Remember the Ubisoft game “Skulls and Bones” announced at E3 in 2017? It has been in development for eight years and has just entered the alpha stage of production.
This is based on various Skull and bones Ubisoft developer who recently talked to Kotaku.
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Originally a branch of Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag in 2013, instead of being released as a post-release update, the project became its own title and was developed in Ubisoft Singapore. The game was announced at E3 2017 as a cooperative multiplayer game with PvP and a lot of environmental factors such as wind and ocean currents.
All this sounds interesting, and many people are looking forward to its release in the fall of 2018. However, in May 2018, Ubisoft announced that it would postpone the game to 2019. Despite the second postponement, everything seemed to be going well because the public got another look at the game during E3 2018. Then, when May 2019 arrived, the game suffered another delay, pushing it into the company’s 2020/2021 fiscal year.
Then came the news of the game restart, and finally, the last time we heard, it is now expected to be released sometime after April 2022.
So, what are the reasons for all the delays? According to more than 20 current and former Ubisoft developers and people who know the game, it has suffered from development difficulties, poor management, annual restarts, and apparently never “has a clear creative vision behind it.” Kotaku’s article pointed out that even the core design has not been determined for a long time, and the game has now exceeded the initial budget, Ubisoft has spent about 120 million US dollars, and other Ubisoft studio employees are still continuing to invest.
Over the years, due to feedback from Ubisoft, new managers, employee changes, and more development issues, development has stalled or changed more than once. For now, the game is in charge of the third creative director, and hope that from now on, things will develop in a more positive way.
“No one wants to admit that they screwed up,” one developer said. “Too big to fail, just like a bank in the United States”
“If Skull & Bones is a competitor, it has been killed 10 times,” said another former developer.
An incumbent developer even compared the legend of SKull & Bones with Bioware’s Anthem, a game that had a difficult start and required a restart but was eventually cancelled.
Even so, despite all the problems, Ubisoft still supports multiplayer games and seems determined to release it as a real-time service game at some point, which is also the direction of Ubisoft’s release. In addition, in Singapore, due to the large number of government subsidies, the government requires companies like Ubisoft to launch new games. So basically, Ubisoft has no choice but to release the game.
Kotaku’s article covers the troubled development of the game in more detail, and you should really read it.
