In 2013 the company Ubisoft started work on the game Skull & Bones… It was originally intended to be a multiplayer add-on to Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag… However, it was soon decided to turn the project into a full-fledged online spin-off under the working title Black flag infinite…
Initially, Skull & Bones were going to release at the end of 2018, then during 2019, then after March 2023. The dates have shifted, and recently the premiere was scheduled for March 2023, but now the game will not be released until March 2023.
Skull & Bones suffered from a lack of clear creative vision, too many managers vying for power, and almost yearly reboots and revisions. After years of development, the game design fundamentals are still pending.
For eight years of development, the game has completely exhausted its initial budget and, according to various sources, cost Ubisoft more than $ 120 million. Costs continue to rise, but employees do not receive the required bonuses, because the game never came out. This situation destroys people and morally: they have been working for years, but the matter has not gotten off the ground.
Some participators compare Skull & Bones with Anthem: at Bioware The demos worked great, but the result was disastrous. Large companies like Electronic Arts or Take-two would have canceled the frozen project long ago, but Ubisoft is placing too much emphasis on multiplayer games-services.
In addition, it is rumored that Ubisoft Singapore is obliged to fulfill the terms of the agreement with the Singapore government: provide employment and release completely original games in exchange for generous subsidies.
Initially, the idea was simple: take the best from Black Flag including sailing ship mechanics and supplement it with the developments of multiplayer online games, in particular, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Phantoms… However, Black Flag Infinite was let down by excessive ambitions.
The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One had just appeared at the time of the start, and the already aging Black Flag began to look even more outdated. The team started to improve the visuals, and it turned out that one pulls the other, and the more updated, the more details become obsolete.
In the end, Ubisoft decided to completely abandon the rework of Black Flag and create a new game dedicated to ship battles, but with its own story and design. This is how Skull & Bones was born with a working title. Project liberty… And the real problems began.
Prior to pre-production, Skull & Bones had been using every imaginable version of itself. At some point, her action took place in the Caribbean, and later moved to the Indian Ocean.
One version was inspired by Sid Mier’s Pirates and played out in a fantasy world called Hyperborea, with branched online campaigns that would last several weeks. Another version was based on the large-scale floating base Libertalia, inspired by the utopian pirate colony of the same name.
Most of the ideas died at the stage of prototypes, but each of them managed to eat up a solid portion of the Singapore studio’s time, since the developers each time redesigned the design and concept of the game, which was constantly changing the basis.
By 2017, the studio was once again trying to fulfill its ambitions, and Skull & Bones was once again reborn, this time in the form of a session-based monetized PvP shooter modeled on Rainbow six siegebut with ships. It was this version that was presented at E3 2017.
However, Ubisoft still wasn’t ready to give up on the dream of a bigger pirate game: with a world open to exploration, with quests besides PVP. So in 2018 Skull & Bones returned to E3 with the Hunting Grounds PvE mode similar to The Division’s Dark Zone. In it, players could fight against each other or together, against stronger AI opponents.
This version of the game was also canceled: by 2019, survival games such as Rust and Ark: Survive… Skull & Bones adds resource controls, crafting, and trade in addition to swimming, fighting, and looting. Survival stakes increased with roguelikes in mind.
These changes caused the most problems: the engine was not adapted to collecting resources and expanding inventory. If at first we were supposed to play as a “ship”, now a pirate has become a hero, but all systems were not designed to be able to go ashore.
In 2023, the direction changed again. Although it is still difficult to say what Skull & Bones will turn out to be and whether it will make it to the final at all.
Different Kotaku interlocutors see the problem in different ways. Someone blames the lack of clear instructions “from above”, from Paris, and someone believes that every decision was approved by too many bosses. Employees believed that for each problem, the simplest short-term solution was chosen, which created new problems.
On top of all this, Ubisoft Singapore had no experience in blockbusters. Former creators of Assassin’s Creed are used to working “vertically”, working through every aspect down to the details. And the Ghost Recon Phantoms team is used to a “horizontal” workflow with tons of iterations. As conceived, these approaches were to be supplemented, in fact, chaos turned out.
Each time the Paris center, receiving reports of difficulties, changed the project leadership, which led to a major transformation of the state. The first art director knew nothing about multiplayer games, the second had great ideas, but lacked a clear vision of the game. Ultimately, the first design documents of 2016 were raised: the development described a full circle.
It would be right to take a small team and set them down to work out the basic concept and foundations in detail, and then expand that vision. Instead, over eight years of hesitation, the studio has grown from 100 people to 400, and in addition to working on the game, other Ubisoft studios are constantly attracted – and then their work is sent to the trash.
Skull & Bones isn’t the only big game with an unclear fate. Ubisoft is in no rush to announce the release of an ambitious open world space opera Beyond Good and Evil 2 and games based on Avatar – it arose after the announcement under the name Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora… Not a word was said about them during E3 2023. But the announcement took place Assassin’s Creed Infinity…
The employees of Ubisoft Singapore do not complain about crunches, although they often dislike the attitude of managers and management. They are more pressured by the fact that the work will never make it to the final. And many already want to release Skull & Bones in any form, not realizing that in the case of a game-service, even this will not give them freedom.
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