We dreamt something bigger for Skull and Bones, and these ambitions naturally came with bigger challenges,” she wrote at the time. “The answer is that we simply needed more time. It was supposed to adapt the ship battling mechanics from Black Flag for multiplayer and strip all the narrative threads that make the Assassin’s Creed franchise hard to follow.
Initially, the premise of Skull and Bones was simple. Last year, Elisabeth Pellen, the game’s creative director, attributed the ongoing delays to a vision change.
#Ubisoft skull and bones update#
Update your settings here, then reload the page to see it. This article was first published in Geek Culture.This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Ubisoft Singapore certainly has plenty to learn, and let’s keep our fingers crossed for its future projects moving forward. Nonetheless, the game is due to come out before March 2023, but hopefully it can release sooner than later, so the developers can finally take a break from this hot mess of a project. While Ubisoft CFO Frederick Duguet assured during the company’s May investor’s call that production “has been advancing well over the past 12 years, and the promise is better than ever”, it’s difficult to get rid of the lingering apprehension for what appears to be a sinking ship. The current development of Skull & Bones has finally entered Alpha, but it seems like the finish line is still nowhere in sight. “People would learn about the project, see how it works and everything around it, and then leave. “It’s one of the only projects I’ve seen where as we were going, the team became more and more junior because all the talent and all the experience would leave constantly,” one former developer said to Kotaku. In light of the revelations, it’s only understandable that the team is running on fumes and extremely low morale. These are on top of existing workplace problems (as listed on Glassdoor) like office politics, a toxic work culture, and wage discrimination, alongside the persistent refusal to listen to feedback from senior managers, who will surround themselves with “yes men”. The report has shed light on a lot of behind-the-scenes troubles, including the lack of a clear direction from upper management, cultural clashes on the team, the studio’s lack of experience in shipping original heavy hitters, and constant big leadership shakeups. The most succinct summary, though, comes in the form of this comment by a former developer, “Nobody knew what the f– they were doing.”
The sentiment is echoed by another ex-developer, who shared, “If Skull & Bones were at a competitor it would have been killed 10 times already.” “It’s a classic case of mismanagement for eight years,” said one former developer in the same Kotaku article.“Instead of adding layers of value we kept running around in a loop.” Nothing seems to be headed in the right direction, however. The other reason can be attributed to the game’s shift to a live service approach that proves to be an important and lucrative part of Ubisoft’s portfolio in recent times. The company, in exchange for generous subsidies, is required to hit a certain hiring quota and launch original IPs in the next few years, making it imperative that the title gets shipped by hook or by crook – final look notwithstanding.
The worst part of this development hell? The project has to be completed, courtesy of an agreement with the Singapore government.Īccording to a report by Kotaku, Skull & Bones cannot be scrapped as part of a deal with the authorities. Originally slated for launch in late 2018, the game has since undergone four delays in three years – sometime in 2019, after March 2020, before March 2020, and now March 2023 – which is already a huge, huge red flag. Ubisoft Singapore first rose to prominence with their water tech prowess in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, so it wasn’t surprising news that the studio had been tapped to work on an original title involving pirate ships, sea battles, and of course, water and waves for miles.īut what started out as a pipe dream would soon become the nightmare of developers, as Skull & Bones continues to stumble into its eighth year of development with little to show.
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