Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag franchise writer Derby McDevitt recently participated in the Imaginary Worlds podcast. He shared his memories of his work.
As it turned out, in the process of creating Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, the developers discussed the possibility of presenting more realistic gameplay for pirates in the game — naval stealth could have appeared in the game.
Their idea was that pirates would try to avoid direct confrontation with warships, attacking only weak merchant ships — this would be realistic.
However, in the end, a different approach was chosen: in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, players got large-scale naval battles and boarding (this is less reliable, but very spectacular).