Assassin's Creed 3 director Alex Hutchinson was as surprised as anyone to see the development of Ubisoft's infamous AAAA pirate game Skull and Bones drag on for so long, especially since, in his view, he and his team already laid the foundation for what they were making.
There was a time when many doubted whether Skull and Bones would ever release. Development began way back in 2013 when it was intended as a multiplayer expansion for Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, and without going into its incredibly tumultuous history, there were several major development reboots and delays before it eventually, triumphantly some would say, released in 2024.
Unfortunately for Ubisoft, Skull and Bones' 11-year trajectory to launch ended with a resounding thud marked by middling reviews, low player counts, and extremely disappointing sales. To fully contextualize just how quickly the masses moved on from Skull and Bones, GR+ senior writer Austin Wood recently wrote that he was "genuinely surprised" to learn that it survived Ubisoft's January restructuring bloodbath that resulted in the cancelation of six games.
Rubbing sea salt into the wound, Hutchinson told PC Gamer it was "bizarre" to watch Skull and Bones take so long to make especially since it was "essentially the same stuff re-shipping 14 years after we made it."
Assassin's Creed 3 was the first game in the series to have naval battles, a technically dicey experiment that went well enough for Ubisoft to follow up with the pirate-themed Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, my personal favorite of them all. So why didn't Skull and Bones stick the landing? According to Hutchinson, by the time at finally released, it just wasn't fresh anymore.
"Ideas have a window ... they age out and become stale," he said, adding, "I think the team was junior. They were trying to essentially make Black Flag crossed with World of Tanks or World of Warships. But I don't think they had experience in that. And then they didn't really have experience in making even an Assassin's Creed game down there, because they really did co-development. And then I think it just got away from them."
Skull and Bones was the first original game whose development was led by Ubisoft Singapore, although the studio worked in a support capacity on every Assassin's Creed game from Assassin's Creed 2 on, notably as a significant contributor to Assassin's Creed 3's ship battling.
I'm a diehard Sea of Thieves fan, noted pirate media obsessive, and longtime Assassin's Creed player, so you'd think Skull and Bones would be right up my alley. Sadly, having played for a few hours at launch and then never again, I have to agree with GR's 2.5/5-star review that on top of many disparate issues, it's just too much of a live-service grind for my money.
