Short version of what went wrong; they marketed 'making a game focused on naval combat based on AC Black Flag', then ended up making a generic MMO-type live service grindfest. Multiple people restarting the project in their own image meant nothing of the original idea was left at the end.

Any publishers reading these comments, please grab a pen...... WE DO NOT WANT GAMES AS A SERVICE!! Have a nice day.

The crazy thing is if you ever played pirates of the Caribbean Online that hand technically had more in it.. also boarding.. in a really really old game.

Played the demo last night….was legit 30 plays queuing up to talk to a NPC which gives you missions of “go get this, bring it back” 10x

“AAAA” even Activision wasn’t bold enough to make that claim💀

"Your boat has stamina." 🤦🏻‍♂️

All i wanted was an expansion that let me play Black Flag with my friends. When i found out i cant get off the ship i just re installed Black Flag for another playthrough.

Having zero hand to hand combat and not allowing you to roam your boat or explore islands is criminal.

The first Quadruple A game goes right next to 16x the detail.

What went wrong is that they looked at everything that made Black Flag good and said “let’s make that feature a cinematic instead”.

They needed to stick it out with the Singapore studio because they not only got funds from the gov there But had a tax cut as well So if they don't deliver they are on the hook for the millions invested by the gov, the tax they didn't pay (the tax cut is based on the IP, no IP no tax cut, that includes all the years they were developing and getting a cut) Then they need to worry about investigation into whether or not it was a attempt to defraud the gov of its money & tax cuts It's better to just follow through tbh

People constantly complain about management, but this is one of those examples of how important competent management is.

The most frustrating part is they could have just reused almost all the mechanics from Black Flag with some tweaks and free roam multiplayer and people would have loved it.

I've said it once; I've said it a thousand times: all I wanted was a single-player pirate game like Black Flag but without the Assassin stuff.

Anybody else watch these videos even though they don't play like 90% of the games covered but just find Falcon's voice soothing? Could listen to him reading out a phone book.

Want a gripping RPG saiiling around in a ship? Play "Sunless Sea" - that game will give you fkn nightmares. It gets grim when you run out of food and have to start eating the crew, then you nearly run out of fuel and to save fuel you turn the light off and your crew starts to go insane in the dark - good times. Get the Zubmariner DLC expansion too, it is well worth it.

What went wrong? They didn't make a game with even the depth of Sid Meiers Pirates.

The only reason this game never got canceled from delay after delay, director change after director change is because ubisoft took money from Singapore and they HAD to release something and it shows lol

I am not necessarily averse to cutscenes in a game, sometimes they make sense functionally, and you deal with it. But the fact that in this game (as I understand from reviews) after you conquer another ship instead of boarding that ship for an on foot battle and looting, there’s a cut-scene instead of letting you board the captured ship in real time. That’s kind of mind-blowing.

You are 100% correct. We all would’ve loved black flag 2 game with more story and interesting missions. They literally nailed the boats and gameplay just build on it

The best thing about Skull & Bones is that it reminded me how much I love AC Black Flag so I started playing it again and it’s still an amazing game. Skull & Bones is worse is almost every way and the ways that it is better (more ship customization mainly) don’t matter that much.

Kind of appropriate that a pirate game gives you a perfect example of the sunken cost fallacy at work.

A documentary needs to be done on the inner working of Ubis HQ because for the past decade almost every game theyve announced has been delayed or cancelled at least once, with practically the only exception being the recent AC Mirage. The behind the scenes turmoil of that publisher in general is just astonishing how bad they manage everything from top to bottom. As for Skull and Bones, its wild that literally this game was only, and only had to be a sliced off version of what was already perfected in Black Flag. Just take that off, make it its own side game, boom. But nah. They tried to find ways to hamfist GAAS and microtransaction into it SOME kind of way, and thats what led to all the directional changes. They legit only had to do that one thing, and messed it up. But Im not surprised because Ubi had a genuinely great multiplayer with that Brotherhood hunting assassin multiplayer mode and for some reason just let that go instead of continuing it. The oddest part is them calling it AAAA, which put their feet further into the hole, when the game encompassed none of the qualities of a AAA game. It sure didnt have the quality, and as for budget, it probably doesnt crack the top 10 for AAA game budgets nowadays. So what could have possibly made it AAAA. And if the Singaporean government reason is to be believed, then that means they got additional funds and write offs that didnt come out of their own expenses, which means even more that they didnt spend nearly as much as they are claiming.

"Looking at it makes me want to take a nap." There's your box quote

Skull and bones went to Davy jones locker on release day

It's better to play Ac4 and AC rouge than this 4A schlop 🎉

With games like this, don’t ask what went wrong, ask what didn’t go wrong, you’ll find it to be much easier to sort out what went wrong then.

