Skull And Bones Sure Does Feel Like More Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag

Starting improvement in 2013, Skull and Bones, conceptually, was a spin-off of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, which launched that very same 12 months. Each are video games the place you play as a pirate and interact in naval warfare, bettering your ship over time as you collect sources and unlock new crafting recipes. I hoped Skull and Bones would construct and iterate on Black Flag–one of my favourite games–to be its personal factor. Though naval fight was a pillar of Black Flag, it wasn’t your entire focus of an Assassin’s Creed recreation, so a recreation like Skull and Bones–built from the leap to be a wholly pirate-focused journey at sea–could make some huge swings with its deeper naval fight and presentation, free from the quasi-realistic world and the sneaking and stabbing focus of Assassin’s Creed. Having now had an opportunity to play Skull and Bones, nonetheless, that does not appear to be the case. Based mostly on my expertise to this point, Skull and Bones is not doing sufficient to distinguish itself from Black Flag and, in consequence, appears like taking part in a recreation I already skilled over a decade in the past.

In terms of having fun with Skull and Bones, I believe your mileage might fluctuate. Since 2013, we have seen extra video games which have constructed and improved upon Black Flag’s naval combat–heck, most of them are subsequent Assassin’s Creed video games like Rogue and Odyssey. So, even when Black Flag had top-of-the-line (and I would argue it was the finest) naval fight in a online game as of 2013, that is not the case anymore in 2024. On the very least, Ubisoft’s model of naval fight is now not novel. For me, it is a little bit dated and off and so, consequentially, Skull and Bones feels a little bit dated and off.

There are new concepts in Skull and Bones, positive (Skull and Bones has far more ship customization than Black Flag did, as an example, that is based mostly on a color-tiered loot system akin to many latest live-service video games), however the déjà vu of the expertise is overwhelming and hits like whiplash. It often pulled me out of any type of enjoyable I occurred to be having. It is not simply the gameplay either–the aesthetic of the expertise can really feel prefer it’s simply been copied and pasted from Black Flag. For instance, a number of the sea shanties in Skull and Bones sound like the identical ones from Black Flag. Within the grand scheme of issues, whether or not or not they’re new recordings is not an enormous deal–Black Flag has good shanties and I like listening to them. But it surely’s the startling sum of particulars like this and different similarities–from the fight mechanics to visuals, and from the sound design to the gameplay loop–that make it really feel like I used to be simply taking part in Black Flag once more. And I do not need to simply play Black Flag once more.

In the event you do, nonetheless, then there could also be some enjoyable so that you can salvage right here. Every sort of ship behaves in another way sufficient to warrant strategic consideration in what you sail, and additional customization choices will let you curate how your ship fights, like creating a particular construct from an RPG’s beginning class. You is usually a damage-dealing warship that banks on a dime however cannot take successful, as an example, or a stalwart behemoth armed with cannons that may heal allied ships and tank hits. There’s some cool selection within the kinds of builds you may create, and when you’re out on the open sea, there is a colourful Indian Ocean to sail via and loads of enemy ships and strongholds to explode. In a world the place Black Flag did not exist already and different pirate video games like Sea of Thieves weren’t already killing it at delivering that pirate fantasy, Skull and Bones would possibly stand out. As is, nonetheless, it feels prefer it’s treading water within the shadow of giants.

I did not play any of the principle storyline in my preview, so I did not see what it is like to start out out because the survivor of a shipwreck and work your method as much as being a revered pirate captain. As a substitute, I jumped in at Skull and Bones’ endgame, already in control of a fleet of ships that have been every armed with quite a lot of weaponry. Developer Ubisoft Singapore supplied a top level view of the primary 4 seasons of post-launch content material through the preview, after which had me play via a number of the occasions that shall be accessible in Season 1: Raging Tides, wherein a legendary poison-spewing pirate lord invades the Indian Ocean, creating new limited-time occasion alternatives.

I first tried a Hostile Takeover, wherein two different gamers and I needed to fight waves of enemy ships and one another whereas members of our respective crews invaded close by settlements and retains in an effort to loot their treasure. Afterward, my group accomplished a Legendary Heist, wherein gamers race to sink a treasure ship earlier than it reaches its vacation spot, loot the cargo, and steal away earlier than anybody else can retaliate. We then accomplished a number of bigger, six-player activities–in the primary, we hunted down a harmful sea creature by capturing at it with our cannons through the temporary moments it surfaced, and within the second we fought a legendary pirate lord who would escape if we did not blow up his ship in an allotted time.

Boiled down, each occasion is constructed on the identical bones: Outfit your ship as finest you may after which shoot the enemy till they sink. Hostile Takeovers and Legendary Heists have the attention-grabbing wrinkle of PvP parts, however I am not satisfied they’re sufficient to provide Skull and Bones the longevity to make it via a season of post-launch content material, not to mention 4 (although, presumably, Skull and Bones could be getting extra kinds of actions in subsequent seasons, like different live-service video games).

The Black Flag comparisons don’t do Skull and Bones any favors, as a result of they jogged my memory of how these occasions are merely imitations of actions from that recreation. Black Flag gave us strongholds and legendary pirate captains to assault, in addition to treasure ships to steal from and harmful beasts to hunt. The key distinction is that Black Flag allowed you to depart the helm of your ship in lots of of those facet quests, offering moments the place you leap to the deck of an enemy ship and cross swords with a number of foes, run via a fort you have weakened to take out the stragglers, tensely face off towards terrifying sea creatures with nothing greater than your wits and a restricted variety of spears, and expertise the unbelievable human tales of pirate legends.

Perhaps Skull and Bones has moments like that in its important storyline–I would not know as I have never performed it. However on the very least, they are not within the endgame, which means there’s nothing to interrupt up the monotony of the loop of outfitting your ship, crusing out, capturing a bunch of cannonballs, returning to port, and repeating. Maybe the objectives of those actions are completely different however the strategies wherein you obtain them are the identical, and so by the top of my three-hour preview, the expertise was starting to tug. It should not be the purpose to make each recreation into an expertise that lasts ceaselessly, but when Ubisoft Singapore desires Skull and Bones to go on for at the least 4 seasons, it must shake up its system a bit extra, if solely to interrupt away from unflattering comparisons to a recreation that is nearly 11 years previous.