It is recent news that of the umpteenth postponement of Skull & Bones, the pirate game by Ubisoft finds no peace and continues to be postponed, with expected exit during the next fiscal yearwhich will start on April 1, 2023. Let’s retrace the troubled history of this project.
Skull and Bones was born as an expansion of Assassin’s Creed IV taking its cue from the naval battles of the latter, the development began in 2013 with the title Black Flag Infinite but soon the game became an autonomous and independent project, completely unrelated to the saga of the assassins.
Thus begins a rather troubled development path which sees numerous personalities at the helm take turns, various reports published by Kotaku and other magazines speak of a very complex development, with team leaders who do not seem to have a clear vision and for this reason are periodically replaced by the management.The public becomes aware of Skull & Bones at E3 2017, when Ubisoft officially presents the game, developed by Ubisoft Singapore. The first launch window is set for the second half of 2018 but it is skipped and the game postponed directly to 2019, only to be postponed again, there is now talk of a debut scheduled for 2020.
But no way, in October 2019 Ubisoft announces that the game will not be released before the fiscal year 2021/2022. In September 2020, Skull & Bones is re-introduced to the public, the team talks about “a new vision” compared to the original idea and this would have caused many delays in production, in this regard the involvement of other studios such as Ubisoft Berlin is also confirmed, which comes to the aid of Ubisoft Singapore to speed up publication times.
In the spring of 2021, Ubisoft is postponing Skull and Bones again to the 2022/2023 fiscal year, in July 2022 the publisher sets the release date for November 8 of the same year, but it is not yet the right time, in September Skull and Bones is postponed to March 2023. But… guess what? Unfortunately the game is being put off again and now the release is scheduled for the next fiscal yeartherefore between April 2023 and March 2024. Ubisoft has closed the pre-orders of Skull and Bones on the PlayStation Store and has refunded the players, reiterating that the game will be released when it is ready, at the moment there is no new release date set by the publisher.
According to various reports, Ubisoft would have invested approximately 120 million dollars in the production of Skull and Bones over the course of ten years of life, for a project that has become increasingly ambitious but which today is struggling to fully convince the public and critics.