You know when you go to a fast food joint that you can feel in the burger or whatever the dissatisfaction of the employees in what you're eating. This game is that feeling in videogame form.

You can tell the game is shit when news outlets start with "What went wrong?"

This game held so many talented devs hostage. Thank goodness it’s out so they can go do something better.

Yes! A deep dive on what went wrong, I've been waiting for a video like this instead of the usual simple bashing and making fun of the game. Thanks Falcon!

13:00 “Normally when a game ships, it’s done” Nice

Was just listening to jake baldino crap all over this game on the friends per second podcast! timing couldn't be better lol.

When you have a game like Red Dead Redemption 2 in development for 8 years, and then Skull and Bones in development for 11, it hurts my brain with the comparison of quality. It really goes to show how mismanaged Ubisoft is and how incredibly managed other companies can be. Hopefully, this is a lesson for Ubisoft.

Wow. You explain so nicely and in a simple manner. Keep it up 👍🏼👍🏼

I actually feel bad for the devs and whoever they threw in to make this finished only for it to turn out like this. But then again Ubisoft did this to themselves

I was so excited for this game to finally come out and then I played the beta and I was like “Yeah no I’m not gonna pay for this”. My friends and I thought we were going to be able to play as a crew on one ship. I mean that would be soooo much more fun 🤦🏻‍♀️

Something I’ve noticed with live service titles is that it’s almost better to start out from early access with generally low expectations, and build it up with a relatively small population of fans and whales. It’s not impossible, but incredibly difficult to get the right kind of gameplay loop, balance, economy, etc. right off the bat. So difficult, that it may not be worth trying for most devs. Especially because, when you do it this way and at this price, expectations are going to be high. Little is better at killing a live service game than the kind of “dead on arrival” media attention Skull and Bones is getting.

12:24 I worked at ubisoft when it was prototyping the game, and I had designer friends during the creation of the game. Ubisoft received a large grant from the Singapore government to create this game locally with talent from Singapore. The local people were good programmers but had previously worked only with banking. A lot of people had to be brought from other places to try and finish the game. As time went on, It kept costing more and more to the point where it already consumed the grant of money received from the government, and it was put on hold. It was revived a couple of times and eventually launched. Ubisoft, EA, and other big triple-A companies, pay some of the smallest salaries in the industry and rely mostly on people's desire to work on big games. You get more respect from smaller companies.

Damn I remember my first trip to E3 in 2017 and seeing it at the ubisoft booth and thinking the exact same thing and how cool of a premise that was

"It exists!" - the most positive thing you can say about this game lol

They could not make Black Flag 2 because under the agreement with the Singapore government they had to develop a new IP. So it couldn't just be BF2, and it had to be sufficiently different from BF, which is probably where the creative vision started to get muddled.

I'm a huge believer in having a story & gameplay direction/Blueprint & the lead developer does what he's hired to do. Not create his vision. Same w/ Movies.. ~~~Star War Books~ The 19 book series New Jedi Order(NJO) had about 6 writers & they spend months preparing the layout of who writes who & who kills off who & when & how they die etc.. Nobody went rogue. I will always respect how they did that.

Ever since the first time we saw this game I've always said the same thing. I've always imagined the Ubisoft board meeting like "ok, so we take Black Flag, remove all the fun, make it multiplayer and sell it." turns out I was right all these years.

A friend of mine is part of the Ubisoft Singapore team and joined the project about 3 years ago. Last week, she tells me that Ubisoft actually never said it was gonna be Black Flag without the Assassin parts. I said no way, because they totally did. So i went back to watch the E3 2017 reveal, and she's right. Some of the old comments on the video even have many people commenting that the game's basically World of Warships but pirates. So while there's much about Skull & Bones that I loathe, Ubisoft promising Black Flag without the assassin bit unfortunately can't be one of them because they never did.

I was hoping it would be as good as sid meier's pirates! I used to love that game as a kid

I'm pretty sure the voices for singing the shanties I head while watching a stream of these were flat out lifted from AC3.

I would hope that Ubisoft examines and makes creative changes to this game. There is vast room for improvement in this game and I hope ubisoft pays attention to what the playing community is saying about this game.

"Sid Miers PIRATES!" was pretty cool.

If they needed a completely new vision for this IP (they couldn’t just do Black Flag 2, they had to add more to it), they could have taken the best parts of Black Flag-the exploration, the ship combat, a great character arc-and added other ideas that changes the setting or characters or the story conflict.

Quick question, does anyone knows the name of the first background song used in this video?

They literally needed to copy paste the ship combat from AC BF and put it in full game. Flesh out like 5 things and make the online solid. That's crazy they took this long to fail this hard on something like this.

