He could have never known the thrill of the call of the digital wide but, after years of procrastination and headwinds, Ubisoft is finally releasing this Friday, February 16, the highly anticipated and several times postponed "Skull and Bones", which places the player in the shoes of a pirate.
Although a very present figure in popular culture, the pirate has rarely been exploited in the world of video games, despite often achieving success, whether for “Sid Meier's Pirates!”
», released in 1987 and reissued in 2004, “Black Flag”, from Ubisoft’s “Assassin’s Creed” series in 2013, or even “Sea of Thieves” in 2018.
Six postponements before the game sees the light of day
It is also the success of “Black Flag”, widely acclaimed, which will push the developer to embark on the pirate adventure, entrusting the production to its Singapore studio, which had already largely participated in it.
Despite this successful genesis, the development of the game proved anything but simple: change of captain along the way, six successive postponements, numerous changes of direction but in the end, seven years after the broadcast of the first images, “Skull and Bones » is ready to set sail.
The player plays a shipwrecked pirate who, starting from nothing, will attempt, through pillage and trade, to become the greatest pirate in the Indian Ocean, alone or with the help of other players.
At the helm, he must take into account the currents, the climatic conditions as well as the state of his ship or the health of his crew to complete his quests, which range from collecting raw materials, without leaving the ship. , attacking outposts or villages, always from the sea.
“It's a huge game and we think people will realize how huge and comprehensive the game is.
It is truly a triple A game
(classification of big budget games considered to be of high quality)
” and even “a quadruple A which will deliver over time”, assured the CEO of Ubisoft, Yves Guillemot.
First negative reactions from players…
But getting there has at times been an odyssey rather than a cruise, between lack of direction within the Singapore studio, constant changes in strategy, pressures of all kinds and significant turnover within the teams.
In the end, to avoid disaster, more than ten studios in the group worked on the project.
The hardest part now remains for Ubisoft: to convince players, who have waited a long time for a game that they never saw on the horizon.
“The longer a game takes to develop, the less expectation there is in terms of sales volume from the market,” recalls Nick McKay, vice president of Wedbush, “at some point I think they felt it was time for them to move on.”
Among the players who tested the “beta” version, the first reactions seem generally negative.
Among the criticisms, the impossibility of participating in the boarding or disembarking almost anywhere to visit the surrounding lands, as can for example be done in the “Assassin's Creed” series.
Another fear: that it will end up being just "a half-finished online game filled with micro-transactions to buy stupid cosmetic upgrades and outfits", as one of the users sums it up.