Ubisoft has finally revealed more details about Skull & Bones. Here you can find all the latest information about the gameplay, the multiplayer, the release and even more.
Ubisoft has finally lifted Skull & Bones from the bottom of the sea again after a long period of dead silence. The pirate game has finally come up with new information and shown that work on it has not died.
In this article we summarise the most important details for all you light sailors. So if you can”t wait to set sail soon in your own ship to pillage, plunder and rip out your black dastardly soul, here”s everything you need to know ahead of time.
Table of Contents
When is the release?
We”ll answer the most important question first: Skull & Bones is scheduled for release on November 8, 2022 This means that the title has been in development for a full five years since its announcement.
On which platforms will Skull & Bones be released?
Skull & Bones will be a pure next-gen title. Owners of the last console generation will therefore be left empty-handed. Skull & Bones will not be released on every platform on the PC either. As is now typical for Ubisoft, Skull & Bones will be Ubisoft- and Epic-exclusive.
Here is an overview of all platforms:
- PC: Ubisoft Store
- PC: Epic Game Store
- PlayStation 5
- Xbox Series X/S
- Stadia
Which editions are available?
What does the cost? The Standard Edition costs 60 euros on PC and the Premium Edition 90 euros.
Is there a gameplay trailer?
There have already been a few trailers and teasers for Skull & Bones. But you”ll find out the most if you watch the latest gameplay trailer.
How does the multiplayer work and is there singleplay?
Even though Skull & Bones is designed as a multiplayer game, you can also experience the game completely alone. As a rule, however, you share the open world with other players. Or you can meet up for a joint co-op round. However, you will not steer a ship together like in See of Thieves, but each player will steer their own ship.
If you prefer to mess with other people, you can also engage in PvP battles. Such ship battles are said to be high risk, but also potentially high loot.
What”s in the Open World?
The game world of Skull & Bones is a fictional area in the Indian Ocean. Here you can sail the sea with your ship and visit various pirate hideouts. You can only disembark in the pirate hideouts, otherwise you remain on the deck of your ship. But there is plenty to do in the Indian Ocean. Here are the known activities:
- Commissions: You can accept commissions from other pirates in the world, increasing your fame and, of course, loot. Missions can consist of making something, hunting ships or finding treasure.
- Looting: You can always look out for loaded merchant ships and dare to attack. If the ship is sunk, however, the yield will be somewhat smaller than if you attempt a boarding manoeuvre. However, the boarding manoeuvre is automatic.
- Storms: While you are crossing the Indian Ocean, heavy storms can occur and put your ship in distress. These include violent winds as well as huge waves.
- Treasure hunting: Use treasure maps to search for hidden chests in the world.
- Forts: In addition to attacking merchant ships, you can also fire on a military fort. These heavily armed castles are difficult to crack. Unlike in Assassin”s Creed: Black Flag, however, you are not allowed to storm the fort on foot afterwards.
- Dynamic Events: Random events can occur in the game world again and again, offering new opportunities. For example, you might come across a well-guarded but also richly laden trade convoy.
The gameplay pretty much sums up the core virtues with which Ubisoft”s pirate adventure aims to capture your hearts:
- Open World / Open Sea: You travel with your ship through an extensive open world in a fictionalised Indian Ocean.
Fictionalised
means that you don”t sail through real locations like in Assassin”s Creed, but sail past fictional islands, which are, however, modelled on the real East Indies. - Systemic campaign: Skull & Bones is clearly more systemic than Assassin”s Creed, for example. You start with a small cutter and are then completely free to work your way up to the mighty warship. Instead of a choreographed story campaign, there”s primarily a sandbox in which you set your own goals, accept recurring missions and upgrade everything that isn”t nailed down.
- Single player or co-op: You can play the entire game solo or with other players.
- Optional PvP: You can optionally make Skull & Bones a shared world experience. Then, alongside you and your co-op buddies, enemy player ships will also sail through the open world and can steal loot from you.
The gameplay loop of Skull & Bones goes like this: You start the adventure with your self-created pirate character and booger ship, take on your first (perhaps randomly generated?) missions in some pirate nest, snatch the loot from other booger ships or simply clear them out, buy upgrades, stronger ships, better armament and set off again to take on more difficult missions.
