Skull and Bones has been postponed again, but Ubisoft isn’t letting go of its filly. He even shares 30 minutes of gameplay to impress us.
Finally, while it was supposed to be out earlier this year, Skull and Bones was pushed back at the last minute without even giving us a new release date. Expected to hit PS5, Xbox Series, PC and old-gen consoles, Ubisoft’s open-world piracy game is long overdue and players are now fearing the worst. In general, it must be said that successive shifts are never a good sign. This is certainly why the publisher decided to share with us a session of around 30 minutes of gameplay to try and reassure players. And if there’s something about the gameplay that’s mouthwatering, the narrative itself, which is the focus of this video, however, risks dividing players.
Skull and Bones will have some storytelling, but not too much
In this new game sequence, Ubisoft is therefore focusing on its narrative, or rather its narrative quests. In skull and bones, it will indeed be possible to leave your ship from time to time to trudge ashore, meet characters, trade or even craft. The NPCs we meet often give us quests to complete on the open sea, but the real story lies elsewhere.
If good old pirates will be able to plunder natural resources to improve their hull, or attack fortresses or other pirates to rob them of their wealth from time to time, we will be able to track that too , what Ubisoft calls “investigations”, narrative missions. The latter will try to convince us a bit of the lore between two naval battles that the game will offer, a new “way of telling a story in a series of phases”, according to Ubisoft. In fact, this would amount to chaining multiple goals together by collecting text messages that act as narratives.
We shoot first, we talk later
Because yes, skull and bones is above all a multiplayer game in which it will be possible to smash your opponents in the blink of an eye during our sea voyages. Piracy is at the heart of the gameplay, and this new livestream seems to prove to us, for once, that the narrative is banished to the background, although it seems to be doing everything it can to satisfy fans of the pirate story. No main quest filled with cinematic staging, so Skull and Bones will bet on something else entirely, and this tendency may not please some players who were hoping to get the right to a real pirate epic. Hoping for him that the bet wins.
On the immersion side, however, Ubisoft seems to have gone all out and is clearly trying to impress us. The boats and their crew appear larger than life and the fighting promises to be intense. You don’t have to get seasick anyway.
skull and bones has a keen interest in seducing its audience since the title has made the developers see all the colors and Ubisoft is currently in the red. If the publisher wants to get back on its feet quickly, it has no choice but to strike with all its next releases, skull and bones and its service game status in mind.
