Status Hacksaw Apr 29, 2024
My new obsession is, against my better judgment, Skull & Bones. If we are to trust headlines, popular opinion thinks this game is a poor joke. I see dialogue around how it doesn't feel like it's worthy of its decade long developmental cycle and how in many ways, it's a step down from the game that inspired it (Assassin's Creed …
My new obsession is, against my better judgment, Skull & Bones. If we are to trust headlines, popular opinion thinks this game is a poor joke. I see dialogue around how it doesn't feel like it's worthy of its decade long developmental cycle and how in many ways, it's a step down from the game that inspired it (Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag).
I hear those criticisms loud and clear. But the fact remains that I can't put it down.
I put something like 600 hours into AC4 across the PS3 and PS4 versions, and only a small portion of that is for the multiplayer. I loved the naval combat. I satisfied my gaming cravings replaying the story of AC4 and sailing the seas as a pirate for a long time. So I was immediately excited when they announced Skull & Bones. That excitement dwindled over the years as the project clearly struggled to figure out what it wanted to be. More on that point in a moment. But by the time the open beta was arriving, my interest was at an all-time low. I tried the beta for the hell of it and wasn't impressed. It looked nice but the arcade-like shooting of the cannons felt completely absent of the weight and might of the cannons from AC4. I put it down pretty quickly.
Then came the void between seasons in Diablo IV. I needed something to fill my time until Season 4 kicks off in the middle of May this year. Skull & Bones offered a 6-hour trial so I gave that a run and sank my teeth into the meat of the gameplay mechanics proper. I wasn't really willing to pay $70 by the time the trial was over, but I also didn't want to stop playing. I sat on it for a few days and pulled the trigger. I felt a little buyer's remorse but after another 5 hours, that went away entirely. It might not feel like a $70 in the ways we typically think, but it's clear to me that I'll get my money's worth out of it. I will probably easily put 200 or more hours into S&B and I've paid just as much for a lot smaller and shorter games.
It should be kept in mind that my affinity for this game was, in hindsight, inevitable. Pirates of the Caribbean is one of my favorite film franchises of all time and I had a real interest in pirates when I was a toddler. Some of my earliest memories are seeing pirate-related scenery and media. So pirate-themed material hits at a nostalgia for me. In a similar way, naval warfare has always been utterly captivating to me. I'm the kind of guy that can get lost in a book of naval destroyers and submarines schematics for hours.
So my default position is to enjoy what this game is offering. But it's certainly a bummer to think about what S&B could have been. From what I've gathered in my short skimming of sources, S&B went through several iterations before the game and mechanics we have now were settled upon. Which at the very least suggests if not confirms that it didn't get enough time in the kitchen. I'm sure S&B's final form will be fleshed out through seasonal content but even so, I can't help but wonder how different it would be if it got the appropriate amount of time to see it start out with the current iteration as the original one, rather than being the end result of several changes.
Ultimately the decisions that led to it being a hodgepodge of mechanics stem from individuals. Those individuals, which in this case are managers and creative directors, had to contend with Ubisoft's shareholders, who more than likely don't care about video games and just want a return on their investment. S&B's development started in 2013 which means it saw the rise and fall of several monetization trends in the gaming industry. The story I have in my head is that Ubisoft's executives and shareholders probably wanted to force S&B to cater to or incorporate whatever trend was relevant at the time, to then only come back x-years later and say, "Now we want it this way." That's speculation but it makes sense to me.
So yeah. S&B isn't the terrible game one might imagine in their heads. It's fun. It's gorgeous. The crafting and exploration mechanics are engaging rather than burdensome. I have no idea what the story is because I skip all the dialogue and I don't really need a story, or a voiced character for that matter, in a game like this. The lore is strong enough on its own that I don't care about a weak main plot. The voice acting is solid. The ship customization is nice, even if feeling rudimentary. I'm here for it. I'll probably stick with Skull & Bones for a long while yet. I hope Ubisoft are committed to supporting this game long term, especially since they sank $200 million into it and there's less than a million players. Yikes.
Yo ho.
