Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag will let players rate missions on a five-star scale

Players will be able to rate missions in Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag as a way to help Ubisoft build better content for future games, associate producer Sylvain Trottier told Eurogamer.

The feature, which Trottier said is optional, was conceived as a way for the developers at Ubisoft Montreal to determine what mission types players prefer. Each sequence, or chapter, in Black Flag is broken up into smaller missions. After each mission, a small box with stars will appear on the lower right hand corner of the stats screen, and players can assign between one and five stars in rating the missions.

“The idea behind this feature is to be able to get the input of our players on their appreciation of each mission,” Trottier said. “The rating is anonymous and is sent to our servers to be analyzed.

“It’s an idea that came out of discussions between our creative director Jean Guesdon and our executive producer Sébastien Puel,” he added. “It was implemented early in the production, more than one year ago. It’s also being used during our playtest sessions to gather the player’s feedback.”

Trottier noted the developer is testing the system with Black Flag and there is no guarantee it will appear in future games.

“It’s a way for our players to tell us directly whether they liked or not the mission,” Trottier said. “It’s a survey if you prefer. It will help us know which missions are the favorites and which one people like less.

“It’s the first time as far as I know that we are doing this,” he added. “It’s a test, we don’t know how much data we will collect from there and don’t know if people will use it or not but we think it was worth trying it to get the direct feedback from our players.”