Those who played Black Flag back then will recognise various aspects: I can give other ships the full broadside at the touch of a button, boarding manoeuvres work after enough fire – and if I have a lot of guts in my bones or rum in my veins, I can even attack a fortress and then have my crew clear it out.
So I”ll have the chance to take on more difficult missions.
Like Black Flag, Skull & Bones doesn”t really simulate the complexity of seafaring, as Sea of Thieves attempts to do, at least to some extent, through the different roles you take on as a co-op crew when manoeuvring the ship. But nevertheless, in Skull & Bones there are also various types of ships, weapons, different attack manoeuvres, for example Greek fire or mortars or classic cannons or, or, or. So there is a lot in the game … but unfortunately there is also a lot not in it.
There will be none of that. Almost all interactions beyond ship battles still run on loading bars. My crew storms an enemy fort? Then I squat in the ship and defend it until a bar fills up. My crew boards another ship? Then I”ll sit in the ship and wait until… a beam fills up. My crew bags a treasure? Squat, wait, beam, although at least in some accessible hub worlds it is possible to open a chest (more on this in a moment). But you even mine raw materials like wood from your ship instead of exploring foreign isles.
And that is my biggest problem with Skull & Bones: the pirate fantasy is always more than just ship combat. See Sea of Thieves: there I choose to play a crew member, explore exotic islands, rummage through ancient catacombs, sneak onto enemy boats, bury treasure and so on. Skull & Bones feels like a Red Dead Redemption 2, in which I crouch incessantly on my horse and exclusively swing the lasso. Yes, that”s part of the scenario somehow … but not only.
And the one area where I can run around by myself are the small hub settlements where I buy upgrades. But that”s exactly the one area where I couldn”t care less whether I click my way through the purchase menus or walk the five metres to the merchant myself. If I absolutely want to walk through residential areas in a pirate costume, I can do that on Saturdays in the centre of Munich – and people even throw me money there if I do it well.
Of course the cynic in me says: Yes, but in a purchase menu I can”t show other players my purchased emotes and skins.
Master of a class?
Now it can be rightly objected: Isn”t Ubisoft”s legitimate choice to simply focus on a single aspect of the pirate world and give me a cool ship sim in return. Isn”t that what the X-Wing, Tie-Fighter and Squadrons games in the Star Wars universe do? And yes, that”s true. But even after four years, there is still a big question mark hanging over Skull & Bones as to whether it offers enough gameplay depth to really keep me hooked for long.
Ubisoft games usually always work on depth or breadth. Rainbow Six: Siege and For Honor don”t keep their players for six years because they pump out new maps and characters every month – quite the opposite. The sword duels and gun battles simply offer so many tactical possibilities that the community only gets bored after hundreds or thousands of hours of play.
The opposite with Assassin”s Creed, Far Cry or Watch Dogs. Every mechanic in the game is shallow – the fighting, sneaking, scrambling – but there”s just an awful lot to do across the board. If I don”t feel like shooting in Far Cry, I just drive stunt races, fly planes, explore towers, craft new weapons and so on.
Skull & Bones offers – so far it seems – very little breadth, so it has to work through depth. The tactics with different hull covers, cannon types, ship types, armaments and crew ensembles must be so much fun that I want to go out again and again, collect loot and start fights.
The same goes for PvP. If I conquer some fortress only to be attacked and sunk by an alien player ship immediately afterwards, then Skull & Bones relies on me saying to myself afterwards: Harr, harr, cool, straight back into the online world.
Why am I still happy?
But I don”t want to throw in the blunderbuss here, after all, I haven”t played this new Skull & Bones from 2022 yet. On the one hand, there are still a lot of question marks hovering over the long-term motivation, because the always same upgrading of my ships can only work if the always same driving around, sinking ships and looting motivates me in the long run … On the other hand, I really want to play the game.
Sea of Thieves doesn”t have to remain the only pirate sandbox under the sun just because Skull & Bones offers less on paper. The colourful comic-book look of Microsoft”s buccaneering will not appeal to all pirate fans for a long time; Ubisoft goes for a grittier and more realistic look here. And what”s more, the gameplay looks quite entertaining!
