Skull and Bones - Review

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[ __ ] time to get the popcorn out this is going to be one hell of a roasting well I'm sorry to disappoint you but that's actually not quite the case because a lot of what I've just described there isn't about the game itself it's about the context around the game like its connection to Black Flag its curse development cycle its price tag and the fact that the CEO straight up lied to his shareholders about the very nature of what this game is and where it sits in the market in context skull and bones is a genuine [ __ ] disaster it is no exaggeration to say that every core element of this game Black Flag did it better right down to the sailing and the ship combat and that is the one thing that this game had to do better they took out all of the onf foot pirate combatti stuff so you'd think they'd be able to spend all of that extra time and energy to make the ship combat deeper and better but they didn't they made it dumber and shittier way shittier and all they really added was like cannons that magically heal your allies if you shoot them like how do you spend 11 years making a worse version of a game that you already made just think about what it would take to arrive at that result that is just unfathomable so in comparison to Black Flag in comparison to what we consider to be a reasonable price point in comparison to what we would expect from a AAA game let alone this ridiculous quadruple a label skull and bones is a colossal failure but as I was playing it I wasn't hating it and broadly speaking 20 hours in I had a decent time with it I did I had some fun with skull and bones and I've certainly reviewed many many games that were objectively better than this but that I disliked for a variety of reasons so that led me on a strange thought exercise like why don't I hate this this is obviously pretty disappointing on many fronts so why don't I hate it and I kind of arrived at two conclusions number one it's really [ __ ] cool to be a pirate and try as they might not even Ubisoft can mess that up it's cool to have a pirate ship it feels good to drop the sail and catch the wind it's really nice to sell an expans of water with pirate shanties playing in your ear it's exciting to spy a distant vessel accelerate to attack speed and then let the canonade roar that [ __ ] is just cool and while a lot of those things are worse here than they were in Black Flag they aren't so much worse that they are ruined secondly I really thought about how much skull and bones is undermined by those contextual elements the link to Black Flag the development timeline the price tag and Eve Gilmore's embarrassing comments and I thought to myself let's remove all of that let's imagine that Black Flag never existed and this is the first time that Ubisoft had made a pirate game Let's imagine that it wasn't stuck in development hell for 11 years and instead had a Thrifty 3 to 4E development cycle that from the outside looking in seemed perfectly normal let's imagine that this game wasn't an absurd $70 plus extra for the deluxe or whatever but a more reasonable $30 and let's imagine that Eve Gilmore never opened his mouth and said something so stupid that it's basically painted a Target on this game's back for everyone with a social media account freed from all of that context is Skull and Bones an absolute catastrophe no it's not it's just a really average video game that most people are going to think is boring but some people are going to find some enjoyment in because to ubisoft's credit there isn't any other game quite like this one this is totally different from sea of Thieves or World of Warships or whatever this is a really accessible low stakes arcade Pirate game that you can play solo and it's relaxing and it's repetitive but if you're the kind of person that likes Pirates likes nautical combat or just likes Ubisoft style of open world busy work combined with skinny box progression you're probably going to have at least a little bit of fun with skull and bones because I certainly did so I'm going to review Skull and Bones as a video game and I'm going to tell you that it's broadly fine but at the same time I don't think we should ignore the broader context stuff because I think skull and bones is a very powerful example of how much worse the business of video games has gotten over the years and how Brazen video game executives are in their lies to prop all of this up Ubisoft really did spend 11 years to make a worse vers version of a game they already made so they could perpetually charge for it and then the CEO of that company got up in front of everyone including his shareholders and tried to convince them that this game is a new frontier for the medium playing skull and bones is broadly fine but when you think about what skull and bones is and represents yeah it it definitely [Music] sucks oh de our Fates are revealed in layers and often complains like okay so firstly we need to describe what Skull and Bones actually is because despite being in development for 11 years and being heavily marketed by Ubisoft most people have no idea what this actually is I've seen it compared to the division which is a very unusual comparison given that it's nothing like the division and I say that as someone who covered the division for a living so what is it well in Broad Strokes I'd say that skull and bones is kind of like a really stripped back pirate themed Survival game it does have a campaign and missions AKA contracts but they're extremely Bare Bones no pun intended there are world events that spawn on the map but they're very few and far between the main focus of the game is sandbox and you strike out from Port with the intention of collecting materials that you can use to maintain