Skull And Bones Averts Disaster But Not Apathy
Ubisoft's pirate sim escapes development hell but not the context surrounding it
There's a key distinction that's haunted Skull and Bones for much of its development: are you the boat or a person on the boat? The marketing for the Ubisoft survival crafting sim has always made it look like you're the latter: an unnamed pirate bootstrapping themselves up through the ranks of ruffians and scallywags in the 17th century Indian Ocean. Trailers highlight crews, personal stories, and show lots of familiar third-person action-RPG stuff like disembarking at a port in search of intrigue and adventure.
But at its core, Skull and Bones is a game about a boat that sails around blowing up and looting everything it finds. It is closer to Ubisoft's The Crew Motorfest than Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, the beloved swashbuckler that originally inspired it. You can't walk around on your boat. Resources onshore are harvested from a distance via hokey rhythm mini-games. When you bring an enemy ship's health bar down enough you can press a button to board it, i.e. trigger a brief cutscene animation that leads directly into an ugly resource spreadsheet asking you which loot you want to transfer over into your hull.
None of this is inherently bad, but it is clearly at odds with the pirate fantasy Ubisoft has been trying to sell prospective players on throughout Skull and Bones' long and messy development. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot was mocked far and wide for calling it a "quadruple-A game" while defending the $70 price tag to investors on an earning call. "You will see that Skull and Bones is a fully-fledged game,” he said earlier this month. “It’s a very big game, and we feel that people will really see how vast and complete that game is."
Skull and Bones is certainly AAAA when it comes to its budget, which is well in excess of $200 million at this point, the same price tag as critically-acclaimed first-party Sony hits like The Last of Us Part II and Horizon Forbidden West. Perhaps that's why Skull and Bones feels all-consumed with hiding the fact that it's not actually a story-driven open world RPG, the blueprint for every modern big-budget Ubisoft game at this point, from Assassin's Creed to Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.
Skull and Bones gestures in the direction of these "full-fledged" boxed products. There's a character creator where you choose the third-person appearance of your aspiring pirate kingpin. There are quests you get from vendors in a central social hub. Occasional cutscenes gesture at higher-stakes, character driven drama happening just off screen. And there's an infamy rank you level up throughout the game to unlock better ships and upgrades. Yet GTA Online on the high seas, as some Ubisoft executives might have once hoped, it is decidedly not.
The company has made several attempts to try to rehabilitate Skull and Bones' image over the years following repeated delays, reboots, and reports of dysfunction. In a recent multi-interview deep-dive by IGN, Ubisoft paints the game's troubled production as a sort of natural and inevitable reflection of its scope and ambition colliding with the inexperience and growing pains of a lead Singapore studio that had never shipped a new IP like this before. It's a version that implies everyone is on the same team and rowing in the same direction.
I would suggest an alternative history of Skull and Bones, one in which senior leadership was divided on what the game should be and where decision-making was driven by monetization mandates and flashy pirate vibes rather than a fun, core gameplay loop. The version of the game revealed at E3 2017 was effectively a session-based shooter in the mold of Rainbow Six Siege which at the time was only beginning its triumphant turnaround after a disastrous launch.
It might have been fun for those who played it at the conference, but Ubisoft clearly had concerns about the longevity and the possibilities for monetizing its post-launch live service content. "Because the ships didn't have a lot of customizable options, it was difficult for us to project on the long term," former creative director Elisabeth Pellen told IGN regarding the pivot from PVP shooter to crafting sim. "With the open world, the game experience added more potential.” (Ubisoft implies a single-player campaign was on the table but it never really existed and Pellen arrived to replace previous director Justin Farren who was effectively forced out rather than leaving out of the blue.)
Players can judge for themselves how successful that shift was. Skull and Bones has all of the trappings of a survival sim but many of the systems still feel shallow. It doesn't have robust social options like a Sea of Thieves or the kinds of emergent PVP scenarios you might find in a Rust or even a Division 2. A crew mutiny system advertised in 2022 appears to have been stripped out entirely. And despite being $70 to buy it's full of microtransactions for unlocking cooler things like ornate ship hulls and adorable crewmates like a peg-legged cat. The entire thing feels like it was designed by a committee of people who hate each other.
The result is far from a disaster. After three hours with the game I came away agreeing with SkillUp's assessment: "it's fine." Sometimes pretty, occasionally fun, and mostly inoffensive, it's better than Square Enix's Babylon's Fall and doesn't feel incomplete like BioWare's Anthem did. Those are incredibly low bars in the world of live service multiplayer games. But as Ubisoft does with almost all of its games these days, I'm sure it will support Skull and Bones with post-launch content for at least one to two years, whether players show up for it or not.
