The Art of Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag Book Review
11The Art of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag is an average video game art book. It mostly has finalized concept art - which is mostly of environments - with some rough concept art sketches. A lot of the art (but not all) has captions, and many of them are from the artists themselves.
0:00 - Introduction
0:30 - Quality of the Physical Book
0:52 - Content
4:01 - Aesthetics
6:01 - Nostalgia
6:46 - Backstage
8:56 - Closing Remarks
QUALITY OF PHYSICAL BOOK
-9x12 inches.
-It has about 192 pages.
-The quality of the covers, pages, and printing is average.
CONTENT/INNARDS
Variety of images and image types
-There’s art from many different stages of development, including rough sketches, concept sketches, final art designs, and mood pieces.
-There’s a few other cool things like a diagram of a ship.
-Though there is some variety, most of the art is the final version of the concept art.
Organization
-Apart from the chapter on people, virtually the whole book is on locations and they are divided into chapters.
-The chapters are Abstergo, People, Cities, Exploration, Pirate Life, Sea Battles, and Underwater World.
-I suppose the organization makes some sense but it’s basically just a huge series of environment art for an open world game.
Is there writing or insight from the artists and developers themselves?
-Yes. A lot of the captions are from the artists and they describe why they made the design decisions that they did. Great!
-It seems like most of the artist’s instructions were to set the mood, give general ideas, and that’s a lot of what the art is. For example, some art book commentary will be like “Troy has a rough past and has learned not to trust authority, but now he’s working with the government and wears a uniform. But we have his shirt a bit untucked to reflect that he’s not entirely on board with what he’s doing.” Whereas this book is more like “We wanted this scene to be epic.” or “high cliffs are a key element in the art direction of the game.” So the commentary is fine but you don’t get as much mileage out of it as some other art book commentary.
Quality of writing.
-Some writing by the author is a bit over the top but nothing else is particularly noteworthy.
Does it have what you want it to have?
-It mostly has pirate ship stuff and tropical environments.
-I liked that there was so much commentary from the artists about their work, and that they explained what they were thinking.
-Most of the art is finalized sketches, which isn’t my ideal. They are also mostly the type of art that gives an overall feel, rather than showing things specifically in the game.
AESTHETICS
-If you really like looking at beaches and ocean-side towns then I suspect you’ll enjoy the overall visual aesthetic of this book.
-Some captions are labeled weirdly. Like there will be a caption labeled “above” but there are two images above and only one caption. Since some of the art doesn’t have captions it just adds to the confusion. And unfortunately this type of thing is very frequent in this book.
-Some captions are just in dumb places, like page 61 has the caption for page 59, even though there’s plenty of space on 59 for the caption. Issues like this made reading through the book annoying.
NOSTALGIA/AFFINITY EVOKED FOR THE GAME
-This is one of the weaker areas of the book in part because it’s one of the weaker areas of the game. Perhaps this is just my bias showing, but I think it’s a valid critique. Since they crank out, especially back then, Assassin’s Creed games at such a fast pace with several hundred people on the development teams, the game is less “let’s design the perfect stealth section” and more “we need a stealth section, here here and here.” As a result the game does have a consistent overall feel, but there aren’t many standout moments. So I felt some nostalgia for the game setting but that’s about it.
BACKSTAGE
-I thought there was an interesting entry where they discuss how realism isn’t always as important as pleasant visuals. For example, they write that in real life a sugarcane field would be low to soak up water, but that kind of cut into the look of the organized town that the artists wanted, so they moved the sugarcane fields high above everything.
-I noticed that a lot of the environment art is less specific than other games. I think they wanted the general mood and then the programmers have a system of basically populating areas. One caption says that artists give the overall look, and “the 3D team then adjusts the scene.” It’s interesting to see how this contrasts with other games where things are more clearly defined by artists. To me it seems like the artists have good design sense but in the juggernaut of the Assassin’s Creed series it doesn’t always get translated into the game.
There are 17 book reviews in Season 1 of my series “Mike’s Video Game Art Book Reviews.” I hope you enjoy them!
Other Videos By The Therapist Gamer
Other Statistics
Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag Statistics For The Therapist Gamer
At present, The Therapist Gamer has 712 views spread across 3 videos for Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, and less than an hour worth of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag videos were uploaded to his channel. This makes up less than 0.36% of the total overall content on The Therapist Gamer's YouTube channel.