The Death of Skull and Bones - The Full Story

I don't think it's any surprise to anybody that Skull and Bones didn't actually intend on becoming what it later released at in fact going back to 2017 is a real look at to what the first iterations of this pirate title were intended to be first being announced in 2017 we got one of the coolest cinematic trailers of course with the most cinematic Music Beautiful Ubisoft CGI everybody knew that this well this was probably just another rug pull from the triaa company you see when they came out on stage to talk about Skull and Bones they had this to say about it building on the legacy of one of our most popular worlds since bringing Innovative Naval Combat to Assassin's Creed we at Ubisoft Singapore have set out to bring you the ultimate pirate experience Skull and Bones takes place in a shared systemic world where you can sail Solo or form a gang of pirates with your friends Ubisoft showed off our first little bit of gameplay and with that that showed something completely different an arena game mode with ships fighting man on man taking out each other in a PVP battle this was less of a Pirates of the Caribbean and more of Halo infinite with ships and this left people baffled a 5v5 Arena mode that was more along the lines of a rainbow six Siege more than anything we'd ever seen before a strange iteration of the pirate title that was first teased you know based of the same Studio that made Black Flag back in the day people wanted this massive open world a standalone Assassin's Creed Black Flag if you will but it seemed less and less or at least this was the first sign that that's not what we will be getting I for one remember seeing this gameplay and seeing absolutely every floor that I was not wanting within a title the arcadey nature of it health bars above ships strange destruction that didn't dynamically resolve and of course handling that looked like n cars more than big wooden gallions and when was this game coming out fall of 2018 that was our first news of a release date yet before it even came around before we even got E3 the game Skull and Bones was delayed until 2019 with no indication as to why we can only assume that Ubisoft had had a change of heart maybe it was just a fact that it wasn't ready and that the game was still on track in the same direction it once had been but they just hadn't polished it up well no not quite okay this is the point where Ubisoft start to really lose its fan base you see spokes people have come out and said that the game was just evolving that it wasn't actually completely changing but I think that is complete nonsense you see the first reveals of gameplay in 2017 showed this 5v5 arcad of course player versus player and with a few PBE elements as well yet in 2018 it was said that it was going to be more of an open world with a co-op nature you and your mates fighting against against Ai and of course going through that campaign a campaign that is integrated within the multiplayer once more yet their excuse for evolving is saying that they had bigger ideas that they wanted to make this game larger than they ever intended it to be which makes me worry how it actually started out we like to see it as an evolution of the game not a different game necessarily but we wanted to expand we knew we had something great it was feeling great it was looking great but why don't we offer more why don't we offer more variety in gameplay and bring back that exploration that was very popular in Black Flag we wanted to do the biggest pirate in EV open one game we could do I think it goes as this Ubisoft saw the terrible reception that Skull and Bones got at E3 in 2017 a title that everybody wanted to be a standalone Assassin's Creed Black Flag a large open world Pirate game but now with full multiplayer and Co-op elements being able to just jump off your ship in the middle of the ocean going exploring finding treasure Ms with your mates or going to take out fors from bombarding them from the oceans this was the game that everybody wanted a mixture of the initial Black Flag single player campaign now with Co-op or even multiplayer yet when they released the 5v5 arcade it got a lot of backlash as you'd probably expect this was such a small game that nobody really wanted who was this title for now when Ubisoft saw that they then delayed it even more then coming out saying they delayed it because they wanted this game to be much bigger in other words the game that people thought it was going to be in the first place they tried to to trim it down they saw the backlash and realized they couldn't get away with skimping and from that point onwards it was a cycle a never ending cycle two delays three delays then four delays with Ubisoft coming out that they've now found a new intention with the game a new direction that they wanted to take it in and thus is going to take much longer in development what does any of that mean well I'm assuming it's part of some of the closed beta tests you see throughout this whole time people were jumping on and testing the title there was a lot of negative rumors and whilst no one could properly record anything unless it was sanctioned by Ubisoft themselves a lot of news was coming out that this was not the open world sprawling Pirate game that everybody wanted this was something much more basic wide as an ocean maybe Maps were huge we know Ubisoft can do that but as shallow as a puddle then everything was revealed with kaku's Infamous blog post I remember actually seeing this come out in 2021 kutaki released a block saying first it was an Assassin's Creed expansion now it's ubisoft's 8-year nightmare with some of the most interesting things being outlined a few people had said it was a curse others simply had no idea what they were supposed to be making one former developer said nobody knew what the [ __ ] they were doing you see Skull and Bones actually started back in 2013 and it was supposed to be a multiplayer expansion for Assassin's Creed Black Flag this is why a lot of the Defenders of Gull and bones that say you shouldn't expect a Black Flag are just playing wrong because that's what Ubisoft initially intended it to be and that's what it was sold at then the expansion tune took on its own life morphing into a full-blown MMO like spin-off on the working title Black Flag