Skull and Bones- still trucking?

There's nothing more sad than a failed shot at glory that just doesn't die. Failure is it's own hit, sharp and lingering, but it grows on you. Grows with you. In time, a failure can be the bedrock of success. I mean... it's never really been that way for me but- that's what people say, right? But when you dangle it on the end of your nose and wave it about pretending it's the prime belladonna of the party- then you have people around you staring and asking the tough questions. Such as- is the Singaporean government making you do this? You'd think they have enough on their plate with everything going on over there, but apparently even with a total upheaval of government steaming Ubisoft's hams is just too good to forget about. I get it. If I had them on a leash like that I'd definitely make them dance. 

Of course I speak of 'Skull and Bones' Ubisoft's answer to... the very idea of competency, I guess. Entering a Pirate game landscape holding burnished goods that vaguely resembled the fantasy people flock to these myths for, only to be outdone by the untimely release of it's vastly superior competitor... Six years beforehand. Seriously, what kind of chunk out of the market did Ubisoft really expect to bite? A Live Service (Oh those are always winners!) ship only (because Pirates are just anthro-ships when you break it down) grind driven (delicate gameplay systems cobbled together by half-addled rhinos) MMO-lite. Or you could just get Sea of Thieves, the swashbuckling pirate sandbox game- now on Playstation too. I wonder how much attention these games rake in on Twitch... right now Sea of Thieves is looking at a just shy of 4,000 viewers and Skull and Bones has... 13. Huh. Yeah, I don't think this made the splash they thought it would.

Skull and Bones was already a poor proposition off the bat, but Ubisoft went out of their way to ensure the game would do the absolute worst by limiting it's reach on the platform that was probably the most interested- PC. How? Why, by selling it exclusively on a platform that wasn't the single biggest PC retailer on the market. Now, Ubisoft have held their games hostage on Uplay long enough that they do actually have a sizeable audience of PC players that are trained like beaten dogs to limp to their servers come new game release- but that audience was never going to be strong enough to compete with Steam- hence why they've been slowly releasing their older and newer games on the real platform, and hence why the very same is happening with Skull and Bones.

That's right- the realm of the dreaded 'User review' is going to be getting their hands on Skull and Bones and this could turn into the greatest moment of exposure for a game that literally no one cares about- it could be the very moment it achieves that tiny core audience who lack enough respect for themselves to leech onto the game- or it could be a moment of PR disaster where all the world is alerted to just how dismissive Skull and Bones is. Now we know the power of user reviews on publishers, you can bet that an unsatisfied public are going to get vocal- but that's just the gamble that Ubisoft need to make if they're going to squeeze one last bit of profit out of this game before it slithers off the timeline like a particularly Vitamin C-starved serpent. (That last simile was rough even for me.)

And here's the thing- we know where all of this is going to end. Skull and Bones was never the kind of property with legs under it. The very idea of a pirate themed MMO only ever appealed to a small subset of players who, for some reason, trusted Ubisoft to see it to fruition. Others went 'sure, but what are you going to do differently', and Ubisoft never could answer that. Different map? Assassin's Creed Rogue already did that. Different gameplay? Ubisoft spent the next half-dozen games slowly worsening ship combat in pursuit of exactly that. It was only when we got our hands on the game that it became clear- all Skull and Bones offered over Assassin's Creed Black Flag was a worse grind. Which is... I mean it sure fits the MMO spirit to be sure- but I'm not sure that was what people expected when it came to 'enriching' the experience.

So Skull and Bones is going to be pulled before it's time. We've seen it happen countless times with this age of the Live Service- and even though I think Skull and Bones might have secured a few more sales than it rightly deserved- it still landed with an minuscule blip of a splash. Hardly anyone covers the game, the official reddit is dead most times of the day (8 members online on a Friday afternoon? Seriously?) and the most discourse you see on the game in the public space is people wandering exactly what I am- why is this game still alive? Although to be fair, I guess game preservationists would laud the effort to keep the servers running given that premature game delisting is something they so vehemently abhor. 

