Five years after its announcement, a trailer dropped at E3 2018. The multiplayer pirate game Skull and Bones is out, but was the long wait worth it? It’s an always online live service game focused on late 17th-century ship combat with just a hint of supernatural elements. While the game runs well and has real fun moments, it is weighed down by a dull world and bland quest designs that grow old after only a few hours.
Story
The story of Skull and Bones kicks off with the player controlling a ship as dozens of British vessels attack them at once. When you are inevitably defeated, you’re saved by two of your crewmates and learn the basics of sailing on your tiny raft. Once you finish the tutorial, you go to Sainte Anne, where you meet the town leader, John Scurlock, who gives you a proper pirate ship and sets you on your way to becoming a pirate kingpin. That is it for the story of Skull and Bones.
The main quest is just doing jobs for Scurlock and other quest givers for the player to increase their reputation. There are no branching paths, and while you can choose dialogue options for your character in cutscenes, your choices change nothing in the story. There is never an opportunity to betray or lie to your employer for your own gain, so instead of a pirate, you feel like a soldier following orders.
The end game of Skull and Bones is much the same — you will spend much of your time as a delivery boy dropping off liquor and opium to try and earn enough currency to buy the game’s best ships and guns. There is minimal narrative to drive the player in Skull and Bones beyond the game’s first hour.
Gameplay
Let me make this very clear. This game is not Assassin’s Creed Black Flag 2. Skull and Bones may share some of that game’s DNA, but they are fundamentally different in their setting, combat, and pacing. Action in S&B may initially seem complex, but it’s mostly just point-and-shoot. Enemy ships have weak points you can hit for extra damage, and certain weapons have effects that encourage the player to aim for things like a ship’s sails, but for the most part, combat is just shooting a vessel till it’s dead.
Boarding a boat has been reduced to a cutscene that plays if you hit a low-health ship with grappling hooks, and there is no foot-based combat in the game. This would be fine if the navel combat were more complex, but unfortunately, the most significant factor determining if you’ll win a fight is if your ship’s level is higher than your opponent’s. All ships have a base level that increases as you add better guns and armor.
Customizing your boat with different weapons is fun, and having a giant ballista on the front of your vessel adds character, but none of that matters if your opponent has a higher level than you. The level system hurts the enjoyment you can have with this game. It’s one thing to get blown apart by a big man-of-war ship that you stupidly challenged to a fight. It’s another thing to get two shot by a ship half my size because his number is 10, and yours is seven.
Even exploring the ocean is a chore, thanks to Skull and Bones’ perplexing stamina system. You have three speeds when sailing, with the fastest speed costing stamina. In practice, this means slowing down to let the crew rest every 30 seconds, making traversing the world tedious. You can improve your stamina with temporary food buffs and faster ships, but that solves a problem that shouldn’t exist in the first place. I have never had a problem with low stamina in combat, so it seems to exist solely to annoy players as they attempt to traverse the world. I often found myself fast-traveling from port to port since there was no reason to sail over long distances. These fast travel points will be the main reason you explore in the opening hours, after which you can travel wherever you want for a small fee, making the world feel even more stagnant as you navigate menus instead of the open ocean.
Quest design is also lackluster, with the majority being a simple fetch quest asking the player to destroy a ship or collect a particular resource. Once every 10 missions, you may get to do something more interesting, like plunder a fort or take control of an NPC’s ship, but most of the time, you’ll just be fast-traveling to a destination for a fight and then fast-traveling back home. The end game is no better, basically boiling down to traveling between smuggling outposts to collect Pieces of 8, which is required to build the most powerful ships and weapons.
Art style
On a more positive note, Skull and Bones’ art style is its greatest strength. You can make your ship your own, customizing your sails, exterior color, ornamentation, and even your crew’s clothes can be changed. I was repeatedly surprised by just how different each player’s boat looked, even if they were in the same class ship as me. The settlements are also visually interesting, with many featuring prominent landmarks like a broken lighthouse or a giant tree. Larger colonies are bustling shanty towns with blacksmiths and black market dealers, all encouraging you to buy more weapons and info from them.
The music is great with the addition of female crewmembers, adding a new sound to the shanties your crew sings. You can also buy clothes to make your pirate captain as flamboyant or disheveled as you like, but once again, some of the more ornate and interesting accessories are blocked behind the Pieces of 8 currency.
Technical
Skull and Bones features both Quality and Performance modes, with the former running at 4K at 30fps, the latter running at around 1440p and a stable 60fps. The game is always online, but I have never experienced a crash or disconnect over 12 hours of playtime. I did, however, experience several bugs that prevented me from completing the quest and accessing the stores, which required a restart. The game may not crash, but it will sometimes prevent you from picking up loot and spawning enemies right in front of you, breaking immersion.
Summary
Skull and Bones is quite possibly the biggest disappointment of 2024 so far. The lack of content at launch reminds me of the first Destiny game, with somewhat fun moment-to-moment gameplay, but a complete lack of anything else to keep the player interested past the first hours at launch. Two or three years from now, this Ubisoft game may be updated enough with new content to be worth the $70 price tag, but in its current state, it’s not even worth the time it takes to download it.
Skull and Bones is available on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. You can buy it on the PlayStation Store.
The Review
Poor