your ship both in terms of repairs and ammo but also upgrade your ship by crafting new equipment so enemy ships that you syn do not drop actual ship parts like a new Cannon but they will drop or that you can then use to craft a cannon so long as you have the blueprint which you can earn by completing contracts or just buy it from a vendor standing on some farflung Island all of that is in pursuit of upgrading your ship but there's also an infamy system that reflects your overall standing as a pirate the more contracts you complete the more enemy ships you sink the more your Legend grows giving you access to higher level upgrades and higher level contracts think of this as your player level while your ship has its own level reflecting the quality of its armor armaments and Furniture so you can be like what is the core of Far Cry and the answer to that is clearing map markers and creating explosions what is the core of modern day Assassin's Creed games it's third person melee combat and stealth missions in service of a sprawling narrative Le campaign what is the core of Skull and Bones it is a big wide ocean that you sail around on so you can collect materials to craft ship upgrades it's the focus on Sandbox materials and crafting that make this feel more like a survival game than a lot of the other stuff in ubisoft's portfolio but that feeling also comes from just how little there is around that experience Survival Games typically feel very lean and mechanical and that's usually a reflection of their focus on making their Survival Systems deep and flexible Skull and Bones feels similarly lean in that it lacks a rewarding campaign experience a proper narrative a proper cast of characters interesting Mission design it doesn't have any of those things but it also doesn't have anything to compensate for those things being absent all of its core systems like sailing combat Gathering and crafting are extremely one-dimensional they all work perfectly well but they're just basic and in no aspect a skull and bones distinguish itself even against the very game that inspired it all of those years ago Black Flag you can play this game solo which is what I did during my 20 hours with it however some of the open world activities definitely require a group and broadly speaking I found some fr frustrating difficulty spikes towards the back end of my playthrough where it felt like a party would have really helped so yeah you can definitely play the solo but not for everything and do expect it to get a little hairy at times the game is a seamless open world multiplayer game I'm very hesitant to call it an MMO because it's not but if you were to put it into that kind of MMO light category I'd be like yeah maybe as you sell around you will see other players ships but not many at least not in my experience the Seas feel really empty furthermore you can actually call for Aid when you're plundering a Target or trying to do an open world event I put out multiple of those calls during my 20-hour playthrough and no one ever came what about PVP well yeah the game does support PVP but in my 20 or so hours I never actually experienced it that's because PVP is only for specific events during the leveling experience and when those events were happening there was just no one else around there is a lot more PVP at the end game but again I spent a few hours at the end game and I couldn't find any PVP I joined PVP events and no one else would show up but it's definitely there however it is always optional even at the end game i' go as far as to say as this is absolutely a PVE Focus game that has a very limited number of very optional PVP events this is not like CF THS it is not a free- for- all out there if you want to be left alone and just get on with your PVE pillaging you can do that and no other players can mess with your fun so what about the whole getting out of your ship thing oh man okay so you can get out of your pirate ship in skull and phones you can only do so at specific ports so it's not like you can sell up to any Shoreline and hop out like you could do 11 years ago in Black Flag no you sail up to a port you hold down a button to disembark the screen Fades to Black and then all of a sudden you are magically ashore there are two types of ports there are main towns and outposts the main towns are what you'd expect it's a space for vendors to hang out they hand out quests they sell you things they upgrade your ship ship Etc nothing else happens in these spaces there's nothing else going on there's even less going on at the outposts these are things like old forts or deserted Islands or smuggers caves or whatever and they're really weird in their construction because these spaces are often quite large but they are completely empty save for like two vendors which are often in totally different sections of these areas they also kind of dot them with random resources that you could just pick up off the ground but they're in such small quantity that there's like no point in doing that for example when you craft a crate of cannonballs you craft them 100 at a time but here at these outposts you can pick up a crate of cannonballs that contains like 10 or 15 of them it's so weird and it's so clear that these spaces have just been awkwardly tacked on because at some point in the development someone at the top said people want to get out of their pirate ship let's let them get out of their pirate ship but they didn't actually come up with a good reason why you might want or need to get out of of your pirate ship other than to speak to an NPC and Trigger more loading screens some further evidence of this comes in the way that this game handles Gathering and harvesting so this is pretty funny if you haven't seen it before but you do need to chop down trees and