Skull & Bones - Ubisoft Singapore, multiplayer pirate ship battles

Games
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(Alternately - Skull and Bones for search results)

Official site

Gameplay video:

It was just confirmed that, yes, of course, there will be loot boxes.

Farren: So, our economy emulates the real economy of the Indian Ocean, so things that are important to the people who are shipping goods, the merchants, … the empires, those things are important to you. There’s nothing more pirate-y than the treasure chest.

GameSpot: Right. It fits very well.

Farren: So, what I don’t want to players to feel it is, that it’s some abstraction from the fantasy. It should feel like the things that you’re hunting, using your spyglass to see the things that are on board, should directly relate to the things that you need. But you know, there’s nothing more pirate-y than the treasure chest.

There is no separate or offline single player campaign, but you can get through the story PvE on your own like The Crew.

We wanted to create a system that let us tell our narrative month after month, year after year, and then throw in the story elements to it. So, if you’re a PVP player, you should still feel like you beat the campaign. If you’re a PVE player, or like me, I plan on sailing with my daughter a lot, I want us to be able to go through the story and become kingpins together, and be able to tell the same world narrative through the game ones that we build.

It’s different. There’s not a lot of games that do this, but we really think that this is where people really want to experience narrative on a personal level, where they can effectively change the world. People always say, “It’s a living, breathing world.” Well, we really take that to heart. We want to create a world that actually reacts to the things that you do in it.

GameSpot: So, just to clarify, it’s not a completely separate mode, it’s woven together-

Farren: Yeah. It’s woven into it, so the story itself will be woven in to everything you do, from the time that you build your relationships with your crew until the time that you take down your first kingpin, building up your hideout, all of those things are woven into the modes that you play.

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Do they train developers to talk around the issues like that, or is it an innate talent that targets you for leadership roles?

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My favorite part was “our economy emulates the real economy of the Indian Ocean” as if that means anything in regards to loot boxes.

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They then follow that up with “There’s nothing more pirate-y than the treasure chest.”

So my read on the situation is to treat them like the pirates did the trading economy of that era and crack their servers to steal loot box code. Immersion!

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Those explosions… I didn’t know pirates carried so much gasoline on their ships.

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Ubi released their financials today. Bad news.

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Gotta fit in a battle royale mode somehow, eh? :v

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2020 at the earliest.

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A headline just reminded me that this game still exists and supposedly will come out in March.

Curious to see what shape the final game will be in. Loot boxes? frantic PvP? Battle Royal? a serious Sea of Thieves?

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VGC was told the new Skull & Bones has moved towards a ‘live’ game model. The game will now feature a persistent game world with quests, characters and storylines that will drastically evolve and change over time based on the collective actions of the community.

This is unlike GaaS titles like The Division 2, which receive regular updates, but relatively static worlds, stories and content.

One person with knowledge of its development said that the social and “live storytelling” elements of Epic‘s Fortnite had been a strong inspiration for Skull & Bones’ new direction. They said the rebooted Skull & Bones would have a stronger focus on collaboration, as Ubisoft is keen to appeal to audiences beyond the competitive action fans who usually play its other series.

The reboot also brought big changes to the game’s leadership, including the departure of creative director Justin Farren, who later joined Wargaming.

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Maybe 2022?

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“No one wants to admit they fucked up,” said one developer. “It’s too big to fail, just like the banks in the U.S.”

Mantra for the decade.

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That was a fascinating read. The article just kept going, with new interesting tidbits of what a nightmare that project is. And then you think it’s done, but no, there’s more.

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Is it better to hold onto it or release and have it pilloried like Anthem or Cyberpunk.

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Honestly, it can’t have helped things that Microsoft essentially jumped their train with Sea of Thieves. Heck, I like to think I pay attention to this stuff, and for a little bit I didn’t associate that there were TWO multiplayer online pirate games in the works.

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Huh, I don’t put them in the same audience space at all. I have zero interest in Sea of Thieves, but I was pretty hyped, at least in theory, for Skull & Bones when it was announced. There’s a world of difference between a “steer the ship” pirate combat game and a “control the pirate” game, especially what amounts to a forced co-op one.

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Unfortunately, it sounds like Ubisoft couldn’t figure out which game they wanted to be.

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Yes, but that’s you.

For the consumer market at large they don’t need to play similarly or have similar aims to create market confusion. For the greater consumer market who may not follow the games closely, they’re two multiplayer pirate ship games that have Noun Preposition/Conjunction Noun titles.