Skull & Bones: What WENT WRONG?

Ubisoft's Skull & Bones released after years of tumultuous game development time. After receiving mixed reactions, was this all worth it? Let's talk.

Sources:

[daylen]

Short version of what went wrong; they marketed 'making a game focused on naval combat based on AC Black Flag', then ended up making a generic MMO-type live service grindfest. Multiple people restarting the project in their own image meant nothing of the original idea was left at the end.

[Protosin]

The crazy thing is if you ever played pirates of the Caribbean Online that hand technically had more in it.. also boarding.. in a really really old game.

[donatedpizza]

The first Quadruple A game goes right next to 16x the detail.

[nerfherder]

Any publishers reading these comments, please grab a WE DO NOT WANT GAMES AS A SERVICE!! Have a nice day.

[LarcoVisuals]

“AAAA” even Activision wasn’t bold enough to make that claim💀

[centerleft]

Having zero hand to hand combat and not allowing you to roam your boat or explore islands is criminal.

[ARIXANDRE]

"Your boat has stamina." 🤦🏻‍♂️

[Lawrence_Talbot]

What went wrong is that they looked at everything that made Black Flag good and said “let’s make that feature a cinematic instead”.

[Mattwillo]

Played the demo last night….was legit 30 plays queuing up to talk to a NPC which gives you missions of “go get this, bring it back” 10x

[seanbjornson]

The most frustrating part is they could have just reused almost all the mechanics from Black Flag with some tweaks and free roam multiplayer and people would have loved it.

[ScytheNoire]

Ubisoft management takeaway from this will be that people don't want pirate games.

[summons]

All i wanted was an expansion that let me play Black Flag with my friends. When i found out i cant get off the ship i just re installed Black Flag for another playthrough.

[ralphengland]

What went wrong? They didn't make a game with even the depth of Sid Meiers Pirates.

[juliosilva]

This is like when EA released Battlefront 2015 and they were surprised that people wanted Star Wars Battlefield with large scale vehicular warfare.

[RukuRyukami]

They needed to stick it out with the Singapore studio because they not only got funds from the gov there
But had a tax cut as well
So if they don't deliver they are on the hook for the millions invested by the gov, the tax they didn't pay (the tax cut is based on the IP, no IP no tax cut, that includes all the years they were developing and getting a cut)
Then they need to worry about investigation into whether or not it was a attempt to defraud the gov of its money & tax cuts
It's better to just follow through tbh

[MyUsualComment]

I've said it once; I've said it a thousand times: all I wanted was a single-player pirate game like Black Flag but without the Assassin stuff.

[agwasp]

Thing is, as soon as a studio commits to developing a specific ‘live service game’ you know the major decisions are just about how much money they can make over time. The idea of actually making a fun game is secondary. Players can smell that a mile off, and understandably don’t like being seen as ATM’s.

[Matias_L]

People constantly complain about management, but this is one of those examples of how important competent management is.

[MacDaAce]

Honestly, I'm just grateful its out so those 100s of devs can move on from this hellhole of a game and go make something new.

[markoyamashitach]

You'd think, at some point in that 11 years of development, somebody would have said, "We've been making this game for a while now.... but it's not fun! We should MAKE IT FUN!" lol