It's too late for this now, of course, but this is a lament for what could have been. It’s funny, all this nonsense around Skull & Bones, until it isn’t. Yet still, the devs toil away in an environment that is likely becoming more difficult by the day. Reading about the frenetic development environment, and seeing the game go through multiple delays, it’s difficult to imagine Skull & Bones will be any good, and that’s before you even get to the fact it has probably missed its window. She’s right, which makes all the information about Skull & Bones so much worse. Recently, our own Jade King wrote about Skull & Bones feeling out of place in modern gaming, with the live-service world moving on and Sea of Thieves already dominating the virtual high seas.
This is the ridiculous reality behind Skull & Bones. Then years into your work, someone wanders into the room and says “I don’t know… maybe it would be better if you played as a boat in this thing?” The game that could be your biggest ever title.
Imagine working on a project like Skull & Bones - a huge triple-A game with the backing of Ubisoft, fresh off the success of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag. Related: If The Activision Blizzard Lawsuit Shocks You, You Haven't Been Paying Attention The investigation into Skull & Bones also revealed that several Singaporean developers felt there had been a ceiling placed upon their progression within the company - a ceiling that does not exist for French developers, they allege. Ubisoft came under fire for various workplace scandals last year, mostly involving some form of harassment. It’s easy to mock Ubisoft for this, but it’s important to remember that individual people are involved in making this game, being pulled in several different directions at once, with no end in sight. Three years after it was supposed to be in our hands, it’s finally in a vaguely playable state. This game was initially supposed to launch in 2018 - in mid-2021, it just passed Alpha. It’s difficult to oversell how chaotic Skull & Bones is as an entity - and it’s not chaotic in the fun pirate ship kind of way either. But it never needed to be that way, especially when Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag was sitting right there. It has had such a strange, drawn-out development process, and those recent reports also reveal that, predictably, this process has been toxic in places too. This week, we got a boatload of information about Skull & Bones, including the bizarre reveals that years into development, the team was still deciding whether you would play as the pirate or the boat, and that because of a deal with the Singaporean government, Ubisoft has essentially been forced to continue with the game.