infinite yeah where have we heard of that before in 2020 and 2021 more developers were leaving the project it went over three different heads all working to different briefs yeah there were three different directions that Skull and Bones were supposed to be and it completely kept morphing from one to the other no surprise that people thought they had no direction another former developer said a lot of stuff just didn't make sense just polishing at this point would be a waste of time so why was it never cancelled why did it never end up being fully ditched well Ubisoft said themselves this game is too big to fall just like the banks of the US well that's kind of an ironic statement after four big delays in 3 years even a company with a reputation for rescheduling like Ubisoft the amount of red flags that came out of Skull and Bones was something incredibly worrying the fan base was starting to waver people no longer look forward to this of being a new interesting foray into the Indian Ocean leading Pirates into battle and of course looting and questing to grow an Empire now it was an interesting car crash one that we just couldn't quite look away from I noticed one thing that Ubisoft themselves said when talking about Skull and Bones they were talking about a new director coming in and she completely changed the direction that this title was heading in yet they also revealed something interesting that they turned what was the original demo the 5v5 arena shooter in 2017 into the fully fledged open world that we have now so it was never meant to be an open world or at least its initial intentions grew into something less bold I mean if this started out as an Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag expansion a big open world that is now multiplayer then by 2017 they'd given up pretty much they thought that it was too tricky so went back to just being a 5v5 Arena shooter then a new director came in and they thought let's try it again even though knowing that they don't have the resources or skills or whatever the main blockages were because they've already tried to make it that so this was always going to be a disaster it's so crazy to me that it was revealed that Skull and Bones was still in its prototype era at the end of 2018 you know a game that was supposed to release during 2018 they hadn't even nearly finished it most of this was down to the fact that they wanted it to be a 5v5 Arena shooter most people thought that was a stupid idea and a complete waste of potential so they bought in a new director she then said well this needs to be open world and well one of the main things she said is terrifying at that time the game was a five versus 5 PVP Arena the five versus five was fun to play but sometimes it was also difficult for the player to maneuver inside an arena with such big ships because the ships didn't have a lot of customizable options it was difficult for us to project on the long term while on the open world game experience had more potentials so essentially what you're saying is that there wasn't enough stuff to sell so you had to make the game bigger so you could sell more customization okay I mean does it really technically count of lying I don't think so but promoting a game as an open world whilst internally it's still only being a 5v5 Arena [ __ ] battler feels completely dishonest the game that you are telling us will be there is not even close to even starting in that direction let alone actually being in this open world state so in 2018 the year that the game was initially supposed to come out the entire Direction was changed from this 5v5 Arena ship battler into an open world the entire team was shifted onto this new version of the game and making what was originally some ideas and a bits of demo into the main core structure not only this but there was supposed to be a single player narrative in Skull and Bones something that was also ditched at the time and a huge disappointment although I don't think it was necessary for the success of the game whilst people wanted a black flag spin-off they really wanted it to be part of multiplayer but I think single player and really focusing on quality would have been something that Ubisoft might have benefited from yet despite all this it was ditched along with the arena mode we were going full force on this open world MMO style and like the new director says we need more customization from the way they are talking about it though it does sound pretty sad that there was a full team working on this solo campaign that it was pretty deep into development and it was scrapped what it could have been I guess we'll never know but I think parts of it are what have been put into the current Skull and Bones the NPCs the quest lines and shallow as they might be at least in single player we could have got more depth with characters so we got new release dates February 2022 yet even that ubisoft's current developers told Kaku saying no one believed in February 2022 for launch but we always hoped production led by Ubisoft Singapore had been advancing well over the past 12 months and the promise is better than ever Ubisoft CFO Frederick dut said yet it didn't seem like that's what was coming out of Ubisoft themselves you see more gameplay was being released and this new open world with more information was starting to be teased the reaction well probably not exactly what Ubisoft were hoping for because everybody had been asking for one thing they delivered something completely different if every everybody else wanted it to go right Ubisoft would go left and that was something that would keep reoccurring over and over again my mandate was to deliver an authentic pirate experience within a deep multiplayer open world so the first objective was to develop a vast fully seamless open world dedicated to generate emergent content okay let's just talk about some of the stuff that they're saying about what they want through the game a fully seamless open world that was your aim and this is the result of it loading screen after loading screen whether you go into Port whether you go to any Island that you need to do quests on whether you go into any trading screen whether you go into any sort of quest or Mission that is involved in the main story line cut scene after cut scene even godamn boarding within this game