I’ve never played Skull and Bones. That might not be that much of a bombshell considering the game hasn't been released, we’ve barely seen any gameplay footage, and it seems we’ll be waiting until the start of 2024 for it to hit our digital shelves – or even later, if it’s delayed again. But some people have played Skull and Bones, or at least an early demo of it from E3 back in 2018, a year after it had been revealed at the same event.
The game has been in development hell since, as you’d expect from five years of near radio silence. Ubisoft has dropped a couple of carefully curated vertical slices for us to marvel at, but other than those, there hasn’t been so much as a peep from its proverbial parrot on the shoulder. After a complete reboot and presumed change of direction, which included a debate over whether we should play as the pirate or the ship, the game we play in the closed beta and the final game that’s released may as well be completely different from that original concept. They may as well be sequels.
The original concept revealed in 2017 was a kind of nautical MMO, taking inspiration from Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag’s naval sections and expanding them into a whole game – it was even called Black Flag Infinity at one point. Sea of Thieves had already been announced, but Ubisoft was taking a realistic, gritty approach, like the edgy older brother to Rare’s more wholesome affair. The band of French pirates who burned down my sloop three times in a row while singing and laughing maniacally would have something to say about that ‘wholesome’ tag often affixed to Sea of Thieves thanks to its cartoonish art style, but you get the picture.
The 2018 demo doubled down on that Sea of Thieves-esque MMO style, offering a glimpse at an open world inhabited by many players who could loot and shoot together, or compete with one another for piratical glory.
Supposedly, the game pivoted away from this direction in 2019, bringing in crafting and survival mechanics and taking focus away from the PvP naval warfare that everyone had fallen in love with. However, this again was scrapped in a full reboot of development in 2020. Most games couldn’t survive this turmoil, and it’s likely only due to the alleged contractual obligation with the Singaporean government that it remained afloat in such stormy seas.
Ubisoft let nothing slip about the current state of Skull and Bones at its Ubisoft Forward live stream, showing us an original sea shanty (yes really, a sea shanty in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty three) and an assortment of shots of boats sailing, pirates firing cannons, the like. But we can be sure of one thing: this is nothing like the game that anyone played in 2018. Skull and Bones might have been through two complete iterations by this point, and will be unrecognisable. From what I hear about that demo, that’s probably for the best.
It’s not often that games get sequels before the first instalment is even released, but Skull and Bones may well have. Perhaps all the iterating and innovating will have taken it further from its Assassin’s Creed inspiration – diversifying genres is always a good thing – or maybe it’s returned to those roots after trying to tread new ground too far and too freely.
Skull and Bones intrigues me, almost entirely because of its chaotic development. I want to know what this game is, how it plays, what genre it falls into. Nobody has any idea, and Ubisoft’s gameplay-less trailers offer no hints. I don’t know if it’ll be good, bad, or somewhere in between, but I mostly hope it’s interesting. I hope that, after all this time in limbo, it tries something new. Sadly, after having so much funding poured into its lengthy development, I think investors will want something safe, something that is inoffensive and can bring in easy money. But I’ve played Black Flag and I’ve played Sea of Thieves, so Skull and Bones needs to be different from those that have come before. I hope its developers have been given the space to take that risk.