We were recently offered a chance to catch up one-on-one with Ubisoft Singapore's Hugues Riccor who is serving as producer on Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, ahead of this year's inaugural PAX Aus event in Melbourne.

In our interview we chatted about the challenges the team faced in making an entire ocean an enticing, explorable playground, Easter eggs, what they learnt from the feedback of Assassin's Creed III, how Ubisoft's myriad development teams manage to all work off different game engines and what they pulled from the Far Cry 3 development and play experience to aid Black Flag.

"So what we’re doing is really also leveraging what Ubisoft’s learning how to do," Hugues explained. "I think Far Cry 3 was exploring some great balancing between the main mission, but also I’m building my own story; I’m crafting, and I’m progressing through the game; and we’ve partnered with them. We look at the data of how people played Assassin’s Creed 3, and how they played Far Cry 3, and then we tried to improve, in particular, things like fast-travelling, things like how to hold your hand to explore certain gameplay and new mechanics, but at the same time, give you the freedom to just go the other way if you wanted to go the other way."

Click here for our full video interview feature.