Skull and Bones review: I paid $80 for this 'AAAA made-in-Singapore' game so you didn't have to
Ubisoft's Skull and Bones is probably better off consigned to the depth of Davy Jones' locker, says contributing editor Aloysius Low.
"Has this game ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?"
"No sir it is Singaporean."
Skull and Bones could have been great, but it's unfortunately a dud. I'm sure no one working on this title wanted to create a bad game, but the final product has all the hints of homework that was submitted for the sake of meeting a grading requirement.
There’s the problem. They saw how much people liked the pirate stuff in Assassin’s Creed 4 and they thought they could just throw a bunch of money ar making another one. I’m guessing no one really had a creative vision for the project beyond “make big pirate game.” It looks like Ubisoft got exactly what they paid for.
I look forward to this sort of thing playing out a lot as generative AI becomes more common. “I don’t get it, we fed all the right data points into the computer, but no one likes the result! Why aren’t people enjoying the things that our models show are statistically identical to the other things they like?”
I’m guessing no one really had a creative vision for the project beyond “make big pirate game.” It looks like Ubisoft got exactly what they paid for.
They basically changed the core concept at least twice during development, first rejecting every prototype for two years straight then telling the studio to make "Siege, with boats" and then going
"Sea of Thieves!" when that came out.And the whole time they were shitting on the local devs, rotating out the management, and basically just using the ongoing project as a way to grift subsidies from the Singapore government and have some place for their execs to vacation while pretending to work.
Goddamn, I looked into it more and you weren't exaggerating. What a clown show.
On the flip side of that, I could easily see indie creators feeding a mishmash of ideas into chat-gpt and stable diffusion and coming out with a weird-ass, wonderful game like Kenshi. It's the corporate "polish" that smooths off all the weird edges that will make these insufferable.
Exactly. Nothing is going to change about the system. Indie developers will do all the innovation while big studios continue to let endless market research and monetization drive all of their decisionmaking.
They saw how much people liked the pirate stuff in Assassin’s Creed 4 and they thought they could just throw a bunch of money ar making another one.
'Okay, mes amis... now let's rip out the ship boarding, the melee combat, fleet management, island traversal, towns, most of the resource stuff and economy, and the single-player aspect! C'est magnifique!'
So far away from what anyone wanted or expected.
Years ago there was a big budget pirate themed porn movie. I worked with a person who rented the "rated" version with all the XXX content cut because they had no idea what it was. They were like "yeah the acting wasn't great and there were a lot of sex scenes in the plot." Ma'am that's because you rented a porno from Blockbuster.
I still think about that when I see pirate themed stuff.
TIL Pirates is a porn movie
Skull and Bones is huge, so expect to spend a lot of time travelling. I managed to locate Singapore in the East Indies and travel there, where it's known as a pirate den called Telok Penjarah, but getting there took me almost 15 to 20 minutes of listening to shanties
I really don't want to defend an 80 dollar game in any capacity, but this is exactly what I wanted from it. Sailing around listening to sea shanties (and occasionally attacking British ships and outposts) was the good part of ACIV.
Yeah but theres no ship boarding or melee combat…
What? That's how basically every naval battle ended before the modern (Dreadnought and later) naval era. Ridiculous.
yeah but that's a separate complaint from "the map is really big and you have to sail too much in this sailing game"
improve the combat and he would still complain about it taking 20 minutes to get to the east indies
Okay that sounds really bad then
I came here to post like what a moronic fucking complaint, like, it's like buying a farming game and complaining about all the fucking farming you have to do
I would assume that for the full experience, you might need to manage crew members, or assign tasks. If all you gotta do is move the stick left and right, to get from point a to b. I'd be bored out of my mind.
Ngl I mostly enjoyed using the car in FFXV. Just spending a couple of minutes being driven around looking at the beautiful vistas between missions was really relaxing. Spent a lot of time in AC Odyssey just sailing the boat around looking at islands too.
80 bucks? I thought "big" releases were 70 now, 80?
I already decided I'll never pay 70 bucks for a TRIPPPLE A GAME so 80 is extremely out of the question. Why would I spend so much on such garbage when better games are still coming out at the 20-40 price range
Triple-A games sell for $70, which is around $23 per A. Ubisoft has stated that this is a quadruple-A game. At $80, you’re only paying $20 per A. Say what you will, but that’s not a bad deal.
Well damn when you say it that way it's a bargain!
It's an Ubisoft game (and reviewed negatively), so it'll be $15 during frequent sales within a year.
The author is Singaporean, so presumably that's the price in Singapore dollars.
Hold on, the most expensive games right now are around $70? Far be it from me defend game studios, but I distinctly remember spending like $50-$60 on N64 carts like Goldeneye and Ocarina of Time back in the late 90s. That’s almost like, price deflation since then.
Gaming used to be much more of a niche product than it is now. Bigger market means more potential sales and economies of scale. Also products based on new tech tend to get cheaper over time - compare the price of the first cell phone to a top of the line flagship phone today, etc.
Game development technology has also come a long way since then. 3D modeling and animation and game design and stuff are all probably a lot easier to do with all the fancy desktop software now available (and super fast computers).
Also it's entertainment and there's an incredible amount of competition for entertainment stuff. Games aren't food or housing.
They're easier, but the standards are a lot higher, and the number of people working on modern AAA games is staggering. All the roles in a very high-production game from the 2000s (the kind that would split modeling, texturing, animating, or gameplay programming, graphics programming, menu programming) are now whole large teams.
The market grew and people aren't willing to spend more.
Well they can't simply raise prices by the inflation since people wouldn't buy games if they were too expensive. Also most big budget games make a lot of money from other sources besides the box price.
Seriously, though, you could tell this one would suck just from the overproduced sea shanty in the commercial.
I pine for a really good Boat Game and really wish Tears of the Kingdom had a giant ass wind water style ocean with islands and stuff where you'd build your own boats to get from place to place.
Nothing has ever managed to scratch the it h that Sid Meiet's Pirates! gave me
Honestly I'd love another remake. The 2004 version was my jam, still revisit it every few years.
people keep talking about this game's price, but it's $60 on epic.
I know how you can get it for free...
