Is it too late for Skull and Bones?

 Yes.

You are Yves Guillemot. I know- horror of horrors, but just play along with my little thought experiment for a bit, will ya? You have in your hand the key to unlimited riches, a franchise that people will pay through the nose for, and yet for some reason you can't help but dabble in ways to seize for more. How do you temper your worst impulses when they have become most all that you are? It's the curse of the rich, it's never enough. To be fair, that illness effects all of humanity from the most lavish to the poorest, not one person can ever be happy with their lot. It's the same reason why the Neo-Assyrian king Ashurbanipal used to task his people with walking onto the streets and telling the citizens wild tales about lions he had slayed with his bare hands. Actual fake news propaganda gibberish originating from a deeply insecure man to whom all his world was his oyster. There's no such thing as being content, and Yves Guillemot is slowly learning that when you surrender enough to those avaristic compulsions, the slap back can be dire.

Did his company need to accept a grant from the Singaporean government in order to create an online spin-off to the ship-sections of the popular Assassin's Creed game, Black Flag? Of course not. But they absolutely did. And ever since then that game has hung like a noose around the necks of Ubisoft, a daily reminder of the coming disaster that they cannot avoid and really don't need right now given the general state of disarray the company has been exhibiting of late. Of course let me be clear- the ship sections of Black Flag were hugely fun and people loved them to bits; but they also wore themselves off before the end of the game for how frequent they were. I know this because the Assassin's Creed games have tried to reinstate them as staples of the Assassin's Creed formula several times since, in Origins and Odyssey, and everytime it just seems to grate at the audience more and more. So turning that into a premise of an entire sperate spin-off game? Well, that's definitely more brave of a choice than I would ever make for the company.

I think for me the real issue with the idea of Skull and Bones is that it was invented at a time when there was a real gap in the market for a Pirate-themed game. Love for the 'golden age' of pirates roared back into the mind of the modern youth with the success of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies; everybody wanted a pirate game to capture the dream of becoming the audacious yet humbly quirky Captain Jack Sparrow and embarking on countless death defying adventures like he did. I'm pretty sure most every kid of that age played at least one of the largely mediocre movie tie in games and sighed with the thought "If only this wasn't utter trash." (To be fair, I actually liked the first Pirates game at the time because I really was that young once.) But that is not a void which has festered totally unanswered in the years since. Plenty of other developers tried their hand at living up to the fantasy and, much to the disappointment of the Ubisoft team I'd imagine, one already released.

Sea of Thieves is the pirate fantasy brought to life. It's done in a highly stylised fashion, perhaps, but with all the hallmarks that one would want. Fantastical adventurous creatures to battle with, co-operative framework to pilot ships together, vague party game mechanics for social players and a free-form approach to play that encourages the consumer to make their own fun within a robust and comprehensive sandbox. It's a very refined game that has been steadily supported by the developers and the community ever since release, and even though the game is perhaps no longer the belle of the ball, every Pirate fantasist out there has their copy of Sea of Thieves and therefore simply must compare it against any other sea-faring pirate experience due out. Just as how Wildermyth beat Ken Levine to the punch of a story-flexible narrative and now his upcoming game is inevitably going to be compared with Wildermyth on a narrative level, Skull and Bones is going to have to butt up against Sea of Thieves to prove it's worth in the games market. And I know who I'm not putting money behind regarding that dust up! 

But Skull and Bones can't really shy away from the fight, else the Signapore government will ask for their Grant back and Yves has already spent that on hush money for all the harassed women he's helped cover up in- oh come on, that isn't slander! (Slander is spoken, in print it's libel.) People who have been waiting for Skull and Bones had their perception of what a good pirate game feels like dictated to them by the Sea of Thieves team over at Rare, which is a problem for Ubisoft when Skull and Bones doesn't, by the previews we've already seen, seem able to match-up to that vision. For one, Skull and Bones totally walked back on all of it's mythical elements in favour of a boring straight pirate game set somewhere in the Indian Ocean, similar to what Black Flag already delivered. For two, Skull and Bones features no substantive on-ground gameplay, which is arguably half the fun of being a pirate; and for three the initial MMO-style pitch seems to have been peeled back bit by bit with each re-reveal of the game to the point where this could be a peer-to-peer deathmatch game at this point and no one would know until launch.

However the team could hide behind the fact that this is just the general perception that people have when looking at Skull and Bones. Nobody really had any empirical evidence confirming that this game was a boring, uninspired waste-of-effort that is being dragged on the development team against the wills of everyone involved. Well, at least we couldn't say that until the playtest reactions for Skull and Bones started to get leaked out into the public. Getting such great responses as "There wasn't a single point in my hours of gameplay I felt any fun" is pretty much the worst feedback imaginable as a designer. If people can't even see a whisper of a good time in your idea, it might be time to go back to the drawing board. But if there's one thing Skull and Bones has pretty much expended itself on, it's spare time.

From what the testers appear to be saying, the Skull and Bones title lacks anything unique or interesting in it's premise that will help it last longer than half a year out in the wild. This is at a time where the games industry as a whole is genuinely starting to become sick of the endless live services out in the world and thus are abandoning them one by one. It was just recently revealed that Multiversus is suffering the effects of player fall-off after an entire season during which Marvin the Martian was the only new character brought to the game. As you can imagine, when Multiversus is feeling the brunt of a flagging market, soaring star that it once was, that can only mean grim tides for all the other pretenders. And Multiversus actually had a USP; Skull and Bones has nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.

So it is too late for Skull and Bones at this point? Too late to work on the feedback, too late to identify a gap in the market and steer their ship towards it, too late to come out and be a success that the Ubisoft offices really need right now? Yes, absolutely, unquestionably, yes. It seems that years of middling titles and repetitive pitches and design philosophies has started to wane when inflicted upon industry typically defined by creativity, and Ubisoft's own bad decisions have backed them into a corner with a bad game, destined to dry up in no time flat, after a year of cancellations and dropped market value. (And Watch_Dogs Legion was a literal personal insult aimed at me. I will not let that game's mediocrity go as long as I live.) I genuinely never thought I'd be saying this about a company as seemingly unshakable as Ubisoft- but we may be looking at the beginning of the end. Or maybe the middle- Assassin's Creed Unity was the beginning.