Crazy to think how troubled this game is with all of the foundations theoretically being there with Ubisoft's past experience. Even cobbling this together from pre-existing parts seems like something that hasn't happened.
You'd think but the game has been rebooted a handful of times from its initial modest ambitions of just being Black Flag DLC. Ubi Singapore did the ship gameplay for Black Flag and technically they could have just done a GAAS live multiplayer version through Early Access. It's now cost Ubisoft $120 million and government subsidies require it to ship. I doubt Ubisoft Singapore would exist after launch even though the govt wants more original IP.
Inside Ubisoft Singapore’s struggle to ship Skull & Bones
kotaku.com
The idea was simple. Ubisoft Singapore was responsible for developing the sailing tech that helped define some of the best parts of Black Flag and had recently-gained experience in online multiplayer games with its ongoing work on a free-to-play Tom Clancy game called Ghost Recon Phantoms. Black Flag Infinite would pool that expertise to make a quick turnaround live service game that would reuse and reskin as much of Black Flag as possible. But conditions on the ground were already beginning to outstrip these modest ambitions.
The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One had just come out, and in the years ahead Black Flag's already aging tech would become even more dated.
"Technology was moving forward, and pretty soon you want better visuals. And then you realize that some of your assets don't fit anymore," said one former developer. "And the more and more you start to change, the more parts become obsolete. And when a project drags for more than a couple years, your initial assumptions are no longer valid."
Ubisoft eventually decided to leave Black Flag behind and create a new AAA IP that would still revolve around ship combat but with its own narrative and visual identity. And so Skull & Bones, codenamed "Project Liberté," was born. But the real trouble was just getting started.
"On paper Skull & Bones looks like it's an easy game to make, but it's really not," said one former developer.
Skull & Bones has been a lot of things in the years since it entered pre-production, developers told Kotaku. At one point, it was set in the Caribbean. Later, it moved to the Indian Ocean. One version was inspired by Sid Meier's Pirates! and played out in a fantastical world called Hyperborea through branching multiplayer campaigns that lasted weeks. Another revolved around an elaborate floating base called Libertalia—a "cathedral on water," as one developer described it—inspired by the mythical pirate colony of the same name. Most of these ideas never made it past the prototyping phase but still managed to take up an increasing amount of the Singapore studio's time as developers reworked designs and concepts for a game whose core premise appeared to change with the wind.
By 2017, the studio tried to reign in its ambitions to focus on ship combat, and Skull & Bones was once again reborn, this time as a session-based shooter modeled after Rainbow Six Siege but with boats. This was the version that was revealed at E3 2017, but Ubisoft wasn't ready to ditch dreams of a grander pirate exploration game just yet. It would still need a world and quests beyond a monetizable PVP grind. So in 2018, Skull & Bones returned to E3 with a PVE free roam mode called "Hunting Grounds." Here, similar to The Division's "Dark Zones," players could loot hideouts, fight one another, or work together to take on more powerful AI opponents.
But this version of the game would eventually get scrapped too, and by 2019, survival games like Rust and Ark: Survival Evolved became Skull & Bones' new guiding stars. In addition to the sailing, fighting, and looting, there would be resource management elements like crafting and trading. There would also be harsher stakes for dying, adding a roguelike-lite edge to the pirate fantasy. It was a particularly messy change in direction, according to five current and former developers. The project's existing engine tools were ill-equipped to take players exploring on land for resources, and the additional layers of inventory were a pain to try to implement, they said.
By 2020, direction had shifted yet again, four current and former developers told Kotaku. The latest build of Skull & Bones will be different still, though many remain unsure what shape the finished game will ultimately take. It's not just that it isn't close to the finish line yet; it's still not even clear where the finish line is.