Still, it feels like a huge waste of money and a disservice to the talented developers Skull and Bones' production burned through that the final product is a decidedly niche AA experience saddled with all of the indecision and market-tested bloat of a big-budget blockbuster ($30 barebones Early Access hit Palworld, by comparison, knows exactly what it wants to be and doesn’t stray from the path).
Helldivers 2 has conquered the console wars
Skull and Bones is, in many ways, the opposite of Helldivers 2. Arrowhead's alien shooter continues to break Steam concurrent records (most recently Destiny 2 and GTA Online), bringing in so many new players the studio had to temporarily cap logins at 450,000 over the weekend to help stabilize the game. Its simple but robust formula has players sharing their most unexpectedly hilarious and clutch plays online. And despite a premium currency and in-game microtransaction shop, Helldivers 2 feels like a narrowly tailored vision focused on doing a few things really well rather than being an on-boarding vehicle aimed at maximizing recurrent player spending.
Most notably of all, there's an entire set of cultural norms and conversations springing up around the PS5 console exclusive. Influencer sarahebaus went viral on TikTok with a video telling women how to talk to their husbands and boyfriends playing Helldivers. It includes a checklist of memes and phrases to respond with when their significant others' ask them if they can go play, as well as notes on the game itself. "They WILL have trouble logging onto the server," reads on preparing women for the endless complaints about login issues. Another viral Helldivers TikTok video shows a player fighting for their life with the caption "Her: why isn't he responding he's probably out cheating."
The hype around the game has also been bridging the imagined console war gap. At the same time some Xbox superfans are still in a cope-spiral after Microsoft confirmed it will be opening up more of its first-party games to Nintendo Switch and PlayStation, others are producing Helldivers videos about being ready to answer the call and help players fight back the surprise Automaton offensive if the PS5 console exclusive ever comes to Xbox. "Am I the only one expecting a trailer of hell divers being overrun, asking for reinforcements, and the hell jumpers are the ones that respond to call," wrote a TikTok user in the comments of one of them.
In addition to the on-planet hijinks and gunplay, Helldivers 2 sports a multiplayer meta-narrative where players can see their contributions to the war efforts against various enemy factions across multiple star systems in real time. At the end of last week, Arrowhead, playing he role of an RPG dungeon master, unleashed an automaton ambush on the opposite end of the galaxy. Players rushed into the breach to complete new mission objectives, only to be beaten back so handily they speculated the updates were bugged.
Genuine enthusiasm for how the game plays, its cohesive and compelling Starship Troopers knockoff world-building, and this evolving meta narrative have all helped make Helldivers 2 not just a critical and commercial success but a cultural one too. That's something many live service games try to astro turf but which players smell from a mile away and instantly recoil from when it feels manufactured and inauthentic. It also points to why live service games are such risky propositions: you can try to get players to buy your game but you can't control how they feel about it once they do. Like someone hosting a party, studios and companies are ultimately at the mercy of their guests.
A bad year ahead
No matter how successful Helldivers 2 is or continues to be, it can't fill the reported $10 billion hole that just opened up inside Sony after its latest earnings release spooked shareholders. In addition to weaker-than-expected PS5 sales and no big new sequels in 2024, the company also revealed that its operating margin for its gaming business was just 6%. That's just half of what it was before 2022. “Their rev (revenue) on digital sales, add-on-content, digital-downloads are at all time highs…and yet their margins are at decade-lows," Jeffries analyst Atul Goyal told CNBC. "This is just not acceptable."
I'd been told by one former PlayStation employee that this was the main metric driving the recent leadership shakeup, including CEO Jim Ryan's departure at the end of this month, and development VP Connie Booth's reported firing last year. Sony's first-party games are costing more and taking longer, and some new live service experiments like The Last of Us Online won't even see the light of day.
Nintendo just suffered a major market shock as well, though for completely different reasons. On the heels of reports that the console manufacturer might delay the Switch 2 launch until early 2025, its stock price slipped 6%. At the same time, the company reportedly has over $10 billion in cash on hand even as it invests in Hollywood adaptations and global theme parks. But the potential delay of the Switch 2 would still contribute to the gaming industry's overall stagnation that's currently driving an unprecedented series of layoffs.
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