Assassin's Creed Pirates Set One Year After Assassin's Creed 4

This fall Ubisoft will be releasing Assassin's Creed: Pirates, a brand-new adventure set in the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy. Pirates is an open-world game designed for smartphones and tablets.

AC Pirates is set one year after the events of Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag. It doesn't continue the story of Edward Kenway and his crew. Instead, it's centered around the hidden treasure of the notorious pirate Olivier Levasseur, nicknamed "La Buse." His treasure is a real-life mystery that still hasn't been solved to date.

"You play the memories of Alonzo Batilla, a young and ambitious pirate that knew La Buse and knew about his hidden treasure," Ubisoft says in an official Q&A accompanying Pirates' announcement. "Along the way he will confront the Templars, natural enemies of the pirates, as they are trying to find La Buse’s treasure. The interesting fact is that the cryptogram left by La Buse and that leads to his treasure was actually written in Templar alphabet."

The game is centered around real-time naval battles similar to that of Assassin's Creed 4. Players will explore the Caribbean and point their cannons at anyone who looks at them wrong. Throughout their journey, they'll earn XP that can be used to then upgrade Batilla's ship and its crew.

Pirates is being developed at Ubisoft Paris with assistance from the company's Craiova studios. This game will be the first to showcase a new engine developed by Ubisoft. This engine is said to display "groundbreaking visuals" for mobile devices. You'll need a "high-end" smartphone or tablet to run the game, though.

"We don’t want to downgrade the experience nor the ambition of the game in any way. That’s why the game will only be available to devices that can handle what we want to do in terms of graphics, fluidity and gameplay depth. But we don’t want to exclude players, so the game will be available to most of the current devices."

After Pirates launches later this year, Ubisoft plans to support it with regular updates. They've already started to plan their post-launch approach.

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