Until then the game is actually going through at least one full support cycle, with updates and events and the whole nine yards- which is kinda funny when you think about it. Modern RPG Assassin's Creed games are treated like Live Services with similar incessant support structures, but the tailor-made Live Service gets less engagement with the exact same level of interaction- it makes one wonder why they even bother. To which I have no answers, merely speculation, that ol' daddy Singapore is waiting still with a baseball bat outside their offices making sure this deal is seen through to completion. Tell me I'm wrong, Ubisoft- Tell me I'm wrong. 

Just kill it

Oh Ubisoft- you funny!

"The constraints of my deal, surely have a backdoor!" - Yves Guillemot, probably.

It's barely been a few weeks since the launch of Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League and already the game is losing steam. The shock factor of how blatantly and callously it achieves it's name sake is undercut by how lacking in core content the game is and how unworthy of the Rocksteady brand it appears to be: such to the extent that people are going back to relieve their fond memories of Arkham Knight more than they are playing the new Suicide Squad according to Steam charts. Which would be an ingenious way to boost past games sales if it weren't for the millions of invested revenue into the mess of a new game compounded by the probable loss of future profits from the lost customer trust that this failure has resulted in. And now as if to put the matter slowly to sleep, the very next doomed-to-fail game is rearing it's way our direction at mach speed.

There hasn't been much on my end to talk about when it comes to the old awaited multiplayer pirate game 'Skull and Bones', and that's probably because even as far Live Services go- the game feels so Ubisoft-ingly generic that there's nothing worth discussing. Although given recent preview events I guess there has been some general updates from the crowd that would actually be in to this kind of game, and not just the old curmudgeons like me who spend our time throwing banana skins at Ubisoft everytime they take the stage. ("BOOO! Get off the stage! Where's the show-man ship? Where's all the finesse?") And the feedback? Actually a lot better than I expected. Not glowing, but it seems there's something of a sub-standard Ubisoft game here to play- which is more than enough to satisfy the entertainment starved prisoners that Ubisoft call their audience.

I mean the early game looks a bit rough, but there's enough going on at the endgame to at least sink a few mirthless hours into before you realise your heart stopped beating several hours ago- which is about my experience with most single player Ubisoft games so I'd say this one is right on track. It's still a niche product entering a much despised genre at a time when people are good and done with all of it's crap- but a small game like this might get a few pity players from the kind of folk who have had no recent pirate games to sink their teeth into except for 'Sea of Thieves'. Not that this game really captures all the wonder of 'piracy', what with it's ship-only focus- but I concur. Games like this can find a little bit of footing when they go around for a nice 20-30 dollars. Hmm? It's 70? Oh dear...

Yes, I realise that 70 is the price point that most developers think is acceptable, and though I take that as an excuse to clean up my back catalogue whilst I wait for all the storefronts to come to their damned senses- in their twisted and warped logic the 70$ dollar tag is a stamp of exclusive luxury. You spend the most on the highest value products, afterall. However, there does come some expectation of delivery when you make such a promise. You can't just deliver average slop and call it a 70$ game without getting a bit of a clap back now! And there comes a point where putting a price tag like that might as well be erecting your own great wall of China around your game and then wondering why there's no player base. What on earth could justify that?

"Skanks & Banks" was actually brought up at a recent investor call with that price tag called under scrutiny by someone with a working frontal cortex, unfortunately it would be someone lamentably without who rose to assuage him. CEO, and professional gaslighter extraordinaire, Yves Guillemot donned his most tacky snake-oiled stained top hat for this one. "It's a really full, triple- Quadruple-A Game that will deliver in the long run" the con man said, presumably whilst nervously fidgeting with the brim of his top hat and traying to avoid direct eye contact. What a hilariously nonsensical lie to spit out before your investors- just so that everyone will know exactly who to blame when they're out of pocket.

