Skull and Bones delayed...again...again...again

Ubisoft has announced that it has, for the sixth time, delayed Skull & Bones, as well as canceled three more unannounced games amid "major challenges" in the industry, the underperformance of Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope and Just Dance 2023, and an upcoming "restructuring."

Six times! As of now the game is slated to launch between April and December of this year. I can't imagine this game will ever turn a profit after a decade or so of development but I'll be curious to see if it ever actually releases. Is Beyond Good and Evil 2 still on the docket?

@rorie: Based on the additional Yves quotes in this article, I assume that anything outside the tentpole franchises is getting little to no love anytime soon:

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/ubisoft-has-cancelled-3-unannounced-games-and-delayed-skull-bones-again/

I'm shocked! Just shocked!

Ubisoft is in such a weird spot right now, but I guess they’re paying the piper finally for just pushing Assassin’s Creed/Far Cry/Clanciverse/Just Dance/lackluster-extreme-sports-or-motorsports-game for the past 15 years on a near-annual basis, with little to no major divergence.

That 2 years around like 2014 where they made Grow Home, Child of Light, and Valiant Hearts: The Great War was kinda sick, though. Sadly just a small blip in the sea of Ubi open world games.

@bisonhero: Their core franchises are doing really well though, its the other stuff thats the issue. Support studios getting their chance to shine plus covid has been a real killer, Ubisoft's tentacle nature probably hasn't helped either.

my fiancee was Really interested in this one when when first showed it ( i showed him) after that original e3 trailer , over the years my mild interest has dissipated and i think he just flat out doesn't care. at this point i just want to see how bad it is when it comes out after all this. i've never been into mp games much so it never really appealed to me anyway and i've played better naval combat games than ubisoft's take on it in the AC games , but damn if i didn't Used to love those first handful of AC games n enjoy farcry 3-primal , but at this point it looks like ubisoft is finally feeling it in a few waysd having pushed out cookie cutter games with different skins on it for over a decade at this point.

And so it begins. This game won't be the last. Starfield, for example, is like Beyond Good & Evil 2. It will never come out.

@av_gamer: idk i would be suprised if starfeild got delayed again , i'm sure it'll release with the expected amount of bethesda jank instead , it'll just be less bad jank dude to no ps version being a thing ( they usually have worse versions on sony hardware so i could easily understand it going ms exclusive after they were bought)

I just had a strange thought about how this game became the game that it is that no one wants to play. Could it be that when Ubisoft was told people wanted "Black Flag without the AC stuff" they internally have this prideful idea that what makes AC AC is the parkour and melee combat and campaign missions/storytelling etc ? So for them to make the game "without the AC stuff" they needed to remove all those aspects, not just make it a story unrelated to the AC IP.

It just seems like it could be a case of the typical pretentious artist that thinks all the generic stuff they do is somehow unique and special. A lot of people speculate that it's just Ubisoft trying to push the game into a more monetizable format, but after this long it's fairly apparent that there's a basic miscommunication between the developers and the target audience.

@ares42: It's more likely Ubisoft Singapore's inexperience ment they were unable to or couldn't, I wouldn't be surprised if they had to scale back to get it out the door especially with covid. It's the Mass Effect Andromeda scenario all over again.

How much AC stuff do the recent games even have? Their already got cosmetic mtx items unavailable in-game, xp boosters and seasonal evens etc, Skull & Bones would just have more of it and ideally for Ubisoft for a longer period.

@thepanzini: If that was the case, wouldn't they at some point involve more studios to handle the scope of the game ? The game has literally been in development for 10 years now, so their other studios have finished and started other projects several times during the development. If they truly wanted the game to be bigger in scope they've had ample of opportunity to make that happen.

@ares42: Covid likely made a lot harder to offload the work to other parts of Ubisoft, with different parts of the world being in an out of lock down.

Even then at some point it's sunk cost fallacy and better to just cut and release what you have.

In what capacity was it in development Singapore not know for AAA development would have made much harder staffing up.

Assassin's Creed for me is defined by its gameplay. It's not necessarily unique or special, but if you told me you wanted a game to be less like Assassin's Creed, I'd start by removing the parkour. What do you consider to be the "AC stuff"? Just the Animus and things related to the story in that way? If it never mentioned Desmond Miles, would that be enough for you?

@eccentrix: As already mentioned, the general consensus seems to be that people just wanted Black Flag 2 without it being tied to the AC IP. So yeah, build on the same gameplay, but write a pirate story without the hook of the animus, the present world characters and assassins and templars.

Think of it this way; What was the major differences between the current AC games at the time and the Arkham games ? While they certainly weren't exact copies they shared a ton of core concepts, and almost every gameplay difference could be attributed to the overall themes of Batman or Assassin.

ACs traversal and combat wasn't something intrinsically unique about those games, it was just their thematic spin on the same concepts you saw in a lot of action adventures. So to make the game less AC-like you don't remove those concepts, you put a different spin on them according to the theme of the game.

@ares42: But if you're saying "almost every gameplay difference could be attributed to the overall themes of Batman or Assassin" and "to make the game less AC-like you don't remove those concepts, you put a different spin on them according to the theme of the game", doesn't that mean changing gameplay elements to make it less Assassiny and more piratey? Pirates don't climb trees. They're not usually stealthy, either.

