This is a pirate game with a reputation for being cursed, and not in a fun spooky way. Skull and Bones has been Ubisoft’s ghost ship for over a decade: never hoving into view but with a swirling miasma of mystery and foreboding surrounding it. Whispers of developer hell carried on the breeze. Now finally released, it doesn’t so much have to live up to the hype as survive a treacherous reef of its own making.
Originally a multiplayer expansion to the beloved Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, it has now become a hulking behemoth MMO – a massive multiplayer online game. Depressingly, this is not so much in response to fan demand, but because games as a service (GaaS) are a tempting revenue model for game publishers like Ubisoft.
Not only does the base game cost an eye-watering £69.99, players have to shell out a monthly fee for an online pass, and there are in-game purchases for pimping boats and outfits. Piracy has always been a part of capitalism, but it’s the gamers’ coffers that are being looted here.
At least the idea sounds fun. Skull and Bones’ promise – become an infamous pirate kingpin! – is as alluring as a mermaid’s song to anyone who has harboured swashbuckling fantasies. Sadly, the reality doesn’t quite live up to it.
A starting cutscene sets out the blood-soaked world of pirating on 17th-century Indonesian Seas (it was originally set in the Caribbean, then mythical Hyperboria, before setting course for Southeast Asia and East Africa. The accents remain confusing). Seemingly already a pirate captain, you’re immediately tossed into an unwinnable battle against some rude Merchant Navy ships, who shout insults even as they blast the boat into oblivion.
Pulled from the waves, a new crew welcomes you as a castaway savant and quickly promote you to captain of their dhow – a nippy little trading vessel indigenous to the region. But when land is finally reached and the first quest (or contract, as the in-game lore calls them) acquired, an irate senior pirate comes along to harangues you as the captain that caused this whole mess in the first place. This tension is never resolved.
That sense of confusion remains throughout. While the other wrecked pirates get to drinking, dancing, or dying of shark bites, you’re left to scavenge supplies and pick up plot devices in order to upgrade gear and acquire a bigger boat. The way one acquires these resources doesn’t always make sense. One of my crew warned me I’d have to loot corpses, but when I broke into a wreck to do some lootin’ amidst a veritable charnel house of dead bodies and treasure chests, I couldn’t ransack anything beyond paperwork.
There is one upside, namely the combat. The ship-as-a-gun playstyle is enjoyable, in a trigger-happy way, but the world map is more Sims 4 travel expansion pack than ominous skullduggery.
Grinding to harvest the necessary materials is also fun but (of course) confusing, as you hug the shorelines of islands to unlock minigames for cutting down trees, fibre and coconuts. I couldn’t work out how to get chopping until I accidentally reversed into a patch of acacia while bludgeoning an aggressive shark to death. Shark corpses can be looted, luckily, as that meat will be needed to cook into dishes to restore crew stamina at sea. Yum.
Once the first fighting ship, complete with cannons, has been unlocked, more aggressive contracts and combat scenarios become available. It’s here that the MMO should come into its own, but as the Skull and Bones subreddit will attest to, it’s glitchy and leaves the community open to trolling. One glitch leaves supposed safe zones for lower level players open to attack for those who have already levelled up to bigger guns and ships.
Yes it’s a pirate game, but getting constantly slammed is no fun. In many cases it’s entirely accidental – if another player is on a delivery contract and being pursued, they may dock into safety but you’ll be entirely wiped out as swarms of high-level enemies pursue them.
There’s also an infuriatingly distracting bug. Any tangling with the operations of underground smuggling operation The Helm will mark the player to be attacked on sight, but people are finding themselves blighted by notifications of Death Marks that appear and disappear seemingly at random.
Glitches to be patched are not necessarily a deal-breaker, but after so much time and expense sunk into making a game it’s not a good look. Getting heckled by NPCs shouting words like “chum-sniffer” or “smelly piece of whale piss” is pretty hilarious, but after a while the game can make you feel like you’re just a mark for a developer looking to make a pretty piece of eight.