The whole 'AAA' scene is something of a populist construct anyway, but to go one step beyond and in doing so basically call Skulls & Bones the single most ambitious game ever made- that takes some brass iron balls. At least when Microsoft made the same head-scratching claim, it was at the founding of a studio they intended to feed unlimited funds into- with hopes of creating the a studio that spat out first party exclusives like tommy gun ammunition. Of course, that was another instance of jumping the gun, as the Initiative has gone so silent in the past few years I'm just assuming they've all been Isekai-ed to the Goblin Slayer universe or Viziepop's Hell or somewhere else equally as inescapable. Now the very concept is little more than a joke.

Why stop at four? Why not make the next game a Hundred A game? Why not give their next game an A for every employee abuse scandal that Yves Guillemot covers up during the game's production cycle? That sounds like it would be fun- no? Give it a million A's- and release with a day-one ultimate game of the century edition! Sky's the limit when you don't give a toss! And of course, all this underpins the fact that no one seems to have ever had faith in this cockroach of a game. This vaguely indestructible little Tardigrade game who's been watched over it's entire formative life by it's mommy and daddy, baseball-bat wielding enforcers of the Singaporean government. Maybe the AAAA is just the scream of frustration the team let out everytime they remember they have to release the game eventually.

This is gonna be my year. I just feel it. No- not the year where things are gonna go my way in some formative, life changing way- something much better. This is going to be the year I finally live to see my arch-nemesis struggle and die under the weight of it's combined mediocrity. Live Services', with their mask cracked and their robes bloodied from the effluence of the several backstabs these games have performed upon themselves- collapsed in a dying heap whilst we all watch over. Perhaps the genre will throw one last hail mary before the year is out- grasp upon our sleeve and beg for one last chance- a revolutionary new step forward towards a peaceful future where players and Live Services can live in harmony. And it will be with astounding amounts of forgiving dignity and saint-like magnanimity, that I will glance down and whisper "No" whilst watching the light leave their eyes. Yeah, I really hate Live Services.

Here comes the 'Ubisoft boat game'

 Thank you, auto suggest

Can I just start by saying how in love I am with the fact that when my memory failed me and I went to the search bar- the words 'Ubisoft boat game' were suggested to me in order to jog the old noodle. God, isn't that just beautiful? 'Skull and Bones' is the damn thing's name, and guess what? It's got a release date. Woopty doo. It only took them... 10 years of being chased by the Singaporean government before Ubisoft realised they couldn't sweep this one under the rug for a single moment more, and our prize? Well we get to see what it is that the company have been so darned ashamed to show us! And heck, once that's out the way the Ubisoft nagging force can fully combine their efforts into forcing another showing of that darned 'Beyond Good and Evil 2' game they're crossing their fingers and hoping the world is about to forget about. We don't forget, U- we just get more ravenous!

I don't know who's bright idea it was to show off nothing of the Boat Game throughout Ubisoft's event showcase earlier this year and then to cram a release date announcement in the middle of the Game Awards and expect anyone to remember- hey, actually- maybe the entire point is that people don't remember! Perhaps this is another situation of the puppy trying to sweep it's faeces under the rug so the owner never finds out about it! Well I'm afraid that ship has already sailed, U. (Oh, look at me- I did a pun!) The course they've set to wring the very blood out of each and every franchise their company has been unluckily enough to be lumped with is a disaster of an artform that I just cannot tear my eyes away from. And given the bizarre amount of coverage this game regularly receives despite the relative lack of enthusiasm towards it- this disaster tourism fascination is not unique to me in the slightest.