The amount of time that this was in development for what resulted is somehow wildly mind blowing and simultaneously expected. This one always felt like the outcome was obvious, but I think it's indicative of a wider issue in the industry when you look at other AAA titles that spent ages in development and did not live up to that time and resource investment.

All they had to do was make Black Flag and Rogue again, but with a different story and more in depth pirate elements. Why can't studios make a good pirate game? The last really good one was Sid Meier's Pirates, back in like, 2004

I'm the outlier here and I know it. When they said, way way back early in the dev cycle that they were taking out all of the moving around as a person and concentrated on just the ship part I was pumped. The off board parts and sneaking around islands to get upgrades in ACIV got absolutely tedious to me. I just wanted more ship combat. I imagine they'll cut this game off after the first year of content and I'm OK with that. I've got 45+ hours of game time in now. I feel like I got my money's worth. Shame it wasn't more fun for more people, though. I think they could have added more ships, enemies, story content, and even exploration areas(on ship) for a long time.

As someone who bought S&B I find myself wanting more content than whats available now. I like many wanted more ac4 mechanics to come back in this but alas it wasn't ment to be i hope they continue to make improvements to the game and have a nms like redemption arch and this time next year it will be what we all want and expected it to be

The special creatures and ghost ships are sponges too. I spent 20 minutes and used over 800 cannon balls on a ghost ship just for the game to crash on me with the ghost ship at 10% hp. All that time and effort wasted...not to mention all the supplies i wasted on that ship for nothing...

Live service shouldn't be a participation trophy that studios give to themselves. It should be an award given to a studio by the players when they make a good game and the players want more. That's the inherent problem with games being designed as "live service". They're putting the cart before the horse. They should be focusing on making a game so good that players clammer for more and thus turn it into a live service game when the demand for it is there.

I was hoping Skull & Bones would be Sea of Thieves but with PvE combat and no open pvp. And ofc have the land exploration and combat with swords and pistols and with more human enemies than just skeletons. No problem with some supernatural elements, love the supernatural.

They could have done so much with this new IP. Created a new story-driven, single-player pirate game (why they went the MMO direction I don’t know). They could have gone the historical route with the Golden Age of Piracy or they could have gone fantastical with sea monsters, mermaids, and pirate curses (or both!) Maybe added some survival elements to it? You get OFF the ship to gather resources, hunt, find treasure or secrets you have to uncover to progress missions. Ship combat? I would have left it the same as Black Flag-taking over ships for crew and loot and being hunted-that was fun. Maybe an element they could have added was changing the flag to appear non-threatening to other ships to ambush them? Or creating a hidden pirate cove. Weather could affect the ships too. There’s just a TON of ideas that they could have ran with if they’d just kept the pirate power fantasy of AC Black Flag but removed the Assassin’s Creed branding. When people think of pirates, the ship is just one piece of the puzzle-people want to fight, explore, find treasure, etc. EDIT: I should have watched the video. They added sea monsters-but without really explaining how the sea monsters existed (or leaning into the idea that there’s huge monsters that exist and you have to build your empire in the chaos). Survival elements? From what I’ve seen it’s mostly a mini game and “ship stamina” rather then forcing the player to interact with the world and the character. To be immersed.

Their mistake was stopping at only a Quadruple A game. If they had just pushed a bit further to Quintuple A, then the game would have been great!

The second I had seen that the sailing ships in this game had "stamina" when going full speed ahead, I knew there wasn't much hope for this game...

honestly I wish they just did make AC: Black Flag 2. I want to know how we got from the pirate/Assassin to his son Haythem the Templar in London to the Native American guy we meet in AC: 3. The original games just don't tie up a lot of loose ends. I think an MMO taking placing in the AC: Black Flag universe would be interesting and would be a great expansion on the core concepts.

they need to look at ac black flag and pirates of the carribean online, (if you know about it you know) and make it more immersive, like actually boarding ships, hand to hand combat, exploring islands, and just do events were we can play with friends/people

Well, glad we can all still play Black Flag. Thanks.

It's very sad to hear how this developed and why it was done that way. I personally like pirate games (maybe the only thing I could imagine playing with friends online), but the price tag is high for me (and probably for my friends) and as it's not my main type of game, I'm not going to grab it yet - I might as well go back to "sid meier's pirates !" game and enjoy it again

Yea i played the demo .. the Ship battles where more like a shooter rather than a pirate ship battle

One of the problems with a live service game is that it's designed to be monetarily focused from the start. We as players of a specific genre - whatever that genre be - know we already pay almost to over $100 on one game. Some of us buy more than one of them a month. Some of us can only afford to buy one a month. So we really would rather play the game the way it's intended from start to finish and be done. We'll still buy more games in general if the content is good. So the studios WILL make more money off us at some point. But when you design a game that's intentionally nerfed in power levels just to nickel and dime the player who wants to be successful; and probably can't afford Whale status, it's going to piss most players off. Not to mention turn what should be a fun game into something arguably unfinishable. It tends to rely on players' competitive drive to earn cash, rather than permit any actual sense of fun.

