Developed by hundreds of game makers from around the world for the multinational company Ubisoft, and led by a team in Montreal, it is, arguably, modern pop culture’s most effective nonliterary vehicle for cultural tourism. Over all, Black Flag’s Caribbean archipelago is a nice place to be, if you don’t mind the killing.Īssassin’s Creed is among gaming’s most exotic feats of annual engineering. They may see churches, slip through plantations, kill British and Spanish authorities (to a pirate, they’re all bad) and take to the high seas to plunder a galleon, harpoon a whale or follow a treasure map to a buried chest. In that time and in the adventures beyond it, virtual travelers may explore a period-precise Havana and Kingston, Jamaica visit Nassau, the Bahamas, and Tulum, Mexico and sail to dozens of islands. This new video game’s main story line casts its player as the fictional early-18th-century pirate Edward Kenway and can run 30 hours to its narrative conclusion, still leaving half of its glimmering Caribbean unexplored. The pirate adventure Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is nearly as long and almost as beautiful as an actual vacation to the tropics.
