I played the 'Skull and Bones' ENDGAME early...

well everyone I'm just as surprised as you are to be talking about Skull and Bones once again I've played this game a handful of times and each time I leave a little less enthused than when I went in and yet Ubisoft keeps inviting me back so I'm going to keep playing the game every chance I get and hope that maybe it changes my mind one of these days but this one was was different a couple of weeks ago I was invited to An Early Access preview event for Skull and Bones where I got to play Four to 5 hours of the game that specific specifically focused on the end game so the profiles we were playing with were leveled as if we had played quote unquote dozens and dozens and dozens of hours of the title yeah they wouldn't say exactly how far into the game this was like was this 200 hours in or was this 30 hours in cuz I was trying to figure out like how long is the base game expected to be but they wouldn't say all they would say is that this was dozens and dozens of hours into the game so make of that what you will but the point is that this was the endgame content this is what you're expected to do after you finish the base game for weeks and weeks and months and months as this game carries into the future into multiple seasons and Beyond and at the outset I do want to give Ubisoft a little bit of credit here I have not been light on this game I've been pretty harsh and yet they continue to invite me to these preview events to try and convince me the game is actually worth playing that's pretty admirable as far as I'm concerned especially in a day and age where having a negative opinion of a game can mean that you get blacklisted from that publisher indefinitely the most notable case of this is when I called Bethesda game studios evil for what they did with Fallout 76 and then they just didn't respond to any emails for like five years so it's it's not necessarily a given that having a negative opinion of a game will get you like blacklisted but it is technically possible and granted I called them evil I can understand why they didn't really want to talk to me I get it but it's because it was kind of evil I'm just going to say it the point is I think Ubisoft deserves some credit for still trying to give skeptical boys like me a chance to try the game and to try and convince us that this is actually really good because if they were successful and if they could show me that Skull and Bones was actually really good that would mean a whole lot more to you guys than if they were able to convince like a fanboy who's been trying to hype this game up for a decade basically that the game was good it wouldn't mean much but if I said that it was really good I think that would potentially carry more weight for people since had to do a lot more work to win me over and what I will say is that this is the best showing I've seen from Skull and Bones this was a time where I actually felt like the game was shown properly or at least ideally because you were just focused on pirate stuff just to give you a little recap at the previous Skull and Bones event that I attended they gave us access to the early game and in the early game you actually spend a good amount of time just sailing around collecting different resour ources using these little mini games chopping wood or harvesting a certain type of plant or working to mine a certain type of ore and this was really frustrating for me because it felt like I was playing a pirate game and yet I was focused on tedium that would be a little bit much even for something like an animal crossing game like seriously I'm playing as a pirate and yet I'm just sailing around chopping down trees like what is this but in this play test we only did pirate stuff and that seems to be what they want you to do later in the game they bypass all of the busy work and instead you're just focused on the part of the game that honestly you would have expected the entire game to be built around which is being a pirate there were a handful of different types of missions that we got to do I'll go through each of them briefly now but overall I felt like some of these were big hits and others were total misses there were these Siege missions where basically you just sail around shooting at towers and then fighting off waves of ships that come in as you attack The Fortress it's a little bit underwhelming and at least in like Assassin's Creed Black Flag and Rogue if you were doing something like this you could dock your ship hop out and then go fight hand to hand within the encampment or base but in this case there's nothing like that you just kind of sail in circles while enemy ships come in close to you and then you shoot the tower and you just end up going in circles for extended periods of time it's a little bit underwhelming honestly and these were missions that we played as a party of three and honestly they were generally pretty boring in fact after a couple of hours of gameplay the Ubisoft employee who was in our party kind of helping us through kind of a a gameplay guide as it were they asked us hey what missions would you like to do again we could do another one of those Siege missions and the entire Discord call was silent because nobody wanted to do it again because after doing it once you've seen all they have to offer and we had done a couple at that point and it was all already boring so these were my least favorite and unfortunately kind of the most timeconsuming so so just be warned shocker there are some boring elements and uh missions in the end game of Skull and Bones perhaps my favorite thing we did was fight a SE Beast this was just cool cuz he could basically One-Shot you if you were a little out of position so we all had to kind of spread out