Assassin's Creed 4 development was 'nightmarish' on current-gen, says Ubisoft dev

Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag is technically superb on current-gen, but achieving that level of sheen was 'nightmarish,' according to game director Ashraf Ismail.

Speaking with fans in this Reddit thread, Ismail said of the next-gen builds, "Development on both [PS4 and Xbox One] was very smooth since they are both very similar to PCs. Last generation was very difficult and even nightmarish. Both Xbox One and PS4 were easy to deal with and the 1st parties were both there to help us out.
The one gray area was understanding both Sony and MS requirements for the consoles. They were trying to figure them out themselves."

On PS4's bespoke DualShock 4 features, he added, "The touchpad is used for scrolling through the map, adding waypoints, zooming etc," and concluded, "Overall it was super smooth to develop on [next-gen]."

The critics responded well to Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag at launch, as you can see from our review score round-up.

I also praised the developer for making several key improvements to the formula here.

What do you think?

Via IGN.