- Ubisoft developers worked for over 11 years to create what was supposed to be the best pirate game ever made. Tens of millions of dollars and six delays later. The game completely failed and was one of the most atrocious AAA game launches in the last 10 years.
This is the story of how trend chasing poor management in a toxic studio environment destroyed soft's potential masterpiece. The story of Skull and Bones actually begins in 2013 with the release of Assassin's Creed Black Flag. Black Flag was a strange entry in the franchise because it was a mediocre Assassin's Creed game, but a really fun pirate game players could expand their crew, learn sea shanties, attack, and steal from merchant ships, and engage in both land and sea combat.
The pirate mechanics were so beloved that fans were quickly begging Yusof to make a spinoff game focusing solely on pirate gameplay. Yusof noted the feedback, agreed that it seemed like a profitable and logical idea, and soon green lit the project that would become Skull and Bones Simple, right? Fans want a pirate game and Hubsoft decides to make a pirate game.
So how did things go so severely wrong and cause one of the biggest AAA game blenders in recent history? Well, it starts with an extremely painful development cycle. This game took over a decade to make, and the insane delays that the project had were a problem from the very start.
Like most major companies, Ubisoft isn't just one studio. It has many studios across the globe, and each branch has its own quirks and culture. Skull and Bones was assigned to Yof Singapore, a small support studio founded in 2008.
Usoft Singapore was home to two teams that in theory, were most prepared to tackle this project. Firstly, much of the studio had worked directly on Black Flag, particularly on much of the sailing tech that made the ship travel so satisfying. On top of this, another part of the studio had just wrapped up work on ghost recon phantoms and online multiplayer game.
Each team was bringing a level of expertise to the table that would allow them to make a multiplayer pirate focused game that could revolutionize the gaming industry and create something truly special. This project should have been an easy slam dunk in the early days. It seemed like it was.
The initial scope of the project was small and manageable. They planned to reuse many of the assets and foundation of Black Flag, slap some multiplayer on it, tall as shit a bit, and let the money pour in. If that had remained the plan for Skull and Bones, it's likely that I wouldn't be talking about this game at all.
So what happened that caused this to change? It started innocently enough. First, the dev team just wanted to update certain technical aspects of the game, and as the years flew by, the available technologies improved and the reused elements from Black Flag looked more and more dated.
For perspective, this is what Black Flag Graphics were like in 2013, and by 2018, red Dead Redemption two had been released and looked like this. A straight up rescan of a game made for the Xbox 360 probably wouldn't have been received very well. So tuning up the visuals and performance made sense.
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And thanks to Opera GX for sponsoring this video. Now, before talking about this, we just spoke about tuning up the visuals and performance of Skull and Bones to adjust for the time it took to develop it. But here's what happened next.
More features and ideas started being suggested. If we're touching up assets, why not the gameplay? Why not the story?
Why not go bigger and grander? Eventually, the project grew beyond being just a black flag spinoff and into a new franchise in its own right. Skull and Bones was born from the ambition and passion of Ubisoft Singapore.
Passion is important to game development, but it's not enough. One manager at Ubisoft Singapore would admit, there's nothing in the video game industry that's harder than building a new ip. The dev team knew their project was more than an Assassin's Creed spinoff, but it seemed like that's all they knew how to make.
Skull and Bones would go through a drawn out phase of prototyping. New ideas would be workshop suggested and trashed only to be picked up again later. At one point, it was imagined to be a Sid Meyer inspired fantasy adventure game at another.
The game was focused on a floating base in the sky. The developers struggled to answer key questions about the game's identity. Do you play as a ship or do you play as a pirate?
Is this a live service game or not? Is the game focused on PVP or Collaborative co-op? The lack of cohesive vision led to a little progress being made and a lot of time being wasted.
Eventually, the team settled on a siege inspired PVP focused experience. There would be two teams of five players each with their own ship that would try to navigate the sea while sinking their opponents. This is the version of Skull and Bones that EOF would present at E 3 20 17.
And with this direction, player reception was pretty warm. Fans were excited to finally get the pirate experience they'd been waiting for for years. However, some had reservations about design choices made.
Players didn't just want another live service PVP game with a little single player campaign. They wanted to leave their ships, explore the world and have the full open world experience. But hey, maybe Ubisoft would deliver at the very least, players would soon get the game in their hands and judge for themselves if it was worth the wait because Usoft had announced that the game would be ready by the following fall, or at least that was the plan.