and be very very cautious and careful I thought this was super fun super unique and different it was just generally kind of fun and cool I was like honestly there could probably be like an entire game just about sailing around in ships and hunting gigantic monsters like Monster Hunter but with ships why has no one done this if they have tell me what the game is called cuz I want to play it I thought this was really fun unfortunately the payout for completing this was really underwhelming you basically got a bunch of sea monster meat and you could use that to cook different little meals to feed your crew to recover some of their energy which is that green bar in the bottom it's a useful thing but it didn't feel like a worthy payout for like 10 minutes of work against a very difficult ult Beast so yeah see how much damage he did just by ramming him it's crazy and I think that's the tank grade ship so that's is a powerful powerful boy and speaking of that energy bar that you can use different food items to refill such as the one you can get from cooking up the meat of the big sea monstery boy these missions were basically like heists almost you basically go to a location that you've previously captured through one of those Siege missions and then you redeem the stuff that's been manufactured there and then you go take it and you run to another destination that you deliver it to and everybody on the server gets alerted to this happening and they start to chase you down you basically have a little Target on your head as you can see in that upper middle section with the yellow ship and the red mark on top of it however these missions are just like straight up broken if you aren't playing as a very particular type of ship and even then you don't really stand a chance of being competitive within them you see in Skull and Bones there there are different classes of ships there's ships based around like the tank archetype others are based around being like a Healer others are just raw DPS others are built around Speed and Agility and each of them have their pros and cons and as you play through the game it can be nice During certain Mission types like the boss fights which we'll get to in a minute because you can swap them out try different things and sometimes the Synergy works really well and other times it doesn't so you tweak it it can be cool and dynamic however in this particular mission set it's all about just getting away with the loot and as you can see this other player is like 1 and half kilomet away from me and I'm not catching up I'm losing distance to them like we're screwed they're rounding a corner right now so I'm catching up a little bit there but I can't keep up with their speed and the reason for this is because their ship is the fast class of ship which has a higher top speed now how the game normally balances this is with this little energy bar that you see in the bottom center every time you have your speed maxed out and the sails fully drawn as you can see in the bottom right the speed wheel basically turns green with the numbers to tell you how many knots you're going and normally that drains your overall energy for your crew very quickly so that's how they balance it like you can Sprint but your stamina drains after a little while is basically the idea however if you have some of those food items that I described earlier which you will have a lot of in the end game cuz you just cook like coconut husks and then you have food for your crew or you cook sea monster meat and then you have plenty of food that you can use quickly to refill their stamina and then keep going at Max Speed and so if you're a fast class of ship and you have food items no one can ever catch up to you because your max speed is already higher than their max speed and the only thing that can balance it which is you running out of energy with your crew to slow you down that's not a problem in the end game cuz you have enough food to always maintain Max Speed so once you get just like 100 Mish away from the enemy ships chasing you they will never be able to catch up with you even if they are another fast class of ship because their max speed is the same as your max speed so at the very best they'll maintain that distance from you but never get closer we thought maybe there were like specialty items you could cook to give you speed boosts or something in cases like these to make these missions a little more Dynamic but the devs that were helping during this event said that there was nothing like that in the game and the food was primarily about refilling this energy bar I would love for them to add some cookable items that maybe increase your speed by 20% or something just to make it a little bit more Dynamic and give you the chance to overtake them in these missions but unless they do that these missions are just really really frustrating it it's really too bad because I thought that they were fun in concept but if you don't happen to be using a fast class of ship when these missions start there is literally no way for you to win if another player in this area doing this mission is running with a fast class of ship it just doesn't work and another thing we got to do was fight against leest and leest is sort of the season one endgame boss that you're expected to fight he's very very difficult his ship is extremely difficult to take down it is a cannonball sponge if ever there was one and in addition to that he deals some different damage types specifically poison so if you don't have a certain kind of Kit up of upgrades you just can't beat him it's just like impossible so basically we did this boss fight twice the first time we did it was just with our kit up and load out for our ship that we had been using for the whole play