Skull and Bones has been postponed again, but Ubisoft is not letting go of its foal. He even shares 30 minutes of gameplay to impress us.
While it was supposed to be released at the start of the year, Skull and Bones was finally postponed at the last minute, without even giving us a new release date. Expected on PS5, Xbox Series, PC and old-gen consoles, Ubisoft’s open-world piracy game is long overdue and players are now fearing the worst. It must be said that in general, successive postponements are never a good sign. This is certainly why the publisher decided to share with us a session of about thirty minutes of gameplay to try to reassure the players. And if the gameplay will have something to put salt water in the mouth, the narration for its part, yet at the center of this video, risks dividing the players.
Skull and Bones will have some storytelling, but not too much
In this new game sequence, Ubisoft is therefore focusing on its narration, or rather, its narrative quests. In Skull and Bones, it will indeed be possible to leave your ship from time to time to trudge on dry land, meet characters, trade or even craft. The NPCs that we will meet will often give us tasks to accomplish in the open sea, but the real story is elsewhere.
As good old pirates, if it will be possible to plunder natural resources to improve its tub, or to attack fortresses or other pirates to strip them of their wealth, from time to time, we will also be able to follow what Ubisoft calls “investigations”, narrative missions. The latter will try, between two maritime battles, to make us enjoy a little of the lore that the game will offer, a new “way of telling a story through a series of stages” according to Ubisoft. In fact, this would come down to chaining several objectives by collecting text messages that act as narrative tales.
We shoot first, we’ll talk later
Because yes, Skull and Bones is above all a multiplayer game where it will be possible to smash your opponents on the fly during our sea voyages. Piracy is at the heart of the gameplay and for once, this new livestream seems to prove to us that the narration will be relegated to the background, although it seems to do everything to satisfy fans of pirate history. No main quest stuffed with cinematographic staging, therefore, Skull and Bones will bet completely on something else, and this bias may not please some players who hoped to have the right to a real pirate epic. Hoping for him that the bet will be a winner.
On the immersion side, however, Ubisoft seems to have gone all out and is clearly trying to impress us. The boats and their crew seem larger than life and the fights promise to be intense. You still have to not get seasick.
Skull and Bones has every interest in seducing its audience since the title has made developers see all the colors and Ubisoft is currently in the red. If the publisher wants to bounce back quickly, he has no choice but to hit with all his next releases, Skull and Bones and his service game status in mind.