mine ore in this game and rather than do those things at the on foot locations I just spoke about which would make a lot of sense you do it while you're on your ship you sail up to a resource node and then you press a button to bring up a mini game and you press it again when the little thing is in the green zone to maximize your Harvest and you do that like three or four times and then that's it the stuff just materializes in your cargo it is super shitty like come on guys what were you thinking when you did this you literally made onf foot areas where you can't do the things you'd expect to be able to do there like chop down trees and instead you've invented this ridiculous miname that allows your actual pirate ship to chop down down trees it's it's it's fical and finally just to clear up any confusion there is no onf foot combat in this game at all you cannot fight on land and when you board another ship here's what happens Thea we will make a fortune from this come on keep going did you blink and miss it yeah that's the boarding cut scene that plays when I board an enemy ship a quick cut scene shows us hauling them close to us and then it just cuts to a loot screen even when I'm in the middle of combat with other ships by the way which is super annoying and then I have to quickly press the collect all loot button and that's it that's what boarding a ship is like in Skull and Bones now look I'm sure many people would have preferred it if you could also fight on land and also fight on the decks of ships but I think that would be asking for just a bit much like imagine a game that would let you do both of those things in one video game that's almost too much video game and I think Ubisoft did us a favor by limiting this to shipon combat because if we had to handle both ship-to ship combat and melee combat in the same game that would be too much for our tiny brains we just we just wouldn't be able to handle that I am of course being an [ __ ] but am I though like 11 years ago we got to walk and chew bubble gum at the same time and now a full console generation later we get to do less than half of that but also pay more for it while also being told that it is quadruple a so that is an overview of what skull and bones is now let's take a deeper look at each of its components smell that salt spice and sin captain my officers say you can help Dar Us free from their rules when is I was cut down before I had a chance to grow what a world we live in eh if I asked you to deliberately come up with the most generic boring played out beginnings of a pirate story you could think of you would almost surely come up with something slightly more interesting than what Ubisoft arrived at you are a human being who gets Shipwrecked in a far off land and falls in with the pirate community so you set about building your Legend with the aim of becoming the most feared pirate on the Seven Seas even though there's really only like one sea here in skullo there's a character crate up it's abysmal there's a small tutorial section where you learn the basics of ship craft and hunting you pull into the pirate Port of sen an and it's there that you meet the pirate Captain John Scurlock who takes you under his wing and that's where things really kick off so skull and burs does have a campaign but calling it a campaign kind of creates a lot of expectations that skull and bones is going to fail to meet at every turn campaign is much closer to what you would experience in an older MMO RPG where fetch quests are given the lightest drizzling of narrative dressing and strung together to create the illusion of a campaign this is really typified by the story or lack thereof there are two main NPCs in this game who speak about something other than what they're planning to sell you or what materials they need you to gather for them on a fetch Quest John Scurlock is one of those NPCs and he essentially just invites you into his office to deliver these soliloquies which are occasionally punctuated by dialogue options that have absolutely no bearing on how conversations will end in his ramblings he lists the names of other Pirates or French Merchant commanders or whoever else and these are his enemies that he's going to send you to kill but you never actually see any of these people's faces you just see their names on the ships that you are about to sink so imagine sitting through five cut scenes where Scurlock is complaining about a pirate called I don't know Roger whatever and scurlock's like I hate Roger I hate him so much let's go and ruin Rogers supply lines and then Scurlock will send you to sink three Merchant ships who are on their way to make a delivery for Roger and so you go and do that and you come back and skull's like good job matey you really wrecked Roger's day but he's still up to no good let's go plunder a cloth Factory so he can't fix his sales so you go to this cloth Factory and lay Siege to it by just parking outside it for a while and shooting any ship that rocks up and then you come back and scurlock's like okay great now it's time to kill Roger and then you go and sink Roger's ship and that's the end of it but you've never met Roger you've never laid eyes on him you have no idea who he is he literally could be a complete figment of scurlock's imagination for all you know and you're just out there sinking perfectly innocent ships and besieging innocent cloth Factories at the whim of a mad man chasing imaginary Boogeyman and to be honest I kind of wish that was the case because that at least would be kind of interesting the production value for these cut scenes is also pretty [ __ ] like here's an example of one of these cut scenes after the fry our Humanity got the better of us and we decided to bury them wrapped their eyes in seaweed placed them in