Sea of- no wait... Skull and Bones! (Nailed it.) Snakes and Brakes started life as a DLC for Assassin's Creed Black Flag, wherein it very much should have stayed because since then the idea seems to have ruined itself more and more as time goes on. There's a little trick to game development- you're not developing for the audience of today, but the audience of three year's time. That is to say, if you chase what's big today, the chances are you're going to be stuck releasing a survival game after the general world is bored to death of the survival formula. There was some genuine lightning in a bottle caught when the Ubisoft creators came up with the idea of pirate simulation gameplay, realised in AC4. It has been a decade since then. Sea of Thieves has come along since then. It's no longer a novel concept. People aren't going to be impressed by just another simulator, they'll want innovation. And if there is one word that drains the colour from Ubisoft's skin, sucks the breath from their cheeks and runs the hair white- it's innovation. And Singapore, I guess.

Oh did I mention the grant? I always talk about it but that's just because it's such a funny topic! Ubisoft, morons that they are, accepted a grant from the Singaporean government in order to make this game that they weren't prepared to make. As such they are obligated to deliver something else, and if they don't they can be accused of embezzling a government grant and sued- which is so delightfully fitting I don't know what to say. I'm sure they could bite the bullet and announce the project floundered, but man would that look terrible the next time they go begging some third party investor to pay them to waste time! Stuck between their own hubris and greed, Ubisoft higher-ups have locked their workers into a project being developed for an absent audience, fed a revolving door of seemingly unenthused developers, with a seemingly endless timeline for development. It is a wonder the game is coming at all.

But again, should it really? See the thing about the pirate mythos, the dream of living as a pirate, it's that all the really cool stuff is made up of treasure hunting, sword fighting, swinging across the galleys, singing sea shanties and just about everything that this game is not going to provide. It might as well just be a ship-based arena fighter- actually, it pretty much just is. Captains are merely cosmetic canvasses that Ubisoft can sell their microtransactions to, the increasingly lacklustre spectacle of blowing up ships at sea is supposed to be what drags everyone in. And from there we have another point of contention, for out of everyone that still follows the game literally no one can shake hands on what it is they even want out of the game.

On one hand, Ubisoft seem moralistically married to historical accuracy in their very identity, and on the otherhand they've always hated bringing the stingy accuracy of the Assassin's Creed settings to their other franchises. Such to the extent that they've started losing sight of it even in Assassin's Creed itself. And today I see fans complaining that the game is looking too fantastical with it's depiction of period fortifications and weaponry, whilst others moan that Ubisoft are playing things too boring and not giving into the crazy mythos of Pirates. No Jolly Rodgers, crazy ships and Gum Gum Fruits. Wait- scrap that last one. There was even a period of time when Ubisoft seemed to hint the game would feature aquatic monsters like the mythical kraken, before that idea was torn apart by warring sides of the potential fan base. There is no consensus to reach!

And in the middle of it all is a game that is compromised to it's core most level for the very plain fact that in order to survive on a basic level it has to be shaped in that most sickly of forms- a Live Service. Yes, Ubisoft want this to be one of the several thousand other games that are competing for every single moment of you life everyday forever- and somehow Ubisoft expect to seriously win the competition against everyone else who are more experienced at it, have established loyal fans and demonstrated market dominance. This is destined to become the next multiplayer Ubisoft game killed in a year just like that cool looking shooter they had called... it was... damn it- what was it again? Hyper Scape! Why did that take so long to look up?

I am excited to watch the coming train wreck, but not because I care about this game. I want to see the carnage, feel the flames, sigh and move on. The same way that everyone has moved on. And honestly, I want to start seeing the next disaster that Ubisoft have cooking up, because that is a developer that has delivered nothing but turds recently. Come February next year you'll be saluting the Titanic 2 on it's maiden voyage and taking bets with the rest of us on how many icebergs it'll plow through before the whole thing capsizes. And it will be a funeral that no one will cry at. What a legacy for France's premium development studio. This is what Napoleon got himself exiled for? For shame, Ubisoft, for shame! 

Skull and Bones: The invisible game

 Go away Spectre! We gave you a Beta, what more do you want?

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. 

Just give up on Skull and Bones already!

Where did all the magic go?

