I offer you three truths. One: Ubisoft is so desperate to cut costs after years of financial decline that it's lopping off digits at the weigh-in and starting to eyeball its limbs. Two: Steam player counts, which are more visible than those on console, provide useful but not holistic data, especially in this era of subscription services like Xbox Game Pass and, notably, Ubisoft+. And three: Ubisoft has a history of supporting some lower-performing games for the long haul. Just, you know, not The Crew.
All of that being said, I was genuinely surprised to learn that Skull and Bones, Ubisoft's well-known AAAA game, has not only survived a bloody company-wide overhaul, but also has just rolled out a big Year 2 update even as it (currently) sits at 522 concurrent players on Steam. Just for comparison, that number is roughly 11% of the Steam CCU for 2017's For Honor, which has a nearly identical user review score. Perhaps all the blood from the mainland never reached the sea.
Skull and Bones was not the sort of mega-hit that Ubisoft remains hungry for, nor did it become the next Rainbow Six: Siege-sized evergreen line-booster. After a legendary run of six delays, more than seven years in development, confusing messaging both internally and publicly, and a messy launch defined by middling-to-negative critical reception (our Skull and Bones review called it too much of a grind for too little reward), you'd be forgiven for assuming that Skull and Bones is, at best, in maintenance mode. Cruising along, keeping the lights on, momentarily delaying CEO Yves Guillemot's next serving of crow, and going wherever the ocean breeze takes it.
But Ubisoft Singapore is very much at it, and the Year 2 update actually sounds kind of neat.
The latest season of content, Eye of the Beast, is led by a kraken boss with "five battle phases" featuring massive tentacles that paw at your ship. "Unlike previous monsters, the Kraken has the ability to damage multiple ships at once, requiring increased coordination from pirate crews to take it down," Ubisoft says in a press release. Which feels like the kind of thing Skull and Bones was always meant to do.
Players have a new ship called the Corvette, which is somehow only the game's second large-class vessel, to bring into battle with the kraken. This ship is part of the new Smuggler's Pass reward track, in case you were wondering if Ubisoft has shed its live service skin at any point. If anything, the company has tripled down.
Accompanying quality-of-life changes include new inventory tabs for your cargo and warehouse, "the ability to manage your ship without docking," rear weapons for small ships, and "more immersive weapon ballistics." How does one make cannons and ballistas more immersive, I wonder.
This isn't the 2-year anniversary of Skull and Bones, for the record; that will come on August 22, and a new event – technically an old event, the Founding, which has been reprised – running through March 10 lays some road toward the summer. But for Year 2 of a game that few people expected to even come out, I'd be lying if I said this doesn't sound like Actual Content.
