In hindsight, Assassin’s Creed 3 is both fascinating and fundamental to the later development of the series. At the time, the expansive wilderness and smaller settlements felt restrictive compared to the series’ massive cities, but it gave Ubisoft a model it would carry on successfully many years later in Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla and Shadows. And then there were the ships.

Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag remains one of the high points for the Assassin’s Creed, with its nautical open world and piratical antics, but it was Assassin’s Creed 3 that really kicked things off by letting players explore the Eastern Seaboard and parts of the Caribbean in naval side missions. Some of its changes proved to be divisive, but pretty much everyone seemed to agree that captaining a ship felt incredible. So why wasn’t there more of it?

“There was a whole fear that the tech [for the ships] wouldn’t work,” Alex Hutchinson, creative director on AC3 and Far Cry 4, tells us. Even in an Assassin’s Creed that was already proving to be experimental, the feature was too much of an unknown quantity for the team to put all its faith in.

“So it couldn’t be a huge part of the main story, because we weren’t certain it was going to work,” he continues. “And then when it was cool, then you’re like, ‘This is great.'” It was indeed cool. So cool, in fact, that Ubisoft went and built a whole Assassin’s Creed out of it, with Black Flag, and then did it again in the Templar-focused Rogue spin-off. Odyssey, and to a lesser degree Valhalla, made ships an important part of their respective adventures too.

Hutchinson says this is “the old AAA model”, where the alpha build would come in two months before launch, followed by the beta and final build in quick succession. “I think [Ubisoft is] really struggling with [this] now,” he adds. Naturally, he notes, this means the devs don’t get a look at the game “in its totality” until it’s almost out the door.

When he co-founded Typhoon, the studio behind the excellent Journey to the Savage Planet, it was decided that alpha would happen in the middle of development. “And then that means you have to be hard about what you keep and what you cut, but you can see the shape of the game basically. Then we could have been like, ‘Alright, this naval thing is going to be fine, put it everywhere.'”

Typhoon was acquired by Stadia, and then killed off when Stadia closed its doors in 2021. But much of the team were reunited, co-founding Raccoon Logic, which released Revenge of the Savage Planet last year. It’s still doing alphas a lot earlier than Ubisoft.