a pirate game Ship boarding has loading screens where is the seamlessness this is possibly the least seamless game I have ever played and that was your main a well God damn it I guess I am Brad Pit then if I say I am I am so it it must be true what it was for me was when the information Gameplay trailer came out from Ubisoft when they were basically revealing everything about the game about a year before its launch so you start off with these like little boats here and they're sort of your basic two can oh well there's a few more cans and then you get that a Ballista what's that that's apparently apparently we have ballistas also essentially why in this era when we've got cannons and mortars are we still using ballistas cuz also look at that rocket thing look at that rocket thing so this is about this is about the the crew mutinying the crew can like get really angry if you I'm assuming you don't feed them and stuff like that and they can apparently headbutt you sick that's a feature in the is it like so is it it's like open world is that the idea that it's just like kind of like multiplayer open world vies they're making it seem like that but I don't know how open world it's going to be because as you can see all the actual gameplay that we're seeing is on the ship but what they're saying is you can Harvest resources you can go and treasure hunt you can go to these hubs but none of the Hub stuff or the stuff that's off the ship is gameplay it's all cutcenes so I feel like you're just sailing around and then when you get to like a oh here's an island you can explore you just go into a cut scene right I mean it does look look at that what is that what is that ships it's not going to be appealing to the same people that played Black Flag in 2014 and thought it was really good see this is what I is really annoying is this game has so much potential but they've gone such a weird way like why could they just make a Black Flag game that was Black Flag but multiplay I mean look at this is harvesting resources look what is that's bad so the game finally got its release date in early February of 2024 11 years after it was initially planned and uh well it didn't do quite I think what they they expected it to I think the hopes of this actually surprising everybody and blowing people out the water despite the incredible negative reception to everything in the buildup was never going to be the winning idea even its early closed beta was negative reviews and actually one of them caused the game to be delayed again but playing it on release felt like the most expected disappointment in the world sure the game looked goddamn beautiful but it played like nothing I'd ever seen before the ship skirted around everything nothing had any sort of weight I mean one of the first missions is you go into the Shipwreck you have to destroy the blocks on the wall like some sort of mobile shooter and then once you get in you basically go through a cut scene you Explorer [ __ ] finding maps to continue the story but that's about it every single aspect of this title has Cuts scenes has loading screens and there is nothing that you can really immerse yourselves in this pirate Adventure even thinks I'm hunting trying to go into these areas where you find these animals you pretty much go into this on Rails shooter you throw Spears at alligators and hippos they go down in a few hits and that's it of course you can go out and fight other ships most of them will be pretty easy to take down especially in the starting areas you'll get some XP and loot for them but no real challenges implemented okay you can go into the harder areas but instantly going out of your level means you are decimated by anything so you've got to level up and go through certain missions yet the problem is each of these missions are so lazily designed is that it's actually a chore to get any sort of progression through the game I felt so bored going and collecting bits for cannons to then put on my ship and then I had to go and collect bits from palm trees to put on my ship oh and then I had to go and disrupt some trade routes by shooting a few people then collect some Gunpowder to then put on my ship every single mission was this over and over again there is a few cool bits where youd go into an arena and then you'd fight multiple ships at once but then at the end you just had to get cogs from them to then take back to the port and put on your ships it was all fetch quests every single Mission within this game is a fetch Quest the biggest battle I had was a massive boss battle that eventually just ended up being a fetch quest for some sort of treasure map that's all this game is based on and it seems like Ubisoft has no other ideas of how to do missions the storyline that was so beloved in Assassin's Creed black flag has completely gone there is no sort of characterization and the people that you do talk to in terms of NPCs I mean I don't remember any of their names all of it is just shot fronts that you go to to upgrade find Quest or go to message boards that's the entirety of Skull and Bones sure you can play with friends most of the time you won't be interacting with other players and when you do you can invite them to your squads but it doesn't really have too much of an effect on the campaign and in fact it's actually preferred just to play on your own because it does actually make everything a lot harder the game itself is so big and it takes ages to get anywhere from of course stupid mechanics such as your ship has goddamn stamina but other things are the fact that everything is so spread apart because there's very little within it from collecting resources to the quest you need to do from certain areas where you can hunt or find Merchant ships to take out they're so spread apart and going between them takes so long that it almost just doesn't feel worth it you can fast travel but you have to explore those locations so far and the fact that they've added in fast travel means that they have no confidence that actually sailing from one place to another is an enjoyable experience can you imagine that a game that is entirely set upon your pirate ship has such boring sailing that even the developers themselves no players don't want to do it what was the entire point of this of course now we have no idea of how the game is still