Graves we dug with our ores a week later half my crew died from some cursed sickness those wretched Dutch clawed us down into Graves we had dug that Island reminds me that Mercy has no place in war as you can hear it's some pretty awkward voice acting and it feels like it's been cut together even more awkwardly facial work and character detail is also really not not contemporary I'm not going to say last gen but it's definitely not up to Modern Standard and I mean just compare that little dialogue sequence to one from Black Flag 11 years ago roll it's du oh hi kid you miss quite a Time hi pity about Nassau and Blackbeard flying the coupe we'll see about that veins off to see him now and I'm following soon this is what's left of your experiment in democracy I we do as we please here and we take our time doing it for Christ's sake Edward don't anything but the stink of riches wrinkle your nose what's got into you man reality mate reality see that you ain't pulled into the drink by this drowning wrath I mean look at that scene it's excellent it has more more than one character it has really strong voice acting it has some actual camera work that makes the scene interesting to watch it has some emotional Stakes that you can immediately feel even if you have no idea what the rest of the story is about is it fair to compare Skull and Bones as cutcenes to that of Black Flag I think it is on some level but even outside of that if Skull and Bones had a significantly leaner narrative than what Black Flag had I think it's still perfectly reasonable to expect cut scenes where the audio is properly edited together as for what you're actually doing during this campaign it's like I said before MMO style fetch quests with a little bit of narrative dressing the purpose of this campaign is to introduce you to all of the different types of activities that you can do in Skull and Bones so you will cut down trees from your boat you will plunder various land targets I'll explain that in more detail later you will destroy Merchant ships and claim their cargo you will destroy warships for various reasons it never gets any more interesting than that because you can't actually do anything on land except talk to people they can't can't be any onland missions and you might hope that there might be some more interesting or exciting scenario design to some of the you know C missions but there never is it's just generic open World style activities over and over again doing these will increase your infamy or your level while also giving you access to plenty of ship upgrade resources and that's ultimately what this is all about this campaign does not exist to introduce you to a memorable cast of characters or to immerse you in a thrilling pirate tale or to Dazzle you with scripted scenarios and set pieces it really does exist just to introduce you to the sandbox and level you up and that is it but here's the thing right 20 hours of sailing around as a pirate discovering new locations fighting new ship types upgrading your own ship a bit experimenting with new weapon types and getting acquainted with the various sorts of things that this world has to offer it's okay the sandbox in this game is decent enough it does feel good to sale and engage in ship combat it does feel good to build a new ship and outfit it and decorated it does feel good to get koed by higher level enemy vessels retreat with your tail between your legs Farm up some materials get some new cannons loaded and then return to send those same foes to DAV Jones's Locker the campaign characters story and unique Mission design are all basically non-existent but the campaign experience is definitely carried by the pleasantness of the sandbox and the Very Primal endorphin release that comes from any well-designed Skinner box so I spent 20 hours playing through this and I had a decent enough time I'm sure many people will hate this and they will think it's super phoned in and boring and frankly they are right but there are definitely going to be some people who just want to be a pirate and they don't want to be constantly harassed by other players and they just want to sell around for 10 to 20 hours do their thing put the game down after that and never think about it ever again Skull and Bones will let you do that and because most of it is tuned to be very accessible very playable and very easy you just mindlessly roll through it as you do many other Ubisoft open World style games speaking of the open worlds let's talk about that next skull and bones is set in this weird little microcosm place that has both the East Indies and Africa right next to each other best not to think too much about the geography sadly though even though you get these two different sort of locations they don't feel particularly distinct their shorelines all look kind of the same the outposts and forts that dot them all look kind of the same the ships that Patrol them are all exactly the same but for the colors of their sales and the factions they claim to represent in terms of overall visuals skull and bones is okayish it has its moments when the sun is hanging low when it bathes an area in a warm orange glow that feels like you're sailing through a tropical Instagram post broadly speaking though Skull and Bones isn't pushing New Frontiers when it comes to visual Fidelity it's just very flat basic and the closer you get to it the worse it looks I mean look at this this is how this game handles waves on a shoreline show them stew listen closely by the way do you hear that there's no sound effects for the waves 11 years in development and they couldn't add sound effects to the waves this brings us to a general block on how buggy this game is it's definitely quite buggy I get a crippling audio glitch that actually crashes my audio