session at that point and we got absolutely curb stomped didn't even stand a chance then we pulled out and went back to the ship customization menu as you can see here and we were instructed by the devs to go and load out with a very specific set of things we changed around our armor and we also adjusted a different type of ship customization element called Furniture which is it's kind of like you know in an RPG if you have like an amulet or Rings or something to give you status effects and boosts and resistances to stuff that's basically what these Furniture pieces did as you can see here they give you different perks like uh increase the duration of the flooded effect on enemy ships by 10% or increase damage to weak points to enemy ships by 10% reveals weak points on the fleet of pestilence which this particular thing was really really useful because it showed where the weak points were on leest my understanding is that these are earned by leveling up in the battle pass and they stressed that all of these elements that you need to take down leest can be gained purely through gameplay and leveling up the like free variant of the battle pass I suppose so they said it's not pay to win it's not at all like that it's just tied to progressing through the battle pass so it sounds like they only expect you to really be able to take down leest after you've completed most of if not all of the battle pass make of that what you will if it's not tied to monetization and if you can get it through pure gameplay I guess I don't have a ton to complain about unless it's balanced such that it's like if you bought the battle pass you're going to have a way easier time and be able to get to it way way faster I don't like love that but at this point we just don't know because I've not been able to see the battle pass so it would just be speculation but I'm expecting something like that to be at play uh in the past when live service games have battle passes and they have gameplay affecting things within the battle pass even though it's technically achievable through nothing but gameplay it's usually made intentionally inconvenient in order to push you to buy the battle pass I don't like that I really don't I appreciate it that it's like not only through sale like you can get it through gameplay so I guess it's better than it could be but that's not always saying a whole lot like it could be worse oh okay therefore it's fine that's not how it works but after this we just kind of sailed around F each other did some extra missions on the side and had a good time honestly like I could see people having fun with skull and bones especially if you like pirate stuff I think there is a game here for some people to really like is it going to win any Game of the Year Awards no no I don't think so is it going to be on anybody's top 10 game of the year lists probably not but I do think that there is a community of people that will find some fun in here and I think have a good time the end game is by far the best version of skull and bones that I've seen thus far and that's comforting because that's exactly where you would hope to see skull and bones at its best but whether or not this is interesting to you is another question and I think the negative press surrounding skull and bones and the fact that it's been in the works for so long is going to be a little difficult to overcome because while I do think there is a coherent game here and they've actually put something together that's deliverable I'm not sure if it makes sense to buy day one based on what I've tried especially because I'm expecting this to probably come to a service like Game Pass relatively quickly I mean if it was a free-to-play game and they offer the battle pass can't really complain that much there but it's not it's not and live service games that also charge a cover fee is uh a phenomenon that I don't love and I hope that we kind of shed I think freeo playay and then paid cosmetics and and battle passes and stuff like that I think that's a good balance to strike when you charge up front and you have a battle pass and paid Cosmetics it just kind of that to me seems a little excessive but maybe that's just me all told I feel better about Skull and Bones after playing this I think there are a lot of people that will enjoy it but I'm not sure if I will be one of those pouring a lot of time into to skull and bones but it seems like there is a coherent game here and I'm very surprised at that you know like what does it say about a game's development that like you play it as it gets close to launch and you're like I'm just surprised it runs like that's basically where we are now I'm just like wow it's a thing that you you play you load in and then you sail around and you do some missions and then you log off and it saves your progress like it's a video game I'm actually kind of amazed but you know what let me know what you think of skull and bones in the comment section below I'm intrigued as to whether some of you guys are going to try this or if you're just going to wait for the inevitable drop in my opinion on a subscription service that includes it with your monthly fee I think that just makes too much sense not to do and I think a lot of people are just going to wait on the sidelines until that happens or play it through like Ubisoft Plus or you up playay plus whatever it is I can never keep track of what they're calling it this week but that's going to do it for me thank you for watching I love you all dearly have a fantastic rest of your day and I'll see you in the next video hugs and kisses bye-bye

Channel: Luke Stephens

Views: 355,425

Keywords: luke stephens

Id: ypalMKhiJrU

Length: 16min 5sec (965 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 25 2024