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Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag might be the best pirate video game ever made. That’s why I’m surprised that Skull and Bones is so mediocre. Ubisoft is more than capable of delivering cinematic action, so what explains the gap between this game and its predecessor? The barebones on-foot gameplay is just enough to stitch one moment of sailing to the next. Yet the game’s naval combat has taken several steps back from Black Flag‘s. No boarding parties, no sword fighting, no dramatic leaps from the crow’s nest. Cutting content is fair if you’re getting new or deeper content in return, but that didn’t happen. Why not?
Dead Towns and Loading Screens
To explain what’s wrong with Skull and Bones, the best comparison isn’t another pirate game: it’s Starfield. Like Bethesda’s sci-fi RPG, Skull and Bones suffers from ubiquitous loading screens and a lack of authentic exploration. Whereas other Ubisoft titles like AC: Valhalla sabotaged the wonder of exploration by littering the map with quest markers that leeched the mystery from the world, S&B did it by creating dead towns. It’s not just that NPCs are lifeless, although that doesn’t help. It’s that there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do once I’ve bought some commodities and crafted my next ship. Skull and Bones doesn’t want me in town. It wants me at sea because that’s where the grind is.
I fail to see the sense in cutting the best parts of Black Flag only to make the one system you choose to keep even worse. Maybe that’s why I hesitate to call Skull and Bones a naval combat sim, even though that’s what it wants to be. There’s such an offensive lack of interactions and meaningful systems outside of sailing that it’s just impossible to call it anything else. Anyone familiar with the 11 years the game spent in development hell will have a decent idea of what happened. The vision behind the project changed, new assets were needed, and old frameworks became outdated. Instead of succeeding at one thing, the game failed at 10, and probably no one is more frustrated by that than the devs themselves.
Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag vs. Skull and Bones
Feel how you want about Assassin’s Creed lore, but Black Flag delivered some great characters and brought them to life with solid writing. Even if you didn’t care for the plot, the game offered a pirate-themed sandbox to play around in. Unless you’re passionate about grinding through recycled enemies, Skull and Bones has little to offer. The actual sailing doesn’t feel great compared to Black Flag, and even if it did, there’s not enough diversity in Points of Interest to warrant going anywhere. Both Black Flag and Sea of Thieves understood that games set in oceans run a high risk of feeling bland if you can’t spice the big blue yonder up with surprises and diverse challenges. Skull and Bones isn’t awful, but all that wasted potential is gutting.
Skull and Bones is available for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.
