You and I know pirates to be cheery drunkards, perhaps made of plasticine, who plunder cursed booty and battle sea monsters. Yet, Ubisoft Montreal claims, this is all fiction. The developer has said it is "giving pirates the HBO, reality treatment" in Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, suggesting that perhaps piracy wasn't all hook hands and perching parrots.

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Late into sequence two of Assassin's Creed 3: Liberation, one of the mission subtitles is "Do the mentor's dirty work." Replace "dirty" with "busy" and you have the entire Liberation experience. The opening scene sees protagonist and first female assassin Aveline chasing a chicken as a child. Then, she falls asleep and wakes up as an adult and starts killing guards, pick pocketing, and infiltrating cocktail parties. Why? Like the rest of the narrative, it's never made particularly clear.

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