interface every time I boot up this game so I then have to restart the interface and as I'm playing it sound keeps cutting in and out all of the time especially when I have menus open this does not happen in any other game I own by the way it is just this one there are also other weird audio glitches like a certain high pitch sound that plays when you're in certain like outposts in the towns and oh it's so annoying there's currently a bug where you constantly get spammed that your death Mark has expired even though you never even had a death mark it just keeps spamming over and over again I got disconnected a handful of times which really sucks as it ends your mission progress you need to start again it's also not been thoroughly play tested in the sense that there are various UI things which don't work and which should have been tided up at some point during the 11 years of development so for example you abandon Quest by holding down the x button in your Quest log only there are certain types of quest that require you to first read a treasure map and you do that by pressing the x button and they haven't tied that up and as a result there's actually no way to abandon this specific quest in my log it's stuck in there until I actually do it another example is I'd like to be able to fast travel to this location on the map and I can do so because it's a fast travel Port but because it's got a side quest icon over it I can't select the port which means I can't fast travel to it further when I get there to try to get rid of this icon and do whatever it wants me to do I can't there's just nothing there for me to interact with and as a result this port is now completely closed off to me as a fast travel location so yeah despite the lengthy development timeline it is still buggy and unfinished and it will still need quite a few months worth of development time to polish up all this stuff outside of visuals and bugs the world of Skull and Bones actually does have a fair amount to offer so long as you're up for what it's offering that shouldn't be too too much of a surprise because this is ultimately ubisoft's biggest strength as a game making entity they see video games as structure and system Le and after that they decorate that scaffolding with a setting with narrative elements Etc the central loadbearing pillar in almost any Ubisoft game is not its gameplay or its narrative it's its structure and they've had a lot of practice making games that way and that practice shows here in Skull and Bones so yeah you're always heading out on your pirate ship to do something but what are you doing well we've already covered off harvesting materials that's one thing and you'll do a fair amount of that you can also go fishing there are dedicated fishing boats that you need to hop into at the start of a fishing Mission and then you scoot about trying to spear sharks or whatever that food can be used to provide stamina to your ship crew that is another point where we'll come back to later believe me another major way to gain resources is just to steal them from other ships by attacking them you sell around and so long as you don't make trouble for anybody else they generally won't make trouble for you but you can open fire and sink them at which point you get a kind of of pirate wanted rating as well as a hostility rating versus the faction you just attacked reinforcements will continue to arrive and your wanted rating will go up with each new vessel sunk It's the GTA 5 star wanted rating thing but for pirates and it works it definitely makes it dangerous to attack certain ships in certain locations and you do need to be aware of how close those ships might be to things like guard turrets or other ships who might turn around and join the freay there are trade routes that you can discover in this game which is a really novel idea I mean let's say you need a certain type of wood if youve discovered the right trade route you can sail over to that route and then begin patrolling it and chances are the ships that are sailing that route will have the resource you're chasing it's really immersive because it flows very naturally from the setting if you want to get a lot of resources really fast and the best way to do that is plundering so for this let's say you need steel and so you can mine ore and then refine it back in town alternatively you can find a Foundry that is smelting steel you drive your boat up and then you press the plunder button button at which point a little cut scene plays and your buddies jump out of the ship you stay in of course they're the ones having fun on land you're stuck in the boat and at that point a progress bar appears at the top of the screen you need to stay in that zone for x amount of time and waves of enemy ships Will Roll in you defeat them and claim rewards after each wave complete all waves for maximum rewards at which point your crew will jump back on board with like a single crate of booze or something and you'll sell on to your next adventure what else well there are merchant ship Quest givers who require an escort there are actually treasure hunts which really just involve getting off your ship at an outpost and running around until a part of the sand glows and then this really high quality digging animation plays there are a number of public events that randomly spawn these are almost always just attacking a convoy of ships but they can get pretty wild and they're definitely tuned for group play and of course there are all manner of side quest contracts which have you doing all of the above at different places across the map oh and there's also a giant sea monster you can hunt but I never did that I only saw it in the trailer the main in-game activity centers on What's called the helm which is basically a Smugglers Network