The Indian Ocean is a fairly unconsumed open-world scenario – and climbing the pirate career ladder at least once, working my way up from a small cutter to a mighty galleon, taking down a few real adversaries in PvP, all of that can be fun.
Don”t get your hopes up
If you”re one of those people who thought: Yeah, great, in four years Ubisoft can take the time to develop proper pirate melees alongside the ships so I can hop on the enemy ship with my character, swing the sabre, shoot shotgun and then go treasure hunting on exotic islands
, then you”d better cling to the railing now.
What classes of ship are there?
In Skull & Bones you can level up your pirates using the fame system and upgrade your ship in this way. There are also general ship classes that you unlock gradually. Only a handful of different ship types are known so far:
- Freighters have the most space for loot on deck, but are not particularly fast.
- Navigation ships are the fastest barges in the Indian Ocean, but offer little storage space and are easy to sink.
- Firepower ships do the most damage thanks to numerous gun ports, but are anything but easy to manoeuvre.
You can equip each ship individually with all kinds of cannons, including exotic weapons such as flame or rocket launchers. You also determine the armour yourself.
Is there a beta?
It is not yet known if and when a public test phase will take place. However, you can already register for so-called live tests on the website. Just follow this link here. Remember, however, that you will need a Ubisoft account beforehand and that you will have to register.
What ship classes are available?
In Skull & Bones you can level up your pirates using the fame system and upgrade your ship in this way. There are also general ship classes that you unlock gradually. Only a handful of different ship types are known so far:
- Freighters have the most space for loot on deck, but are not particularly fast.
- Navigation ships are the fastest barges in the Indian Ocean, but offer little storage space and are easy to sink.
- Firepower ships do the most damage thanks to numerous gun ports, but are anything but easy to manoeuvre.
You can equip each ship individually with all kinds of cannons, including exotic weapons such as flame or rocket launchers. You can also choose the armour yourself.
Is there a beta?
It is not yet known if and when a public test phase will take place. However, you can already register for so-called live tests on the website (link here). Remember, however, that you still need a Ubisoft account and must register beforehand.
Editor”s Verdict
No wonder Skull & Bones actually hits port with me in umpteen places. For example, I think it”s great that Ubisoft seems to be going completely for a sandbox concept instead of rehashing some old familiar story soup like in Valhalla or Far Cry 6. Hey, I”m the first to wish for a great pirate story, but storytelling hasn”t been Ubisoft”s focus for years – and I think it”s a better idea to acknowledge that instead of always trying to please everyone somehow.
After all, it leaves more time for the actual gameplay. And here too: I”m not at all generally against the idea of Skull & Bones focusing on the one aspect – the ship battles. I love ships, I just bought Age of Sail in the Steam Sale because seafaring has so many exciting facets. Should Skull & Bones draw on its full resources here in a similar way as it did back then with For Honor, then this could be really, really fun and unique.
But I don”t see that happening yet. Even after the four years of additional development time, I”m sitting there at the end of the gameplay presentation thinking to myself: Whew, how long will this feel fresh? Ubisoft”s Open Worlds always struggle with uniformity, but at least they visibly fight it by, for example, focusing on different gameplay pillars (in Black Flag, for example, parkour, stealth, shipping, sabre battles, island exploration and, and, and).
Skull & Bones does show activities here and there far away from cannon fire, for example I can throw spears at crocodiles from the ship or equip myself with new outfits, emotes and so on in the pirate nests. But the gameplay makes it very clear: in this game I will spend 95 percent of the time sitting at my steering wheel, shooting at other ships and completing missions.
Sure, the PvP can theoretically keep things exciting for much longer, but here too I still have many questions. For example, do really exciting ship duels develop on the open sea, or do other teams simply lie in wait for me to attack, steal all the loot and then leave? Yes, that would be a real pirate manoeuvre, but how long will that motivate me before I click offline in the settings?
You can tell I still have a lot of questions. I don”t want to write off Skull & Bones because I think the scenario is just great and therefore wait to see if the game surprises me positively at the release in early November. But even the new gameplay can”t wash the scepticism of 2018 off the deck.
