“Has this game ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?”
“No sir it is Singaporean.”
Skull and Bones could have been great, but it’s unfortunately a dud. I’m sure no one working on this title wanted to create a bad game, but the final product has all the hints of homework that was submitted for the sake of meeting a grading requirement.
There’s the problem. They saw how much people liked the pirate stuff in Assassin’s Creed 4 and they thought they could just throw a bunch of money ar making another one. I’m guessing no one really had a creative vision for the project beyond “make big pirate game.” It looks like Ubisoft got exactly what they paid for.
I look forward to this sort of thing playing out a lot as generative AI becomes more common. “I don’t get it, we fed all the right data points into the computer, but no one likes the result! Why aren’t people enjoying the things that our models show are statistically identical to the other things they like?”
I’m guessing no one really had a creative vision for the project beyond “make big pirate game.” It looks like Ubisoft got exactly what they paid for.
They basically changed the core concept at least twice during development, first rejecting every prototype for two years straight then telling the studio to make “Siege, with boats” and then going when that came out.
And the whole time they were shitting on the local devs, rotating out the management, and basically just using the ongoing project as a way to grift subsidies from the Singapore government and have some place for their execs to vacation while pretending to work.
On the flip side of that, I could easily see indie creators feeding a mishmash of ideas into chat-gpt and stable diffusion and coming out with a weird-ass, wonderful game like Kenshi. It’s the corporate “polish” that smooths off all the weird edges that will make these insufferable.
Just give me a pirate game where like 30 dudes try to load, aim, and fire 20 guns while trying to repel borders, heal/replace the injured, adjust sails, etc while cannon balls smashing though the ship.
They saw how much people liked the pirate stuff in Assassin’s Creed 4 and they thought they could just throw a bunch of money ar making another one.
‘Okay, mes amis… now let’s rip out the ship boarding, the melee combat, fleet management, island traversal, towns, most of the resource stuff and economy, and the single-player aspect! C’est magnifique!’
So far away from what anyone wanted or expected.
Years ago there was a big budget pirate themed porn movie. I worked with a person who rented the “rated” version with all the XXX content cut because they had no idea what it was. They were like “yeah the acting wasn’t great and there were a lot of sex scenes in the plot.” Ma’am that’s because you rented a porno from Blockbuster.
I still think about that when I see pirate themed stuff.
Skull and Bones is huge, so expect to spend a lot of time travelling. I managed to locate Singapore in the East Indies and travel there, where it’s known as a pirate den called Telok Penjarah, but getting there took me almost 15 to 20 minutes of listening to shanties
I really don’t want to defend an 80 dollar game in any capacity, but this is exactly what I wanted from it. Sailing around listening to sea shanties (and occasionally attacking British ships and outposts) was the good part of ACIV.
I would assume that for the full experience, you might need to manage crew members, or assign tasks. If all you gotta do is move the stick left and right, to get from point a to b. I’d be bored out of my mind.
80 bucks? I thought “big” releases were 70 now, 80?
I already decided I’ll never pay 70 bucks for a TRIPPPLE A GAME so 80 is extremely out of the question. Why would I spend so much on such garbage when better games are still coming out at the 20-40 price range
Triple-A games sell for $70, which is around $23 per A. Ubisoft has stated that this is a quadruple-A game. At $80, you’re only paying $20 per A. Say what you will, but that’s not a bad deal.
I paid 70 euros for Tekken 8 because I can’t pirate it and I’ll put in the hours, but it felt like shit anyway
i paid for fucking diablo IV and basically haven’t played it in months because I hate how everything fucking scales to you