for rum and opium you need to gather the sugar cane and Poppy that will let you craft this stuff and then you craft it in your Distillery or Opium Den you then need to deliver it to targets across the map and you can't fast travel when you do this and it's guaranteed to spawn a bunch of very Fierce enemy ships who want to take your cargo it's a little unbalanced at this point but I'm sure it'll get tweaked the system opens up even further when you hit max level or Kingpin at that point it blossoms into this really interesting territory control thing where you need to capture manufactories through either Co-op PVE events or actual PVP events if you're successful then the factory is now yours and it will begin producing resources for you that you can then convert into an endgame currency allowing you to slowly grind out the highest level ships armaments and cosmetics I have not spent a huge amount of time with this but it seems pretty robust and if you're someone that wants to spend a little bit of time or a lot of time playing this game this system is going to always be there for you giving you something to work towards no matter your time investment so it's a lot right and to be honest this list is not exhaustive there are other things that I haven't mentioned here only because to list everything would take too long but in a broad sense there's kind of three categories of activities there's really relaxed low stakes material Gathering and delivering there's medium Stakes contracts involving sinking enemy ships and plundering land targets and there's high stakes activities involving world events high level targets and PVP so that's certainly not nothing and while it's not enough to make Skull and Bones a compelling value proposition in its own right it's more stuff than what we typically might expect from a newly launched live service game I've reviewed the vast majority of live service games released over the past 5 or 6 years which is the period in which every publisher started farting them out as fast as they could and I've seen plenty of live services that were more shabbily put together and had less content than this one if the core gameplay of Skull and Bones clicks with you then there's no shortage of game to be enjoyed here and while that 11 years of development time didn't serve the game well in many aspects it definitely allowed the development team to deliver a fairly broad content offering both during the campaign and at the endgame and with additional content on the way in the form of seasonal Updates this is the least amount of content that Skull and Bones will ever have unless they go down the bung path and start content Bing it but notice what I said about if the core gameplay of Skull and Bones clicks with you I know it will click for some absolutely but for me personally I found it extremely underwhelming because the underlying sailing and combat mechanics here are just very one-dimensional and almost unbelievably they're a step back versus what we got over a decade ago with Black Flag let me explain why Skull and Bones begins with a spectacular naval battle this one it's got heaps of ships they're all skittering about at great speed and there's massive explosions going off and the whole thing is just huge it's meant to be very impressive and showcase what this game is like further down the line to pick your interest and get you excited about the prospect of earning your own ship capable of this sort of seaf fair and Carnage for me though the minute I got control of my ship and started steering it and firing cannons I was like oh no it didn't feel right it didn't control right it didn't look right but I have to be super clear that that feeling came from my intimate experience with black flag and coming back to what I said at the start of this review let's pretend that Black Flag never existed take away any of the comparisons and ask are the sailing and combat mechanics good I'll come back to what I've said throughout this review about almost every other aspect of skull and bones and say that they're okay ship handling is very arcadey your ship will accelerate slow down and turn on a dime your ship seems to Glide over the water rather than actually sit in it which does make for a very responsive and intuitive control scheme But ultimately one that I think lacks a satisfying sense of feedback and immersion that's further exacerbated by the fact that 90% of the time you're sailing and battling on very still Flat Water it's only out in the open Seas where you start to get some real chop and there's almost no reason to go out to the Open Seas so where the sea should be this Ever Changing modifier that makes navigation and combat more challenging wherever you are it's instead been removed from the equation almost entirely making Naval engagements feel even more repetitive and predictable than they otherwise might I'm still going to avoid speaking comparatively so I will say that on the whole combat is pretty good you fire cannons using a retical system it does reward precise aim owing to the weak points that ships now have and there's definitely some skill involved with judging the speed of Your Vessel versus their vessel versus the distance to each other and the track travel time of your projectiles there's also a very large range of weapons that you can mount on a variety of positions on your ship you may want long guns or Torpedoes at the front allowing for precise strikes as you close in on a Target you might want a simple set of cannons for your port side since that weapon is very versatile but on your starboard you might want a broadside cannon that aims to rip holes in the enemy's hole inflicting the flood damage effect which deals damage over time of course there's the fire barrels you can drop off the back