This week, we got a boatload of information about Skull & Bones, including the bizarre reveals that years into development, the team was still deciding whether you would play as the pirate or the boat, and that because of a deal with the Singaporean government, Ubisoft has essentially been forced to continue with the game. It has had such a strange, drawn-out development process, and those recent reports also reveal that, predictably, this process has been toxic in places too. But it never needed to be that way, especially when Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag was sitting right there.
It’s difficult to oversell how chaotic Skull & Bones is as an entity – and it’s not chaotic in the fun pirate ship kind of way either. This game was initially supposed to launch in 2018 – in mid-2021, it just passed Alpha. Three years after it was supposed to be in our hands, it’s finally in a vaguely playable state. It’s easy to mock Ubisoft for this, but it’s important to remember that individual people are involved in making this game, being pulled in several different directions at once, with no end in sight. Ubisoft came under fire for various workplace scandals last year, mostly involving some form of harassment. The investigation into Skull & Bones also revealed that several Singaporean developers felt there had been a ceiling placed upon their progression within the company – a ceiling that does not exist for French developers, they allege.
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Imagine working on a project like Skull & Bones – a huge triple-A game with the backing of Ubisoft, fresh off the success of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag. The game that could be your biggest ever title. Then years into your work, someone wanders into the room and says “I don’t know… maybe it would be better if you played as a boat in this thing?”
This is the ridiculous reality behind Skull & Bones. Recently, our own Jade King wrote about Skull & Bones feeling out of place in modern gaming, with the live-service world moving on and Sea of Thieves already dominating the virtual high seas. She’s right, which makes all the information about Skull & Bones so much worse. Reading about the frenetic development environment, and seeing the game go through multiple delays, it’s difficult to imagine Skull & Bones will be any good, and that’s before you even get to the fact it has probably missed its window. Yet still, the devs toil away in an environment that is likely becoming more difficult by the day. It’s funny, all this nonsense around Skull & Bones, until it isn’t.
This is where Black Flag comes in. It's too late for this now, of course, but this is a lament for what could have been. Skull & Bones started life as something of a sequel to Black Flag, a spin-off set within the world of the Golden Age of Piracy rather than a direct continuation. Had it stayed on this path, it wouldn't have needed several restructures – it would have had a clear framework and could have used existing characters and models rather than needing to start from scratch.
Assassin's Creed 4 is the most divisive game in the series, and that's largely because it's the least Assassin's Creed-ish of all the Assassin's Creed games. You don't really play as an Assassin, but as a pirate who stumbles across a dead Assassin washed up on a desert island, who then finds himself at the centre of a tale of treachery and deceit. Yes, Animus waffle, bloodlines, destiny, etc. I know. But Edward is not the model Assassin in the way Altair or Ezio were. While stealth still featured, Black Flag was a breakaway from some typical AC conventions, embracing the more action-oriented gameplay at the heart of the series today. Pirates, by their nature, are loud, brash creatures of carnage. They are the antithesis of an assassin, and that's precisely why Black Flag embraced them.
Black Flag also took us to the sea, giving us control over our ship, naval battles, underwater exploration, and even a spot of whaling. No game has ever added more fresh ideas to Assassin's Creed. More content? Sure, Valhalla was bigger than ever. But Eivor doesn't bring as many completely new takes on what an Assassin can be as Edward did. Black Flag deserved to have its world explored, and much more importantly, the Ubisoft devs never deserved the tumultuous experience Skull & Bones has wrought. If we could turn back time, it's obvious which choice Ubisoft should have made.