2024 has not had the greatest start for the video game industry. Rocksteady’s disastrous launch of their controversial title Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League resulted in a divided fanbase and a player count that has recently dipped under 1000 on Steam. A messy launch combined with woke messaging caused this title to see massive refund requests and has doomed it to the same fate as Marvel’s Avengers, a game that is essentially dead and buried. Now Ubisoft, the legendary studio that brought us Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, hopes to claim the title of “Game of the Year” with their live-service, swashbuckling adventure Skull & Bones.
Sadly, critics and players alike can’t quite figure out what Ubisoft could have spent 11 years on during the development of Skull & Bones. While originally planned as a follow-up to the wildly popular Black Flag, it evolved into something that more closely resembles World of Warships instead. The lack of customization, inability to participate in melee combat, and imbalanced scaling have only amplified criticism of Ubisoft’s choice to make Skull & Bones a live-service game littered with microtransactions and season passes, all while charging a premium of $70.
On an investor call, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot was pressed by investors who were worried by the decision to load Skull & Bones with microtransactions, while also charging an exorbitant purchase price. He defended the decision to set the game’s starting price at $70, rather than having the game be free to play, by making the absurd claim that this game was “quadruple-A.”
“You will see that Skull and Bones is a fully-fledged game. It’s a very big game, and we feel that people will really see how vast and complete that game is. It’s a really full, triple… quadruple-A game, that will deliver in the long run.”
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Unfortunately, the majority of people who have played this game would say otherwise. The game is currently sitting at a 3.2 on Metacritic among 96 users. Most of the commentary on YouTube is largely negative, with creators telling their fans not to waste their money on this title. One of these critics was YouTuber Upper Echelon, who didn’t hold back his admonition for this game’s shortcomings.
“I don’t relish the fact that this game is objectively bad because I’m disappointed at what could have been. I’m disappointed that the studio behind Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, while everyone pointed at their fantastic prior example saying more of that, please, basically took 10 years to make something not even half as good, and I’m mostly just confused at how exactly we ended up here.”
“It just doesn’t feel like it’s a cohesive intentional game. It’s more like a haphazardly constructed final version of the homework that was due at midnight, the final deadline, with no more rewrites allowed by the teacher, where the students got it done at 11:59 p.m. by smashing together all of their previous versions to meet the length requirement without thinking about how they actually fit together.”
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Another YouTuber, Some Ordinary Gamers, had to share his thoughts on the disappointment that this so-called “AAAA” title turned out to be.
“In general, most of these looter shooter live service games don’t really make it past I would say a year. This game is up there with The Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League, which is already dropping below 1000 players now, and it’s up there with Marvel’s Avengers, which is dead. Okay, so this game either better pull a rabbit out of its hat, okay, better shoot out the cannon, no pun intended, with some serious content, or it’s going to die.”
Whether this game will succeed or fail remains to be seen, but based on what early reviews we have, things don’t look good for Ubisoft.
Have you played Skull & Bones from Ubisoft? Do you plan on buying it? Let us know in the comments below!
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