In Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag you play as Edward Kenway, the captain of the ship Jackdaw. You are a pirate, traversing the cities of the West Indies, as well as the waves and islands in between, doing all the fun pirate-y things you’d expect: looting, plundering, swash-buckling, and so on. But it wasn’t enough for the game’s lead writer, Darby McDevitt, to just choose the right setting. McDevitt wanted the game to be as factually accurate as possible; he wanted to defy the expectations players might have about pirates.
This is why, when his team came across a book called The Republic of Pirates, they didn’t stop at using it as a source. “We contacted (author Colin Woodward) and had him become one of our historians,” McDevitt says. “A number of pirates used Nassau in the Bahamas as their base, and from about 1715 to 1718 this was the center of piracy in the world. It’s where all the famous names settled like Blackbeard, Calico Jack, and Anne Bonny.”
Read the full article at Kill Screen.