Surprise! There's going to be an Assassin's Creed game this year. But, will it feature pirates? Will it even feature naval combat at all?

One of the big challenges inherent to Ubisoft's time-spanning adventure series is that settings can change drastically. If the next game takes place in Egypt, for example, there won't be much opportunity to reintegrate the excellent naval combat of Assassin's Creed 3 and 4. However, Ubisoft isn't too bummed at the prospect of loving naval combat in future AC games, noting that the tech can be used to build entirely new things.

"We always build on technology, nothing ever gets set aside," Ubisoft's Darby McDevitt told Edge. "There's often ways to creatively use old technology for new things. One of the things that made AC3's naval combat possible--and then of course AC4--is that we were able to have characters climb and walk around on dynamically moving objects.

"With AC3 we started working on that technology and it fed into the naval combat because the boats are constantly moving as opposed to being fixed to the ground, so all of this technology, it might appear in future games--it might just not be on boats. It might appear in a completely different way."

Of course, DeVitt isn't giving any hints on what the next game will be, noting that there are clues and red herrings hidden in Black Flag. However, given that it's tax season, it probably won't be too long before Ubisoft shows us this year's game.