In reality, skull and Bones was nowhere near ready for release. Instead, the studio left fans disappointed and confused. When it announced just a few weeks before E three of 2018, that Skull and Bones needed at least another year to develop to fans.
The game's appearance at the previous year's E three made it seem like although development had gone through a rough patch, things had gotten back on track. But what had happened behind the scenes that now the developers needed another year from the outside looking in, it may have seemed like they were making steady if somewhat slow progress, but in truth, things were far more chaotic and dysfunctional than they appear. Long before Skull and Bones got off the ground, EOF Singapore had gained a reputation for being incredibly toxic and poorly managed.
Allegedly senior managers would surround themselves with Yes men refused to listen to suggestions or concerns repeatedly raised by those on the studio floor, and then saw the higher ups a version of the game that couldn't be made problematic. Team members who complained or criticized upper management never lasted long. There was always an excuse to send them to another team project or even another.
Studio workers also complained that the higher ups often gave conflicting instructions and changed their orders on a whim. Disorganization and lack of clear vision of the development cycle likely came from the top. These problems with the management weren't the only things making the work environment unproductive.
I previously mentioned that the Team First Skull and Bones was mostly composed of devs who worked on black flag or ghost recon. In theory, each of these teams would learn from each other's unique experiences to complete this project, but in practice, they didn't mesh well at all. The different games that they'd worked on had led to the devs forming distinct development philosophies.
The Assassin's Creed devs were used to top-down decision making and handcrafting everything down to the details. While the recon devs favored a more collaborative approach where new ideas organically emerged and were added to the game, neither approach was wrong, but they were mutually exclusive. So when these different organizational styles were combined with no competent management team to guide communication, it of course resulted in disaster.
All of these factors likely played a role in the delays. The lack of creative vision and poor work environment made it next to impossible to get skull and bones to an acceptable level of polish on time. In particular, Yusof was dissatisfied with PVP having five massive ships roaming around a limited arena made gameplay feel crowded and clunky.
There was also a real lack of customization and depth to the game. At this point. The game didn't really have the pirate experience that it promised, but the studio was running out of time and money to make things work.
You see, the main branch of Ubisoft was growing evermore aware of how much money was being dumped on skull and bones, and how little was actually being done. The game not being ready for its 18 release date seemed to be the straw that broke the camel's back. Since Yusof, Singapore couldn't get things in order, Yusof proper had to step in.
Elizabeth Pellen was brought in to manage Skull and Bones, and she had only one goal to get a working product they could bring to market asap. With that in mind, she scrapped most of the working prototype years into development. The combat was still undercooked and flushing out the game would take way more effort than it was worth.
Adding a single player campaign would take a lot of time and cost a significant amount of money, so this had to be scrapped as well. It was time to make some drastic changes to actually get this game out. So Pellen pushed the team to rebrand into a survival focused game inspired by the likes of arc survival of all, she believed that more focus on exploration and crafting would make the players feel more like pirates.
The change in direction was supposed to make finishing the game easier, but it caused yet another series of delays. The engine that the devs had designed for the five V five boat shooter was unsurprisingly unsu suited for an open world survival game in 2020. Hubsoft publicly announced yet again that the game needed more time to accommodate its new vision.
At this point, the game was now two years removed from its original release date, and fans' patience was thinning. But this story is not over yet. 2020 proved to be an especially difficult year for EOF Singapore.
During this time, the issues with upper management finally came to a head. In the summer of 2020, the Singapore studio was caught up in the wave of allegations facing EOF regarding workplace toxicity, harassment, and misconduct. It was already an open secret that EOF Singapore wasn't the easiest place to work.
However, far fewer people knew the severity of the abuse suffered by workers. There were allegations that the managing director would regularly make inappropriate comments towards staff and then use his power to silence complaints. Many workers stated that he made them uncomfortable and made their working conditions miserable.
According to many Yusof, Singapore had a culture of fear that those in power used to keep a stranglehold on those below them. The upper management at Yusof Singapore wasn't just incompetent. They were borderline cruel and malicious under these conditions.
It's not surprising that Skull and Bones development moved at a snail's pace and that the studio suffered from a constant need to replace staff that quit. In early 2023. Pellen left Yusof Singapore and Skull and Bones once again found a new creative director.
The company claimed that Pellen had succeeded in her job of ensuring that the game was on target to be released to the general public. However, other sources claimed that Pellen was supposed to finish out the year and that her departure was more alarming than the studio claimed. It's also important to note that at this point, there was still no internal deadline for the game's release.