fairing whether it still has a mighty player base that it needs for this huge open world because of course they put it on Ubisoft connect a store page that has no details of concurrent players so unlike steam we can't actually get factual evidence of how the game is fairing but in terms of talk in terms of people still actually making content about it and in terms of the reviews it was all just lukewarm and I think that's even more insulting than a terrible disaster the fact that people just don't care ubisoft's employees the developers hated working on it the managements obviously didn't know what they were doing and now the players don't want to play it a complete disaster of a title so that brings me on to the fact of why was it never cancelled why did Ubisoft never knock this game on the head because any other studio and they've said it themselves would have canceled this game time after time as if that's some sort of flex well there are a number of reasons first of all because it had some potential everybody wanted a Ubisoft Pirate game that was a standalone Black Flag and it could have garnered millions and millions of players especially since they've already proven that they knew what they were doing a decade ago then it was the variation of ideas it kept moving from one thing to another so instead of just knocking on the head they thought no this was the right direction so maybe now we could save it this along with new managers and directors who had such egos that thought they were the savors of this game and there's lost profits over $20 million were put into this game rising and Rising every single day this is something that they've even said themselves is too big to fail well it failed but it wasn't cancelled and perhaps it should have been of course cutting your losses is a useful thing to come to terms with but Ubisoft couldn't quite do it because of the last reason there was still alleged rumors that the Singaporean government had a vested interest in this game coming out by putting money into Ubisoft Singapore you see the Singaporean Studio of Ubisoft started off as a a small entity helping with expansions and being more of a side project but scullin bones was their first fully-fledged IP that they were doing on their own of course game development coming out of your country is a great thing so the Singaporean government said we'll give you a hand have some money so they couldn't cancel it they had to get this game out and they had to please investors that always seems like it's the way but because of it developers hated it they left over and over again and came out in anonymity saying how much that they despised working on this title and then the players started to hear about it gameplay was released and it worried people's interests even more kataru interviewed more than 20 current and former Ubisoft developers and they all tell some sort of a different story I think harking back the absolute mess of the management that was going on with skull and bones it never had a clear Creative Vision suffered for way too many managers and all of them wanting something completely different nearly 8 years after its first conceived Skull and Bones had blown through its initial budgets according to three sources the project had already cost Ubisoft more than 120 million and that number continued to go up one developer said no one wants to admit they [ __ ] up they'd attached it almost as a spin-off to Assassin's Creed and now they wanted to do something different but they didn't give themselves the leniency or the resources for that if you want to go off Rogue and make a new IP you need to have a definite vision not just do what you think people might like do what you want One Direction and one idea because of this mismatch of different developers different management it meant that it was a sludge of diluted code an unsubstantiated claims that this was what people really wanted resulting in a live service game that pretty much was Dead on Arrival not only this but imagine being one of the developers working on skill and Bones not only initially thinking you were making a flag expansion then moving to a 5v5 Arena shooter then saying that no that's not what we're doing anymore we're doing a single player campaign working years upon all these aspects to finally have a new director come in to say scrap it all we're doing a live service open world and that I think that's got to be the real kicker one former developer saying just having people working for four or 5 years on something that doesn't move forward that destroys anyone and you can imagine it so many people leaving this project but the people that have stayed on have no direction and no idea what they were doing demoralizing your workers and switching management over and over again then on its release Skull and Bones farted over the Finish Line very clear that this absolute mess of development cycle concocted in a lackluster kind of pretty but very shallow Pirate game oh the irony sailing out into these oceans with pretty much nothing to do but collect messages deliver things and upgrade a few wacky colors on your ships sure you could fight people but this didn't feel like the Assassin's Creed black Flagship combat I mean Ubisoft Singapore were the people that invented this Assassin's Creed ship combat back in AC3 yet now they have destroyed it into a shell of its former self something that doesn't have that same satisfying feeling ships feel like race cars now slipping and sliding doing handbreak turns they don't have that same kind of wait what is the point of this what was the direction how can you expect players to stick around a game that doesn't know its purpose in the first place and I think for me that is why Skull and Bones failed that is why Skull and Bones never had the potential after its initial idea when it was a downhill slope from the first reveal and expectations I don't think were too much but too realistic knowing that Ubisoft could never pull off anything that they promised and once again they proved us right because that is what killed skull and bones and showed us the day it [Music] died

Channel: Resonant

Views: 117,834

Keywords: skull and bones, skull and bones gameplay, skull & bones

Id: fwdodi_24fQ

Length: 25min 14sec (1514 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 19 2024