What are we doing, Ubisoft? Are we just going around in circles at this point? If a normal, sensible, developer turned around and told me that their game needed an extra 3 months in the oven to really be perfected I wouldn't even think it worthy of an update beyond mentioning the shift in expectations now that the upcoming slate of releases is different. Because that's normal, sensible almost; to realise that the first impression is the most important and your team could do with an extra little stretch of concerted work effort to slap on that final sheen before game-time. I actually respect the heck out of that; game developers having the foresight to spot how a extra few months can put on those final few finishing flourishes are becoming rare in a world coming to be ruled by deadlines and release windows. But when that very same game has been kicking around the studio for nearly ten years now... I get a bit fed up. Just rip off the bandage, why don't you? Let us all know how this is going to inevitably suck, please don't make us wait anymore; I don't care if code strings are hanging off the input menu strong enough to slip us into the backrooms; we know how this is going to go so what's with all the pageantry?

Because let's call that spade exactly what it is; any game that crosses the eight year mark of development is a calamity just waiting to be released on an unsuspecting world. Just look at Duke Nukem Forever; a game so dated it had to be wheeled on in front of the masses like Hector Salamanca! Beyond Good and Evil 2 is so delayed that the studio are too scared to even show us the state that mess is in! The only games that have managed to come out with something decent to show for it would be the 10 year development of Final Fantasy XV; which somehow still ended up feeling like it had a rushed second half of the game and Cyberpunk 2077; who's many faults are very well documented, not least of all by me. There comes a point where the lack of direction is so prevalent and rank that nothing short of a total reboot and reassessment of what it is you even want to do with the idea is going to resolve the development hell. And I think that is literally the one step that no one in Ubisoft has brave enough to take.

I mean, come on: Who is this game even going to be for? Once upon a time it could have been for fans of the pirate ship combat portions of Assassin's Creed Black Flag (even though the actual cinematic scope of the action was better realised in Assassin's Creed III) but after several games of that same ship combat somehow worming it's way into every possible time period the time that Ubisoft could think of, I think it's safe to say that Assassin's fans have grown bored with the concept. Those who want to live the fantasy of being a pirate are going find themselves hitting up against a wall once they realise that this pirate game features none of the swash buckling and all of the delegation of being a pirate captain. (So we don't even get to swing a sword? Not even in private?) And people just interested in exploring the famous Caribbean seas renowned for being the stage of that mythical golden era of piracy... sorry, this game is set in the Indian Ocean. So yeah...

At some point you really need to just throw away all of this tip-toeing around the crux of the matter and really confront the issue; what the hell is Skull and Bones even still on the Ubisoft docket for? I mean sure, we're talking about a company that is absolutely petrified of the concept of doing something new and/or different with their games and so an idea that literally just recycles systems they've already made must sound like heaven to the team. But at some point there's got to be a cost-versus-reward write up. There's no way that Skull and Bones is going to do well enough to recoup the development cost, both in money and wrapped up man-power, over it's near decade of development, unless the game becomes a world wide mega hit. And I hate to say it to Ubisoft's face: This is not going to be a world wide mega hit.

The game had the slight attention of those interested in that sort of mythos a while ago back when there was a heart of the fantastical and fictional world of sea exploration beating at the center of this project. But since then Skull and Bones has been rebooted so many times that the product being worked on today looks to be entirely exorcized of all that mythical intrigue by the root. Some have even moaned about the visual design of the ships themselves too, which seem to have leaned closer towards historical accuracy over visual pleasantries in an odd send-up to the historical obsession of Assassin's Creed. Ubisoft doesn't need another pseudo-historical game franchise; they need something new and interesting that takes some damn risks!

Usually these are rhetorical cries to the heavens that go unanswered by studios allergic to ever being upfront and honest, but today there appears to genuinely be a solution to the riddle: why hasn't this game be canned? According to a senior editor at Kotaku; the lion share of development is being done at Ubisoft Singapore for a very specific reason. Ubisoft has a subsidy agreement with the Singapore government that mandates the development and release of some sort of product to justify the grant. That's right, Ubisoft literally have no choice but to push a game that has ignited no one's hearts and which is, in the long run, probably going to cost them a red line on their balance sheet once this is all said and done. (Talk about a rock and a hard place!)