as well as mortars and Rockets and ballistas and a few other things the way that aiming works is that it's a very easily repositioned reticle Which is less dependent upon ship positioning it lets you hit targets more easily more often which definitely adds to the more arcadey feel of combat and the overall accessibility of the game things like ramming and the ability to fire muskets or throw firebombs from your deck are also there and that's about it but that's a fair amount and in defense of all of this one of the reasons that I enjoyed my time with skull and bones is that It ultimately feels pretty good and it really fits the game's focus on accessibility and pleasantness you don't need to fight the controls to make things happen here you can pick this up and immediately understand how to play it and do it well Skull and Bones was never meant to be a simulation or anything close to it it was meant to be something simple and accessible and fun and the sailing and combat model definitely achieves those goals and had Black Flag never existed or had I never played it I might have thought this was pretty great but Black Flag does exist and I have played it and now that I have judged the sailing and combat on their individual merits I will now speak comparatively and say that these things feel so much worse than what we got in Black Flag the simple feel of what it's like to steer a ship here is such a step back in Black Flag Your Vessel sat so heavy in the water it was so much slower to turn without being cumbersome the ocean SWR made its presence felt so much more often and you regularly had to fight in Stormy Weather that completely transformed the look and feel of combat perspective is also a really big deal you do actually have a sort of firstperson perspective in skull and bones but there's almost no reason to use it when that pulled back perspective exists yeah that pullback perspective gives you a better view of things but it's just so much less immersive and I really wonder how much better Skull and Bones would have been had it focused more on that first person view combat also just looks better in Black Flag because it's not so explosion like if you watch a naval battle in Black Flag you'll see that the main thing that happens when a volley of cannonballs hits a hole isn't explosions but splintering cuz that's what happens when you send a big iron ball into a wooden wall it splinters and so as soon as I saw how leveraged Skull and Bones was into these big explosions I was like nah man that just doesn't look right to me a big issue is how much less important positioning is in skull and bones in Black Flag if you wanted to do a broadside attack you needed to present your broadside the Cannons didn't turn left or right very much only up and down so you really needed to maneuver your ship to get the angle you needed and then Arc your shot based on the distance here in Skull and Bones it's not like that cannons are on Magic swivels and can turn in almost any direction aimed by a retical as such you don't need to be well positioned to take a shot you just need to aim your reticle and it can reach some very extreme angles that seem very goofy it also leads to some really cheesy and gamey techniques since you've got four weapons at different sides of your ship and as you turn your ship you can see a dotted line that denotes which Cannon is usable based on the angle and there's no dead zone anywhere near that dotted line so you can actually do this sort of 180 spin that lets you unload your left Cannon and then immediately turn just a few degrees to unload your rear Cannon and then continue to turn and then you can very quickly unload your right Cannon and yeah sure it's like a technical maneuver but it's really simple to execute and it's just dumb it was just so much much better when cannons were in fixed positions and you had to properly steer your ship it felt so rewarding when you landed a clean broadside in Black Flag in Skull and Bones I just feel like Oh yay I moved the cursor over the thing good going me then of course there's the Ship boarding which we've already talked about and no matter which way you slice that it is just a massive massive downgrade I know all the reasons why it is the way that it is but none of that changes the fact that this is a massive downgrade stamina is the other thing that really really blows in Skull and Bones so for some unknown reason I'm guessing PVP balance maybe your ship or its crew have a stamina bar if you're going at top speed your stamina will slowly deplete forcing you to then considerably slow your speed while you wait for the stamina bar to recharge this is active all the time both in and out of combat now listen stamina bars in open world games where we have to run around a lot really suck but a stamina Bar for a [ __ ] pirate ship are you kidding me right now and if you want to have that active during combat okay sure maybe whatever but to have it active all the time when I'm trying to sail across an ocean and I have the wind at my back and my sail's full but I have to slow down because apparently my crew wants a snack there's a food consumable system that kicks in here that recovers their stamina so yeah that is just it's it's just ridiculous so do you see what I mean when I say that this is worse than Black Flag like yeah there's a colored loot Cannon system and some of those cannons specialize in ripping holes in sails and others do burn damage and others can heal Allied ships for some unknown reason and those things certainly deepen combat to an extent especially if you want to get into the PVP side of things for me though the overall combat framework just doesn't hit right partly because I've experienced something better but mainly because it's just not that deep or interesting