After five years dedicated to speeding up development, Hubsoft still had nothing to show for it. Fans received the first scrap of content for Skull and Bones in years. On August 16th, 2023, Hubsoft was holding a closed beta from August 25th to August 28th for invited PC players.
The company likely expected the announcement to be met with excitement from fans, excitement that the game they had been a decade for was finally nearing release. But the response was far more bitter. People were frustrated at how long they'd waited and how disappointing the game looked.
After all this time, under Pellen, skull and Bones had drifted even further away from its Ruth and Assassin's Street Black Flag, and towards something far more generic and uninspired. People wanted to play this game because of its similarities to Black Flag. So for it to be something so much different was a slap in the faces of the people who had supported this project since day one.
As the beta rolled around, people's suspicions were confirmed about the game being mediocre. Players felt that skull and Bones was dull, clunky, and didn't live up to the hype or in development timeline. Things weren't looking great, and the full release now scheduled for February of 2024 would be coming in a matter of months.
Hubsoft could only pray that fans thought more of the full release than they did of the beta, and oh my God, were they wrong? S Skulling Bones, eventual release was more of a whimper than a boom. A few people bought the game and even fewer liked it.
Hubsoft had grand visions of launching a live service game that would last for years and have seasonal content. In reality, they had the same thing they had back at E three. All those years ago, a half-baked idea, not worth more than $15 and maybe a few weeks of attention.
The problems of the beta were not fixed in the final game. Skull and Bones was incredibly boring. You don't actually even play as a pirate.
You actually play as a pirate ship. There's no land combat and little exploration. The gameplay consists of sailing around doing occasional mini games to get resources and completing various fetch quests.
So much of the game is spent sailing, and the sailing feels exactly if not worse than it did when playing Black Flag all those years ago. After 11 years, you'd expect some improvements in the smoothness or excitement of the mechanics. Maybe you have to pay attention to the winds or adjust your sails, or there's more depth to maintaining ship health and navigation.
No innovation. Just watch an arbitrary stamina bar. The game originally copies Black Flag Sailing System, but drops all of the features that made it stand out.
Namely, you can no longer board ships during attacks. For the most part, the player is limited to just the deck of the ship. There's so little to do in swollen bones, and most of the content is just busy work.
It's hard to believe that after all of these years of development, this was the best that Yusof could do, especially when they're selling the game for $60 and the special edition for almost 70. But this far in fans were not surprised throughout the years. They had long since realized Hubsoft didn't know what they're doing.
And with all the stuff going on right now, I mean, I agree with them. Hubsoft has been on a downward spiral for years now, and Skull and Bones is just the tip of the iceberg. In all likelihood, under different circumstances, Hubsoft would've likely canceled the game entirely.
One reason they let the project continue to waste so much time and money, even when it was clear that it wasn't going anywhere, was due to a contract they had with the Singaporean government. Hubsoft had a deal that mandated that they launched three new ips in the next few years. They basically had a gun to their head, forcing them to finish the game, and the results of this forced work speak for themselves.
I think this is also a part of the real problem with Skull and Bones development. It's not just that the gameplay is undercooked. At a certain point, the development stopped being about fun between these switching of creative directors, abusive work environments, and the pressure to release something profitable.
Skull and Bones was no longer a game and was more of an uninspired product that they were forced to release. You can also see that in how much the development began trend chasing. First, I wanted to mimic Rainbow Six Siege, and then it wanted to copy games like Arc.
You could also see that in the hiring of Pellen, a corporate executive whose only goal was to turn skull and bones into a product that could make money. The shift to a survival game that emphasized crafting wasn't an artistic decision, but a monetary one. Originally, that project was delayed because the devs wanted to be more than just a black flag.
Reskin designed to get a quick buck, but somewhere along the lines, that passion to make something truly interesting was lost. Since then, CF Thieves has taken the place of skull and bones and did pretty much everything that this game wanted to do. But better EOF took so long that a competitor had time to steal their thunder.
In another world where Skull and Bones released only a few years after Black Flag and followed its original vision, it likely would've been received better. And this situation makes me ask, does Ubisoft still have it? Do you think that they're still a valid studio or are they just a joke?
At this point, I'm leaning towards the latter, but I wanna hear your opinions. So let me know in the comments. If you enjoyed this video, make sure to drop a like and subscribe to the channel.
I will see you guys next time. And peace.