It just goes to show you the funny and weird side of game development that we never quite hear much about once it gets swept into the broad catch-all curtain of 'board room politics'. I imagine Ubisoft were initially quite chuffed to have the Singaporean government dish out their development costs; only to be saddled with this disease of a project for a decade whilst the team desperately figure out what they want to do with it. Reports from devs who have left that game and company evoke images of Anthem to my mind. Unclear visions that shift with the winds, prolonged development periods wherein teams don't know what the hell they're doing, heel-turn choices made on a dime upending work; this is your perfect blueprint of a development hell cycle.

But we're reaching the very end of the line at this point. There's only so far that Ubisoft can push it back, and whilst recent impressions have rather predictably come up very lukewarm on the game, at least they'll be able to offload this wart on their active development slate so they can someday move onto that next wart: BGE2. It does seem that they are actually hopeful to make a little bit of money off the thing for their trouble, else they wouldn't have pulled this whole delay in order to push themselves away from the launch of God of War Ragnarok, which would have been the next day with their initial release date. Who knows; maybe Ubisoft really will prove us all wrong and revolutionise the industry with their embarrassingly audience-less ship fighting pirate-kinda game. But I've been watching the trend of the gaming market enough to be able to guess... this game is heading the way of Babylon's Fall. (I bet it'll last a least a year longer before the servers get pulled.) 

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.

Skull & Bones & Never-ending Development

"You just don't know when to die, do you?"

The grave seems full of projects that outpaced the ambitions of their creators, the wallets of their producers, or just the patience of their investors. For every game that makes it to market there are at least 9 that fell off somewhere along the way, they usually just fall off so early that they never make it to pre-production, let alone to marketing. But I suppose if your name is Ubisoft and you make your games by recycling your previous ones, it must be pretty easy to throw yourself down a development tract too quickly and rush to the silver screen before you even know what you have. That's the only reason, at least that I can see, for Ubisoft currently being the only Modern Day company juggling 2 ludicrously delayed AAA projects that are still up for debate regarding whether they're even still alive or not. Just when you write one off and finish the eulogy, it bursts out the grave like a zombie and snatches a quick headline before sinking back into obscurity for another 12 months. Not too long ago that game was Beyond Good and Evil 2. Today it's Skull and Bones.

Skull and Bones, if the years have made you forget, was a proposition by Ubisoft: How would you like to see that comprehensive ship-combat from Assassin's Creed Black Flag wholesale lifted and dropped in a multiplayer competitive environment? (Albeit, without the disembarking and boarding which made that system so revolutionary in the first place) Now of course there are plenty out there with as-of-yet unfulfilled pirate dreams bubbling in their core and thus this game seemed somewhat destined for a cult following ever since it's first announcement. Personally I thought that, whilst the system was brilliant upon it's first reveal (which was actually Assassin's Creed III, but people forget that) it had become significantly less impressive each and every entry it appeared in, and the idea of being forced to work with it for an entire game without any normal Assassin work to distract sounded torturous. But I am a self confessed spoilsport, so I'll accept myself to be the outlier in this case. Most people want the pirate game and a pirate game they shall get. Or at least, they were supposed to get.

Even as an amateur observer with no real concept of the sorts of lengths that go into game design, how long do you think it would take to put together a game like this? Based upon systems that have already been built, in the same engine as those systems, most of the work is really going into building working net code and some newer assets and map building. Certainly it's not a game that's going to make itself by any stretch of the imagination, but you're not exactly working from scratch, now are you? With that in mind, I'd say around two years seems like the upper limit, to make something working and enjoyable. It's been four years! And that's four years since the announcement, so it probably has been worked on just a little bit before that as well. (Unless Ubisoft have gotten into the habit of publicly announcing the start of preproduction- which would actually explain a lot now I think about it.) So the question must be asked; what in the ever-loving heck is going on with this ostensibly simple game?

