Ubisoft revealed to Eurogamer that Black Flag's open world, over world will take players 30 minutes to sail across.

The game's director, Ashraf Ismail, didn't say exactly how big the game's map is but he did say "We don't talk about it in terms of size, that would be a little bit unfair - there is a lot of ocean in the Caribbean. But it is the biggest game we've ever made."

The actual gameplay itself is quite big too. He added, "The story and narrative itself will last 15-20 hours, but we're hoping that people got lost in the Caribbean world, in the toybox we've created.

"It will take - [to sail] across the whole game world - maybe half an hour." I hope that's lost in the fun way and not in the 'where the frak is this bloody island!?' way.

As previously mentioned, a large chunk of the map is open water. However Ubisoft hasten to add that there will be plenty of events, side quests and entertaining diversions from the main story peppered across the map. Also, because the map is so big, fast travel has been tweaked to make it easier to cover large chunks of Black Flag's world; players can now travel to any sync-point they've discovered (No more fast travel frustration).

Whilst talking to Eurogamer, Ismail took the time comment on the success of Assassin Creed 3's spin off, Liberation, and why they chose not to make a similar hand held spin off for the 4th game. "Liberation actually did very well - we're very proud of it. Sales were fairly decent. But the focus for us was Assassin's Creed 4, for current-gen consoles and next-gen consoles.

"From a resource standpoint, the team that worked on Liberation is actually working with us on AC4. They're developing a specific part of the game for us. The amount of people working on AC4, Watch Dogs - that's a massive game - the focus within Ubisoft right now is on these two games, and then you have The Crew and The Division as well."