Everyone has been riding this pirate wave since about 2003 with the huge success of Pirates of the Caribbean, a movie that definitely inspired studios to recreate the aura and atmosphere of a scalawag’s life. Somehow, Skull and Bones brings me back to that one house party where a friend wouldn’t stop attempting to gain everyone’s attention by doing a poor Captain Jack Sparrow impression.
Much like this old compatriot of mine, Skull and Bones feels derivative and boring. Lacking any sort of depth, despite taking part in an ocean. This is due in part to the fact that multiple Ubisoft studios have had their hands in trying to ensure a proper return on investment. Everything short of the ship combat feels half-baked and disappointing.
Skull and Bones puts you in the boots of a surviving cremate who came close to death after the game’s quick intro tutorial where your ship is destroyed in battle. You have to rise through the ten pirate ranks and become one of the most well-known scurvy dogs of all time. As you rise through the ranks you’ll upgrade your ship with weapons, armor, and cosmetics; unlocking these are the epitome of tedium, but I digress.
If you are familiar with 2013’s Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, you’ll find the ship combat in Skull and Bones to be absolutely comparable but with some added monotony. Aiming and firing various cannons and mortars feels nice despite at sometimes not being able to tell the proper trajectory of your cannons. There have been times when I have aimed at a structure only to overshoot it. This is where aiming reticles could be enhanced with the drop distance lines, or a telegraph similar to how Black Flag handled combat.
When it comes to maneuverability, your mileage may vary. Skull and Bones employs a wind system where your ship’s speed will adjust depending on the direction of various gusts. Going against the wind will slow you down while going with it will bring you to max speed which is about 12 knots in most cases. Your cargo doesn’t slow you down which is nice, but the wind happens to be the most annoying factor when it comes to traversal, especially as you’ll spend a lot of time just sailing from one point to another.
Between these points, you’re supposed to be conducting these various tasks or committing to acts of piracy- destroying and pillaging other ships for resources so you can upgrade your arsenal. There is something so basic about this gameplay loop. Destroying ships is fun, especially when you start to get some rather good weapons and armor to withstand fighting two or three ships at a time. On the other hand, Skull and Bones lacks any agency when it comes to your character, reducing the ship boarding mechanic to a cutscene where if you can hook in the opponent’s ship, you automatically pillage it. From my experience, there is never a time where I felt this was absolutely necessary as ships will drop resources whether or not you boarded it.
You can also pillage various locations, but you won’t get off the ship. Instead, you send your crew who will take over the area and steal what they can while you provide backup. Usually, you’ll attack a tower or some sort of defensive structure while a ship or two slowly moves into the fray. After a couple of rounds, you’ll have your gear and the location will be placed into a “rebuild” mode where you have to wait to attack and pillage it again. Since Skull and Bones is a live-service title, that means if you do not make it before someone else does, you’ll be waiting before you can unleash your own brand of pirate assault.
Yes, if you didn’t notice me saying it once before, I’ll reiterate: there is very little agency over your captain. On open waters, you only exist as the boat. Everything you do outside of the small ports revolves around the ship, giving me some of the absolute worst mechanics I have seen in a game of this stature. Collecting materials such as wood and wheat revolves around owning certain tools. You have to upgrade these tools to gather advanced materials, something that survival crafting enthusiasts are keenly aware of. The problem is how this mechanic is executed.
See, despite being a pirate, you don’t get off your ship to gather the materials. Instead, you pull up next to the node as depicted on your map, and you hit the gather button. A meter appears on the screen and you must hit the activation button when the tool in question hits the green or yellow portions, you get some materials. Some side missions will require you to gather these materials and ship them off to certain points which makes for some poor gameplay, and this type of design is rampant throughout.
You’ll be sailing past some of the most exotic islands that are ripe with treasure and exploration points only to be sorely disappointed in how you cannot experience what these locations have. Maybe as a pirate captain, you are a bit too paranoid in a potential mutiny in your absence? I don’t know for sure. There are four different sections of the map including The Red Isle, the Coast of Africa, the East Indies, and the Open Seas. I’d say they each have a respectable biome but they all kinda seem the same. Without the ability to explore these islands to their fullest extent, they are all just set dressing to a rather long play.
