while the game-within-the-game is an open-world third-person stealth-action game. Amusingly, the game uses period-accurate English capitalisation in the subtitles of Kenway's parts of the game, with all nouns capitalised as they are in German.
The following weapons appear in the video game Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag:
Overview
The player character, Edward Kenway, carries a number of weapons in a four-direction inventory, including various tools like smoke bombs and later a blowpipe. His primary weapons are a pair of swords and a brace of single-shot pistols; by default he carries two, while upgrades can be crafted allowing the number to be increased up to four, which Kenway can fire using a spinning "combo" animation or use for aimed shots; oddly, they can only be reloaded when every pistol has been fired. It is also possible to pick up muskets found in the world and use them as a temporary weapon, but they cannot become a permanent part of Kenway's inventory and will be dropped if any other weapon is selected.
Permanently upgrading Kenway's armament requires purchasing weapons from merchants which unlock at set points in the campaign; these can then be equipped in place of the default flintlocks and swords. The best weapons also require specific tasks be completed in order to unlock them.
After a number of missions are completed, Kenway gains control of the Jackdaw. The brig's weapons are operated by rotating the in-game camera; forward fires the chase guns, the sides broadside cannons and heavy shot, and astern explosive "fire barrels." Mortars can also be purchased, which are then aimed using the spyglass normally used to sight other vessels. Finally, the swivel guns can be operated by holding down the button to use them when a crosshair target appears, until the gun's target crosshair has aligned with it; releasing at this point will fire the swivel gun. Fire barrels, mortars and heavy shot for the broadside cannons have limited ammunition, while all other weapons do not.
The Jackdaw can also be upgraded, which requires both money and materials gained primarily by capturing and looting other vessels found in the open ocean. This allows a progressively more absurd amount of cannons to be mounted, as well as increases to the damage and ammunition capacity of the ship's various weapons. The final tier of upgrades generally require hidden plans to be found (or the accurately-named "Timesaver" DLC to be purchased) and usually turn the weapon in question gold, though the final hull upgrade instead appears to turn the Jackdaw into the world's first ironclad (!).
Pistols
Flintlock pistol
Kenway's default ranged armament is a brace of Flintlock Pistols, and these are also used by most allies and enemies.
Blunderbuss Flintlock Pistol
The "Pirate Blunderbusses" are Blunderbuss flintlock pistols.
Wheellock pistol
Two types of Wheellock Pistol are available for Kenway to use.
Pistol sword
A pair of swords with built-in flintlock pistols can be acquired as a bonus weapon; these cannot actually be fired like the normal pistols, instead simply firing for additional damage at the end of melee combos.
Long guns
Charleville Musket
Charleville Muskets equipped with bayonets are sometime seen in weapon caches or the hands of enemies, and are always found in the hands of the snipers posted on the masts of larger enemy warships. Kenway can pick up and use them, though the musket is loud and unwieldy. The version shown in the game is anachronistic, since it is the post-1723 version with barrel bands rather than the original version, which would have just been introduced when Kenway's part of the game is set.
Mounted weapons
Cannon
Cannons are the primary armament of the warships and fortresses seen throughout the game. The Jackdaw has two types; chase guns that fire chainshot, which does little damage but slows enemy vessels down (a rather unrealistic depiction of the effect of the ammunition, which was designed to smash a ship's masts) and broadside cannons which can fire aimed normal shot or unaimed heavy shot. The number of cannons on the Jackdaw can be upgraded using materials.
As with all of the Jackdaw's weapons, there is no animation for reloading the cannons, the weapons simply becoming ready again after a short interval. Perhaps most bizarrely, the final upgrade for heavy shot allows the cannons to be fired twice per unit of ammunition.
Mortar
The Jackdaw can be upgraded to mount a pair of large brass mortars on her foredeck; while this was actually done in the 17th century, such "bomb vessels" were specialised ships, not ordinary brigs like the Jackdaw, and this was certainly not a standard feature of large warships as is shown on the Men O' War encountered in the game.
Mortars fire a strange airbursting submunition round which causes damage over a wide area; when used by enemy ships or forts, their radius of effect is shown as a yellow circle indicating their projected point of aim and turns red when the round is about to impact. The exception to this is the legendary warship La Dama Negra (The Black Lady), which does not have aiming circles for her mortars. Bizarrely, her mortars are mounted as a large battery amidships resembling a modern VLS array rather than anything that might have existed at the time.
Swivel Gun
The Jackdaw is equipped with a pair of muzzle-loading swivel guns on either side of the rear deck, which can be used during boarding actions and to target fire barrels and weak spots on enemy vessels and fortresses if these are revealed by scoring hits with other weapons. When boarding, the shots have a substantial splash damage radius, appearing to fire explosive shot; this would have been impossible at the time, since period explosives were not stable enough to withstand the rigours of being fired from a long-barrelled gun.
Their rate of fire is ridiculously high for muzzle-loaded guns and there is no reloading animation, the guns able to fire five sequential shots during boarding and as many as there are targets the rest of the time. This is an odd oversight, since period breech-loading swivel guns with preloaded breech blocks would actually be able to fire almost as quickly as the weapons in the game do.
