Skull and bones ubisoft update#

Some blame the lack of clear direction from above, with decisions filtering through too many senior leads and few willing to take responsibility for making difficult calls. “Everyone knows what an Ubisoft game is supposed to be and the design simply isn’t there yet.”Īsk five different Skull & Bones developers what went wrong, and you’ll get 10 different answers.

“The game is still evolving,” said one current developer. It’s not just that it isn’t close to the finish line yet it’s still not even clear where the finish line is. The latest build of Skull & Bones will be different still, though many remain unsure what shape the finished game will ultimately take. The project’s existing engine tools were ill-equipped to take players exploring on land for resources, and the additional layers of inventory were a pain to try to implement, they said.īy 2020, direction had shifted yet again, four current and former developers told Kotaku. It was a particularly messy change in direction, according to five current and former developers. There would also be harsher stakes for dying, adding a roguelike-lite edge to the pirate fantasy. In addition to the sailing, fighting, and looting, there would be resource management elements like crafting and trading. But conditions on the ground were already beginning to outstrip these modest ambitions.īut this version of the game would eventually get scrapped too, and by 2019, survival games like Rust and Ark: Survival Evolved became Skull & Bones’ new guiding stars. Black Flag Infinite would pool that expertise to make a quick turnaround live service game that would reuse and reskin as much of Black Flag as possible. Ubisoft Singapore was responsible for developing the sailing tech that helped define some of the best parts of Black Flag and had recently-gained experience in online multiplayer games with its ongoing work on a free-to-play Tom Clancy game called Ghost Recon Phantoms. Over the past year, we’ve made significant changes to our policies and processes to create a safe and more inclusive workplace and empower our teams to create games that reflect the diversity of the world we live in. That being said, any unfounded speculation about the game or decisions being made only works to demoralize the team who are working very hard to develop an ambitious new franchise that lives up to the expectations of our players.

Skull and bones ubisoft update#

The Skull & Bones team are proud of the work they’ve accomplished on the project since their last update with production just passing Alpha, and are excited to share more details when the time is right. In response to a detailed list of questions, Ubisoft confirmed to Kotaku that Skull & Bones just passed Alpha, and provided the following brief statement: “Just having people working for four or five years on something that doesn’t move forward, that destroys anyone,” said one former developer. Some on the core team developing Skull & Bones are hopeful they can still avoid a similar fate but are also incredibly desperate to ship the game and move onto something new. One current developer compared the project’s trajectory to Bioware’s Anthem, another big multiplayer game-as-a-service that looked great in demos but launched broken and incomplete. Production has dragged on for years, but many current and former developers say they still have little to show for it.

In addition to hiring a certain number of people at its Singapore studio in exchange for generous subsidies, they said, Ubisoft Singapore must also launch original brand new IPs in the next few years. But three sources also told Kotaku that a deal with the Singapore government requires it. In part, that’s because live service games have become an increasingly important and lucrative part of the Assassin’s Creed publisher’s portfolio. Eitherway, Ubisoft has bet big on the multiplayer pirate adventure and is determined to ship it one way or another. More generously, another former developer said that Electronic Arts or Take-Two for example probably wouldn’t have attempted it in the first place.