Skull and Bones does contain a story and it is not very gripping at all. If anything, it feels like a prolonged tutorial that is supposed to prepare you for the rest of the game’s features. I find every character interaction to be cliche and overplayed. Everyone is kind of an asshole and reminds you that you’re the low guy on the totem pole. As soon as you blow up a few ships and start buying stuff, you’re the greatest captain ever. You’ll return to the central port to cheers of approval by characters you never got a chance to know. It’s so bare and careless.
At a certain point, I started to skip some of the story bits and instead of listening to the drawn-out conversations, I just read them and moved on. There was nothing really captivating about the missions I was sent out on. I go from blowing up ships and collecting cogwheels to changing the color of my sails and blowing up ships, to collecting ivory from blown-up ships located in a different part of the map that takes so long to get to; I just completely checked out one night. So much of this game is unnecessary boredom that I wonder if the game even needed a story in the first place.
Skull and Bones suffers from a lack of changing up the pace early in the game. While you do have a solid start, there are too many points where the game feels like a drag. The typical gameplay loop has you fighting enemies and gathering materials to get better gear for your ship, then you’ll fight more powerful enemies which you’ll outgun if you find the right blueprints.
These blueprints act as the game’s gatekeeping mechanic, preventing you from overpowering your ship too quickly. You’ll find these in all sorts of ways from mission rewards to buying them at various shops around the map.
You can even customize your captain’s outfits but they cost either in-game currency, advanced currency, or micro-transaction currency; the same goes for your ship. All you are doing is building an aesthetic that only a few will actually see. After all, Skull and Bones is a live service game with plenty to do but it doesn’t have the same aura that other games have. While others are also attacking ships to which you can join in, it isn’t the secret sauce that is going to drive people towards this game. Currently, everyone else I have seen are all rocking the same outfit as me, so there isn’t anything inherently special that I can speak to. Perhaps if I saw my captain in places aside from the ports, I’d be more invested.
Similar to Black Flag, there are a few events that you can commit to aside from the standard side quests and bounties. There are ghost ships, sea monsters, and world events that cycle as you play. There are treasure hunts, investigations to look into, and a PvP opt-in event called Cutthroat Cargo which has you and others rush to find treasure. Additionally, there are helms, supply networks to organize, deeper item management, order registries, and a general economy at play here. The problem is that it feels boring.
Ubisoft has been rather clear with their support for Skull and Bones for the future. There will be new loot to collect, more ways to grow your pirate empire, upgrade paths, more ships, weapons, and adversaries to face. While it all seems neat, the entry to this experience just isn’t fun. I can’t even fully embrace this as a title that would become better over time simply due to Ubisoft’s track record with only Rainbow Six Siege making a huge impact over the gaming landscape.
Before I close this out, I need to speak to the PC performance of Skull and Bones as it is absolutely abysmal. With a modern GPU, I experienced massive stuttering and frame rate drops at high settings, going from 60 fps down to 5 on open water with nothing around me. I don’t know how this is happening, especially knowing I can handle more demanding titles with ease.
Before Skull and Bones’ early access period, Yves Guillemot stated that the game is a AAAA game, and if that is the case then I don’t want to know what their AAA titles will be from this moment on. Coming hot off Avatar, I’m honestly surprised by his remarks since Skull and Bones is a rather unremarkable title that takes all the good parts of a live service game and maroons them, leaving me to pick up the pieces.
I firmly believe that not every game needs to be a live service. I feel like there was more originally in the plans for this title. After all, past Assassin’s Creed games offered vast exploration through the seas, allowing me to explore islands, albeit in a single-player fashion, which this game should have been from the start. I wouldn’t mind a nice story with a multiplayer option where I could take part in various game types. Instead, I get to see a ton of pirate captains who looks just like me, who have the same ship style, with the same sails and motif.
