There’s plenty of other comments ragging Ubisoft for their anti-consumer business practices so let me just point to those as a preamble and say “what they said”
… HOWEVER I remember someone on Youtube, maybe SirSwag, saying something years ago that rings true about Skull and Bones. For a big company, they’re taking notable risks by investing so heavily in unique multiplayer games. Basically every other big budget multiplayer game I’ve seen has been trying to compete with Call of Duty or Fortnite by being functionally the same thing with minor differences.
Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Rainbow Six Siege, For Honor, Shootmania Storm, Riders Republic, and Skull and Bones, are not like most other games that come before. Yes, Ubisoft is a massive corporation and fuck that noise, but as a consumer of video games I appreciate that they are at least putting a good amount of the money they trick people into spending into studios with designers and developers who have creative minds and they’re supporting that creativity. Games like For Honor and Rainbow Six Siege can’t come from indie teams with no funding.
I have definitely enjoyed their tactic of doing smaller Far Cry games to test out new ideas, both with settings and game systems. It’s very incremental and nothing too crazy, at least for the game systems, but it is nice to see.
On the other hand this experimentation comes around a solid core of what I like to call the Übigame, with a huge expansive map choke full of points of interest, strong points to take over, larger zones to unlock through story beats, and great traversal options through it all, etc. I don’t see much difference between the Far Cry, the AC series, revent Ghost Recon, etc. Pandora fits right in there, too, so much so I’m surprised it’s not officially an FC game.
Point is : is this one going to be an Übigame or not?
Fuck me, that is some quadruple-A-level bullshit from our man Yves. I played the closed beta and I am sorry to say that this game is going to tank, hard. Its gameplay loop is waaaay too simplistic to be making those grandiose claims.
Some Nintendo games are pretty decent, even just over the last year. Super Mario Wonder, Tears of the Kingdom (I didn’t personally play this one, need to!), and Pikmin 4. As well as some remasters in there, like Metroid Prime. It’s been a good mix of AAA and a lot of indie on Nintendo Switch!
I don’t like FromSoft games personally, but I can recognize that they are well-made and aren’t problematic in the ways that other major AAA studios are.
So I’ll just acknowledge that of course there will be some notable exceptions, despite my hyperbolic use of “all” in my original comment. I’m a huge fan of BotW and TotK and Nintendo certainly counts as a AAA studio, but I think those games are exemplary and also non-problematic in the ways other major studios are. But despite these very real and very notable exceptions, I think my statement still stands pretty well as a general rule.
Oh and the only Santa Monica games I’ve played are Twisted Metal: Black (2001) and God of War (2005) so I’ll simply abstain from an opinion on them as it doesn’t seem fair to me to judge them based on experience that is now two decades old.
edit: also I see you were downvoted and while I know that doesn’t matter, just want you to know that I didn’t downvote you and I don’t think you said anything inappropriate or off-topic so I wish whoever did had not.
FromSoft and Santa Mónica release amazing AAA games and are always respectful to their player base. GoW Ragnarok just released a free DLC a month ago. FromSoft charges 60 dollars for games that have 200 times the content of other games that charge 70 dollars. Zero micro transactions. DLCs are always mind blowing and at great prices.
I really have no idea why they downvoted, these two companies are just good guys. I’d love to hear if they have something negative to say about these companies.
At this point I wonder if there are some internal politics that want this project to fail and be over. 70 price tag, live service but only on ubisoft platform, ignoring the most demanded features, etc.
It’s like they are tired of a project that was a money black hole for years and they just want to pull the plug.
“Kotaku’s report claimed that the studio made a deal with the local government that requires Ubisoft Singapore to launch an original game within the next few years. In short: the studio may be legally required to deliver Skull and Bones. When IGN asked if this is true, Ubisoft declined to comment.”
So they have to launch the game, the $70 is to cover the dev costs (even during the reboots, they were not allowed to pare down or reassign any of the ~500 staff), I predict we then see it all crumble and Ubisoft walk away having fulfilled their misguided obligations. I don’t know if we know the specifics of what they got from the government of Singapore, but it’s money. What a shambles.
Maybe it’s how long it’s been in development, maybe it’s how many times that they’ve changed direction, or maybe it’s just that Ubisoft just put so much garbage in their games, but I predict that this game is going to be a trainwreck.
I was intrigued when they first announced it, but now I’m just so fucking sick of Ubisoft and their bullshit that I’m now just curious to see just how much of a mess it turns out to be.
It’s literally sunk cost fallacy, they wasted so much money for this game, but always spent more instead of putting it in a drawer. Nobody cares about pirates anymore, and lot of ppl are tired of the live service games. Add to this that the Black Flag remake is in the works, so not many will have the urge to buy the game, and it will fail spectacularly.
Now I wish it had either been delayed again or outright cancelled. Not that they legally could have, but to release this and not admit that its a massive L is just sad at this point.
Im not looking down at Ubisoft anymore. Now I just feel pity. This is literally begging.
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