Skull and Bones resurfaces!

 Yo ho

Though I'm choosing to actively forgo my basic due diligence by actually not checking on the matter, like the lazy cur I unashamedly am, I know that I've accused Ubisoft's Skull and Bones of being vapourware before. (Edit: Actually I ended up searching. I kind of cover is in this blog.) And probably on this blog. To eat some crow, but explain myself, I'll admit that I see this game that way with no small amount of bias. First, it's a Ubisoft game that is typically emblematic of their uninspired spiral loop of rereleasing and slightly improving the same ideas over and over; and secondly it's a pirate game, and I find the whole 'pirate fantasy' to be so often turgid and trapped in an unevolved rut since the fantasy was first conceived. Yet I cannot sit back and ignore the fact that Skull and Bones has resurfaced from the depths with a release date, November 8th, and is probably going to actually land it this time. Guess I was the wrong. And it only took the team 9 years of development.

Skull and Bones was first conceived of as an expansion to 'Assassin's Creed Black Flag', the first AC game in the series to prove that breaking away from the somewhat stale Assassin's Creed formula could be viable for the series as long as the entry has a strong personal identity to stand out. Black Flag's assassination elements were largely unimproved and actually somewhat pulled back from Assassin's Creed III, but people flocked to it for their pirate adventure fix and so the game did gangbusters anyway. As time went on, however, and Ubisoft changed their plans on how to expand Black Flag, Skull and Bones was reimagined as a spin-off multiplayer mode for Blackflag, and then an MMO, all on it's way to eventually becoming a stand alone pirating game with it's own brand behind it. Of course, even today the bones of Black Flag are painfully jutting out of this Frankenstein's Monster body of nearly 10 years of conflicting ideas and corporate fiddling, leaving many to question, outside of the multiplayer elements, what exactly does Skull and Bones do to warrant it's independence from Black Flag?

Well, it's set in the Indian Ocean instead of the Caribbean! And that's... that's pretty much it. Yeah, the whole fantasy Pirate of sailing the tropics of the Caribbean is a dead dream now, because Ubisoft wants to both be different, but at the exact same time stay boringly 'realisitc' and grounded. Of course, the 'ship combat' formula has already survived a shake-up by Ubisoft before with 'Assassin's Creed: Rogue' which transplanted the Black Flag formula to the icy snow drifts of the North Atlantic. So again; at what point has Skull and Bones proved it's worthy of it's own brand? Developer talks indicate that once upon a time there was an idea to bring Skull and Bones to a fantastical isle of magic that the team could really stretch their legs with and get mythical; but Ubisoft realised it would need to actually drop some more money to make a dream like that happen. And so here we are. Grounded. In our sea pirate fantasy game. Whoopie.

The player starts off their adventure being washed to shore after a shipwre- Jesus Christ, that's literally the exact opening of Black Flag... >sigh<... From that point onwards our hero develops a fear of touching any ground that isn't the ship port or his own ship, because yet again this is another vehicular exploration where you are the ship and not a human who can walk around this world and interact with it. I cannot convey how much I hate that design phenomena. It works for hyper specialised genres, like I wouldn't really want to get out of ship and explore in Chorvs or something; but if this is supposed to be a Pirate 'adventure' game, tapping into those specific fantasies; why in god's name would you shirk sword fighting, or treasure digging, or walking about the hold of your ship, swapping stories and getting drunk on grog with your friends? Sea of Thieves, probably this game's biggest conceptual competitor, has been doing that from the start for about two years now. 

Apparently there was a point in development where the team had pulled back on the ship aspect and devoted themselves fully to exploration survival in the vein of Rust. (Whether that mean the game was first person or not is beyond me, but the fact that this game's ideas went fully through the survival game trend is just emblematic of the how long this game was kicking around conceptual hell.) That was swapped out, and probably because Ubisoft proper saw that as a direction in no way supported by the game system they had worked on before and shuddered at the very idea of taking a potential risk, as they are so wont to do. Why we could hit a healthy middle ground between ship combat and ground combat is beyond me, but I suspect it's because even after all these years Skull and Bones still recycles the basic template of Black Flag, and any combat they ended up developing would be compared directly to the exceptional combat of that game.

What we've got now appears to be something akin to a semi MMO, somewhat similar to Sea of Thieves, wherein you ride around the sea building up your ship, taking missions, fighting players for scraps in their cargo bays, and undergoing side content that is dragged right out of Black Flag. Such as the spear fishing minigame, (Pretty sure Alligators aren't supposed to go that far out from land) and this game's idea of fun cooperate group content; attacking a fort. You remember that thing you had to do in Black Flag in order to clear up some routes, and you endured it only because you got to do a cool raiding section after you destroyed that huge health bar? What if they took away the raiding bit? Even boarding ships is done through cutscenes; why does this game feel like you're playing chauffeur for an AI that gets to do all the real fun? 

So the feedback to this announcement? It's what modern outlets tend to call 'mixed'; which means it is widely hated and spat-on by just about anyone who was actually holding out their hopes for this game. Everytime there's a space-sim game set entirely on the ship I'm called the weirdo for wanting to explore that universe on foot, but it seems pirates is the one medium where we can all reach a common ground. There's just too much of the pirate fantasy lure which exists outside of simply blowing other ships to pieces with canons to make this proposition desirable, especially when there's a cheaper and more established game already out there which grants exactly that missing lure. Right now, the only advantage that Skull and Bones has is it's realistic art style compared to Sea of Thieves cartoonish look; but that just means it's visuals are going to age poorly. That is, even more poorly than the character models already have.

Ubisoft made several gambles with the new dull version of the Skull and Bones which was teased, and it seems they made the wrong bet every single time. I can't pretend to be someone who was ever seriously interested in Skull and Bones, even as a flat competitive multiplayer game like what it seemed to be at announcement; but even I have to gawk at how off-the-mark this new direction feels. And now the release date has been marked, the game has been in development too long to warrant a reworking, we're stuck with a game that's going to underwhelm. And it's coming out the day before 'God of War: Ragnarok' too? Jeez, this is Titanfall 2 and Mad Max all over again... Let's remember in the post mortem of this game, which I'm expecting by about November 10th, that it wasn't the release window that killed this game, it was the flawed product itself.