a lot of the things that gave black flags combat depth and the wow factor they aren't carried over here I find it less fun to watch and less fun to play maybe if I hadn't played Black Flag I could get over that but like I said I have so I can't I'm sure there's more than a few people watching this review being like come on man it's unfair to compare this to Black Flag so much it's its own game and it should be reviewed on those terms and you know what I agree and that is what I have tried to do during this review in my intro I made that specific call out and I said that if you remove the context and comparisons skull and bones is broadly fine when I spoke about the campaign I said that there was not much to it but World activities combined with the Skinner box progression make it relatively enjoyable when it comes to World design and endgame I called out that there's a surprising amount of content here far more than what many other live service games offer at their launch and when it comes to core mechanics like sailing and combat I said that they're very functional and accessible it's very pick up and play and you can certainly have some fun with them absolutely and that is why I have not titled this review I do not recommend because on its merits skull and bones is fine it's a lot more fine than I suspect most people expect but as I said at the top I do think the context matters this $70 price point for this game is silly it is nowhere near polished enough nor impressive enough to Warrant that price tag especially given that the G has plenty of in-game spending options and a season pass had this game come out at $ 30 to $40 Ubisoft would have saved themselves a lot of headaches and I think people would have been much more receptive to this the commentary from Eve Gilmore that this is a quadruple a game that really lit a fire under everybody because it's rare to see such a Brazen effort to Gaslight us no one with a functioning brain could ever think for a second that this is a quadruple game and to be told that by Ubisoft C is like infuriating because it shows how little respect he has for us as consumers and ultimately his shareholders which is who he was addressing these comments too but the most fascinating thing about skull and bones is its lineage I've long held the belief that the biggest problem with live Services is that they are launched as live Services rather than launching a really good game that people like and then you can bolt on more to it over time to evolve it into a live service Deep Rock galactics sort of Falls into that category and it's going exceptionally strong even today no man's sky is kind of like that too even though they don't charge for their updates it's like make a good game and if people like it make some more of it you know what I mean and this ultimately was what Ubisoft had the chance to do with black flag and skull and bones you take the best Assassin's Creed game sorry not sorry and you take all of that work and then you build on top of it to make something bigger and better that is a slam dunk proposition and it's no surprise that Ubisoft green L this project but Ubisoft Singapore and the 32 other Ubisoft Studios listed in this game's credits didn't do that they took one of the greatest games ever made removed massive chunks of it and the parts that they did keep they made them worse and then ubisoft's management added in an in-game store a $7 price tag and they slapped a quadruple a label on it like isn't that just insane that is insane it very much reminds me of Rainbow Six Siege extraction remember that game no no you don't no one does I said in my review of that that extraction had the benefit of being able to leverage the characters weapon settings and mechanics of one of the best Shooters on the market and all extraction had to do was innovate on top of that to deliver something new and better and it couldn't do that I said of it then what I'll say of Skull and Bones now these games were born on the other side of the finish line but they still found a way to come last place skull and bones is fine if you can get it for 30 bucks after they've polished it up you might have a good time with it but as a statement on how far backwards the business of video games has moved over the last decade skull and bones is a bold one I certainly leave plenty of room for the fact that this could improve substantially over time and I expect that it will but we didn't need to wait for 3 years of postlaunch updates for Assassin's Creed Black Flag to be incredible it was incredible from the moment you took it out of the cling wrap and I want to go back to those days gentlemen how are we doing with those New Year's resolutions still hitting the gym still eating clean reading any new books how's your woodworking project coming along if it still looks like a stump You Are Not Alone sticking to New Year's resolutions is hard but there's one resolution you can keep very easily thanks to this video sponsor manscaped and that's the resolution to tidy up your downstairs and I'm not talking about your basement if you're up to start 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Channel: Skill Up

Views: 783,418

Keywords: skill up, skill, up, gameplay, games, guide, xbox, pc, sony, playstation, gaming, skull and bones, skull and bones review, skull and bones gameplay, skull and bones game, skull and bones trailer, skull and bones release date, skull and bones details, skull and bones ps5, skull and bones video game, skull and bones xbox, review, skull and bones combat, skull and bones vs black flag, assassin's creed black flag, black flag, pirate games, sea of thieves vs skull and bones, sea of thieves

Id: z_BKf5cdV_w

Length: 46min 52sec (2812 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 16 2024