Well recent reports have arisen regarding the 'progress' of Skull and Bones and let's just say they've been more than a little illuminating for why this game is steadily reaching FFXV levels of delay without a modicum of the ambition to show for it. Firstly, I was right about the development reaching back further than 4 years; apparently this game has been in some form of 'development' for 8 years, and has only now hit Alpha. Secondly, Skull and Bones has fallen victim to one of the most predicable demons I can imagine all Ubisoft projects are subject to: Indecision about what the heck they were even making. What was once a Multiplayer mode for Blackflag turned into a standalone project and is know a rare unicorn across the development mythos, rivalled in legend only by that 'Lego Star Wars The Skywalker Saga' game which I've been waiting on forever. (I refuse to see episode 8 and 9 until I've played them in Lego form.)

I would think that when you're studio ethos is formed around the retreading of your own steps time and time again, the very prospect of doing something slightly out of the norm is enough to hopelessly gum the works and send teams spiralling. Not to mention that this game would have been in development around about the time that infamous wastrel we've talked about before was still in charge of greenlighting projects based on his pin-prick view of the industry trends. In that light it's actually remarkable this Multiplayer spin-off-kinda game is still in production at all, even if not entirely commendable when you think the amount of wasted work must have gone towards the several remakes the staff have had to weather. Oh yeah, the report also details several total revisions this game has undergone. (This whole thing just reads like step-by-step directions to development hell.)

Some of my favourite highlights from these the revisions was the almost philosophical question that kept team up at night, (and which undoubtedly held up development on those notes) to the tune of "Do you play the pirate or the pirate ship." (Oh, that's a brain teaser!) To which the answer should have been pretty obvious, it's a vehicle combat game thus you play as the ship, but when it comes to where the focus perspective of the game is and how customisations are crafted and sold, you can see why it's still a conversation that needed to be had. Apparently there was even one version of the game, the one that was teased in the 2018 gameplay footage, wherein there world be an exploration zone between competitive battling. But that was scrapped? Wait, hang on- that was the game which Ubisoft advertised up until now, the one they've provided no indication of having changed... then what the heck even is Skull and Bones nowadays anyway?

Teams have come and gone from the game and it seems like there's more former developers than active ones at this point, which may be why it's so easy to come across waggling tongues I suspect. At the end of the day these troubles come down to a lack of unifying vision at the heart of this project, which is what I feel like has been Ubisoft's problem for more than a decade now. They haven't made anything original because they lack anyone with the leadership and authority to helm a ship, and thus have retreated to following guidelines drawn out by a Ubisoft of the past, a Ubisoft that knew what it was doing. Still, this game has managed to hold on through a tempest of turmoil and though it lacks a release date, or any recent official news for the past two years, it's still listed on the official slate. Right next to Beyond Good and Evil 2 however, which got it's first original trailer 13 years ago; so take that for what it's worth.

Inexplicably, Ubisoft are still deadset on backing this horse, like they've put their heart and soul behind a game which, let's be honest, is pretty niche anyway. I can't imagine this game having much of a life to it in the best case scenario, unless it really takes off by the unknowable winds of internet favor, so this almost decade long development cycle almost seems doom-ridden at this point. But as one developer noted, if any other studio were involved this game would have been killed off 8 times over, and I have to agree: were I in the position I would have killed development before the first trailer. Whether through obstinate determination or, more likely, rank incompetence on the part of Ubisoft leadership, this little game has been the title that could, and now that it's finally hit Alpha I'd say chances are very good this game will actually make it to market! (I shouldn't be as shocked to say that as I am.) Now I feel, through the law of Anime underdogs, inclined to actually route for it; thus I'll be devastated when, after all this effort, the game doesn't pick up a following and shutters after one year. (I jest, that won't happen. Probably.)