Assassin's Creed 4's 'Rate This Mission' system gathers feedback while you play

Assassin's Creed III featured some less-than-stellar missions , many of which involved little more than running between hotspots, triggering a cutscene or glitch or hearing Connor saying something monotone when you got there. It's interesting that Ubisoft has implemented a mission rating system into Assassin's Creed 4 , then. In game, you'll be able to (optionally) rate each story mission out of five; the data will then anonymously be sent to Ubisoft to be analysed by their Ubi-boffins, hopefully resulting in better AC games in the future. Yep: AC4 is essentially one giant beta test for Assassin's Creed 5.

As revealed to Eurogamer by associate producer Sylvain Trottier, "the idea behind this feature is to be able to get the input of our players on their appreciation of each mission. The rating is anonymous and is sent to our servers to be analysed."

The feature was implemented early in the game's production, so it's likely that player feedback has helped shape AC4 to some degree - but it seems the data will primarily be used when designing future entries in the series. It works like this: on the memory sync screen that shows up after story missions, you'll now see a small box in the corner of the screen, along with the words 'Rate This Mission'. You can optionally choose to give it a star rating, or skip the process entirely if you can't be bothered.

Trottier explains that "it's fully optional. It's a way for our players to tell us directly whether they liked or not the mission. It's a survey if you prefer. It will help us know which missions are the favourites and which ones people like less." He isn't sure whether the system will be used in future Ubisoft games, or even whether it will be effective, but hey - at least they're listening. Last night Assassin's Creed 4 was finally given a PC release date of November 19th.

Thanks to Eurogamer .

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.