Game Theory: Skull And Bones finally arrives, and it's already out of date

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

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There’s an odd phenomenon that occasionally happens in the video game industry that doesn’t really happen in any other form of media: Sometimes, a video game is in development for so long that it gets outpaced by technology, requiring more time in development—which risks it getting outpaced again. You can’t write a book that becomes outdated when new paper is invented, you can’t make a TV show that becomes impossible to air when networks shift to streaming, and a movie filmed on old cameras doesn’t become unwatchable on new screens. But you could make a video game for the PlayStation 4 that becomes theoretically useless when the PlayStation 5 comes along.

The most famous example of this is the definitive doomed video game, Duke Nukem Forever, which was announced in 1997 and released in 2011 (it formerly held the record for longest game development, but that “crown” has been taken by Beyond Good And Evil 2, which shouldn’t count anyway, because it’ll never come out). But Ubisoft’s Skull And Bones is a fresher and more timely example of the phenomenon.

Originally conceived as a spin-off of 2013’s Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (arguably one of the best ones, if only because of the hilarious framing device), the project that became Skull And Bones was meant to be an expansion of the pirate ship-to-pirate ship action that was so fun in Black Flag—a pitch that still seems like a good idea, for the record. Kotaku published a feature in 2021 on what the hell happened in those eight years, but the short version is that different people came up with different ideas, other people had other ideas for how to implement them, and Sony and Microsoft kept annoyingly insisting on developing new video game consoles—so Ubisoft couldn’t just release a game that was half-a-decade old and hope nobody would notice.

Skull And Bones is finally available, and based on its recent open beta at least, it looks and feels fine from a technical standpoint. If nothing else, it has caught up to modern technology—but now it may have been left behind in other ways. From the beta, the game seems to have a general lack of imagination when compared to Black Flag (though most games would have a hard time living up to the imagination of peak-era Assassin’s Creed), going for a more straightforward, video game-y approach to naval battles and sailing, plus the extremely video game-y concept of sailing your ship next to a tree and clicking a button to harvest resources from it that you can then trade to upgrade your sails or whatever. Then you do that a million more times, and you win.

The most dated thing about Skull And Bones seems to be how gullible Ubisoft seems to think modern video game fans are. The game is full-priced—and that’s 2024 full-priced, so $70—and yet it’s going to have all the hallmarks of a free-to-play game, like a battle pass and an in-game store where you can buy things for real money. Plenty of games do that now, like Rocksteady’s (pretty good!) Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, but when Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot was asked why the game costs $70 rather than making it free-to-play and directing players to those premium options, he argued that Skull And Bones is a “quadruple-A game” that will justify its cost when players see how “vast and complete” it is.

But… Black Flag let you swing from your ship to an enemy ship and get into sword fights with the crew, and Skull And Bones does not. There was also a whole Assassin’s Creed story there, where you could meet freakin’ Stede Bonnet (you know him!) and stab the seadogs of the British Navy in the neck with your Hidden Blade. Also, not to keep bringing this up, but Black Flag was actually a game-within-a-game and the real game had you playing as an Ubisoft employee using the genetic memories of long-dead freedom fighters to make content for your corporate masters at the evil Abstergo corporation. But sure, try to justify that a game is “vast and complete” even though it doesn’t have that little sparkle of bitter meta-commentary.