I still don't think I fully understand what you're saying, but to me it seems self-contradictory. I think you're saying the structure of the gameplay isn't unique to Assassin's Creed, but you want it to be changed so that it isn't too similar to Assassin's Creed, but keep it mostly the same. Currently, the gameplay of Skull and Bones doesn't seem similar enough to Assassin's Creed to you, even though "ACs traversal and combat wasn't something intrinsically unique about those games". They took too much out that wasn't related to Assassin's Creed and now it doesn't have enough Assassin's Creed.

It's like you had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and said "I really like that it's a sandwich, the bread is very good, but I don't like the PB&J." So the next time, you're given a turkey sandwich. Now you're saying "Actually, I liked that it had jelly in it, I just wanted the peanut butter removed." I guess from that analogy, I can judge that you only associate very specific things with what constitutes Assassin's Creed, but my definition is a lot broader.

Sorry for the long rambling post, I just like figuring out stuff like this and I consider the train of thought important. I don't fully comprehend the mindset, but at the end of this post, I think I understand a little better. The modern Assassin's Creed games don't feel like real Assassin's Creed games to me because the gameplay is so different. To me, they're Far Cry games in the AC universe. Maybe it's time to finally watch jan Misali's video about how many Mario games there are.

@eccentrix: I mean, this misunderstanding is kinda what I was talking about. I'm not talking about how I want the game to (not) be, I was talking about how there's a miscommunication between what people said they wanted and what Ubisoft interpreted it as.

If they interpreted "non-AC Black Flag" in the same way you do the state of Skull and Bones makes a ton of sense. They very clearly made a more developed Black Flag without any of the more standard AC gameplay. But that's not what people really wanted when they asked for "non-AC", they just wanted the same game in a full pirate theme instead the pirate/assassin hybrid Black Flag is. So the reason this game is stuck in development hell is because every time they bring it to the test crowd they respond poorly because it's just conceptually wrong compared to what they expected.

i'm not sure that the case realy either. idk those early showings made not not look like a blackflag minus the assassin's stuff so much as a sea of thevies esqe multiplayer online game wher you are a pirate ship/captain. my guess honestly is frankly just the way multiplayer games shifted in the past near decade between older traditional types to bigger 'live service' styles to the battale royals n such alot of ideas they planned got scraped and repurposed or rejigged. i could be wrong with some of this but overall i think its biggest issue is more the landscape keeps changing and if they had the option they probably would have scrapped it ages ago but whatever deal they made wioth singapore govt. means thats not gonna happen. at this point i have no doubt it'll come out ,flop , then get shut down as fast as SE did babylon's fall


edit: on a side note i'm glad someone finally mentioned those early AC games having the same sorta combat as those batman games. to me that was a core feature of those games aside from the parkour n why i liked them . these newer entries don't have that same feel and the world being as bloated along with it i think they're worse off for it , i'll agree they seem more like farcry with a AC wrapper

@ares42 said:

In non-AC terms, I think what people wanted was "An M-rated Sid Meier's Pirates!" Unfortunately, there was a dev diary thing posted on YouTube from a few days ago which very much gave the impression that the final release is going to be more along the lines of "Ubisoft game variant #146A - Historical Action with Sailing Subtype."

I wasn't unimpressed as much as I was confused with what I saw. Even after watching a 30 minute presentation, I still have no idea what the hell is going on or what the game is supposed to be. The whole thing seemed very disjointed and the developers on the stream were struggling to explain the gameplay loop concisely. I think they were trying to show a quest chain involving tracking down some buried treasure. It seemed like it should have been pretty straightforward, but then Ubisoft(TM) kept happening.

The presentation turned into "We need to attack this ship in order to get the Snitch to tell us which town to raid to get the Flibberty Gibbet which fills the Lore Meter so you can turn it Doubloons to buy a Map which shows the Sailing Points you need to claim to find the Treasure. And that's how you get Infamy."

We've seen it time and again when studio's get their chance it can go off the rails as they try and shoot for the moon.

For me I don't care how much or how little Assassin's Creed feel it has, because I do not believe for a second the single player will be robust. They had developed this game for a LONG TIME to be multiplayer and PvP. THAT is what ruins this for me, they quickly conceive dof this as a multiplayer game likely with expansive DLC. I'm only interested in the single player, but I think that part will be given short shrift.

All I really wanted, and no they do not have to care one fig about what I wanted as the AC4: Black flag gameplay that was expanded so there was a game mechanic to upgrade you ship and even choose the size of ship you wanted. A game mechanic to hire crew (Bowsun (crew boss), carpenter (builder), gunner (ship armament), and sail maker (AKA speed and maneuvering). How good the person in each position is determines how good the sailors on the ships can be - how well/how strong your ship is in the game. As someone said above and adult "Sid Meier's Pirates'" with more narrative like Mass Effect 2-3.

I just want a new Uncharted Waters that isn't some half-baked MMO. I'll even take a fan-translation of 3 and 4!

So now isty being reported that Skull and Bones Pre-Orders are being refunded, the game is no longer on sale in PS Store.

Ubi, for the love of god just give up! Just admit people within your various companies blew the money. Who knows maybe they didn't mean to waste the money, maybe is was mismanagement by your executives like Yves Guillemot and his family. However, ist happened the game is broken or unworthy of being sold...so like shit or get off the pot.