Developing a long-suffering game Skull & Bones from Ubisoft, which has gone through several reboots, has finally made it to the alpha testing stage. Sources said this Kotaku at the publishing house.
Skull & Bones started back in 2013. Initially, Ubisoft planned to quickly release based on Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag multiplayer service game Black flag infinite… The studio was responsible for the project Ubisoft Singaporewho developed sailing ship technology and also had experience working on multiplayer games.
The difficulty was that Black Flag came out at the junction of two generations of consoles, so the technology quickly became obsolete. Therefore, it was decided to launch a new AAA-level franchise, dropping the connection with Assassin’s Creed…
But Ubisoft Singapore lacked a single creative vision. This led to the fact that the development of Skull & Bones was restarted almost every year. The game was surrounded by many “effective managers” vying for power, and the instructions from the head office were very contradictory. This was due to the fact that the culture of work in the Singapore office was different from other divisions of the companies.
There were a great many ideas. Initially, the game was set in the Caribbean, but then it was decided to focus on the Indian Ocean. Another version of the game was inspired by Sid Meier’s Pirates!, the location of the action in the studio was the fabulous country of Hyperborea, and the main mechanics were branched multiplayer battles that would last for weeks.
Another concept revolved around a floating cathedral city called Libertalia. Many ideas remained stuck at the prototyping stage, but this took up valuable time and resources.
Ultimately, Ubisoft Singapore tried to focus on something more realistic. On the E3 2017 Skull & Bones show took place, which is inspired by Rainbow six siege… We are talking about a kind of session shooter, in which players chose different classes of ships.
But Ubisoft’s management insisted on a larger project with a huge world and quests. On the E3 2018 a new demo was demonstrated, which showed “Hunting grounds“- analogue”Dark zones“from The division…
By 2019, the concept changed again, because Ubisoft decided to make a survival simulator in the spirit of Rust and Ark: Survival Evolved. By 2023, plans have been revised once again. Kotaku sources are still unsure what the final version of Skull & Bones will look like as the game continues to evolve. Presumably, the release should take place sometime in 2023.
There is no talk of canceling the long-term construction, because Ubisoft has a contract with the Singapore authorities. At the same time, over the course of eight years, the Singapore office has consistently experienced strong staff drain. The company also has a lot of negative reviews on the portal. Glassdoor… Ex-employees are unhappy with salaries, toxic top managers, unhealthy office culture, and so on.
“If Skull & Bones had been developed by one of our competitors, the project would have been shut down 10 times,” one of the insiders told Kotaku.
See also: “The pandemic gave time to think”: Ubisoft announced the project Assassin’s Creed Infinity