IMDA the segment of the Singapore Government likely affiliated with this funding publicly publish the guidelines for the funding scheme. They would likely have to some degree had funding from IMDA which is fully recoverable if they cancel the game which could've left them liable for millions.

I wish someone would do a video like this about 7 Days to Die and everything they’ve pulled with their promises surrounding the console versions, the TTG shut down, and their 10yr and counting development time. All this on top of several successful funding campaigns, merchandise sales, and having one of the top selling early access games.

Im 40 hours in and I don’t think I’m going to stop playing the game. The game’s loop at LAUNCH is great and it is only going to get better going forward. The game’s systems unlock as you progress and it has VERY GOOD end game systems to keep you motivated to grind. I was reading the negative comments online and I wasnt sure if I wanted to buy the game but I’m glad I played the game and I can’t stop it. Ofcourse it can be improved and according to the devs they are working on QoL and bug fixes right now.

Been playing the trial which was fun tbh. Looks great. But no land exploration, or land combat? Ouch

I’m glad I played the free trial game and saved like $70. Like it got me in a pirate mood again and watched the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies a few days ago, but I feel bad I did not have the same fun like with not just AC: Black Flags, but Sea of Thieves and Sid Meier's Pirates. I wanted a fun pirate game but felt like I was playing ship simulator. Heck, I had a more pirate-y adventure when I modded Skyrim a few years back with some pirates mods! I was hype for the customization and traveling on a ship, but once I got to try it out, I was disappointed. Didn’t get the customization I hoped for and the ship battle got tedious, especially with pirate hunters keep appearing and destroying me so frequently when I was a low level. Read it could be a potential bug, but it was so annoying, I gave up.

Would have been simple, pirate on foot combat combined with ship combat. Assassins creed could have been the groundwork for it indeed. Arena ship combat could have been an add-on later on maybe. You just want an open world with other people where you can do pirate things. But not so vast of an open world that it becomes lonely. Islands with towns and jungle to explore would be nice as well.

At this point, they should just remake AC: Black Flag to be the Skull & Bones everyone wanted.

Pretty much status quo for big studios now. It is amazing that they managed to make the ship combat worse though.

I had not seen any game footage until now. I definitely see what people are saying about how it looks like a mobile game.

Wow i never played ACBF but its been sitting on mt shelf from my brother on PS4 for a while now. Not a ubisoft fan but now I wanna play it lol

They could have reduced the price a little for the full game. In my country it is almost sold for the price for $95! And that is just the standard version of the game. The price tag dosen't match up to what we are getting in the game + it has microtransactions too for almost equal price of the full game. I understand that Ubisoft wanted to take it outand throw it out from the shelf and just be done with it, bit in my opinion, and I have tried the trial version fully, it should have been scraped. Thats my opinion

I played the 2nd closed beta test and I laughed so hard when towards the end of the 6 hour time limit a pop up popped up saying "your time is almost up, preorder the premium edition now to keep everything you have earned during the beta" like.....nah. I booked the day off work for that and I had to play AC: black flag once my time ran out just so the day didn't feel wasted!

Ppl just wated SM Pirates! merged with seadogs 2 and AC:BF, maybe with some dynamic economy of dozens of games in this setting. That was easiest thing to do - just use what came before, slap good graphic and there u go - instant hit. But naaah we need workd of warships with sails strapped to pt boats. I would not be surprised if Akella will do it in a year or two.

Try out Pirates of the Caribbean by Akella. I reckon it's like 30 years old and still has a more satisfying Pirate feel than Skull and Bones. And while you're atbit, you should also try out the fanmade expansion "New Horizons"

Skull and Bones, 300 people, 11 years. Helldivers 2, 100 people, 8 years. One is breaking all expectations and climbing the Steam charts and the other is going out with a whimper before it even made a bang.

Lahey from the trailer park boys would say something like "they sold us a sinking shit ship randy"

Yeah, most developers jumped ship. Makes a whole lotta sense!

It was supposed to be AC Black Flag, without the assassins gear and moves for the player character. Changed mission layout and new game modes. Done. What the hell were they doing!?

The irony about Skull and Bones is that it shares a similar beginning in terms of development like Assassin's Creed. Both were meant to be spin-offs become becoming original titles. Except both would have very different outcomes.

They should have definitely branched this out into a more black flag pirate game that is more focused on pirates instead of half and half with assasins meaning no parkour and climbing tall towers needed. Just a pure pirate game with walkable cities and interesting story

Black flag but with my friends in a co op campaign is all I wanted tbh. Every fun and cool part of Black Flag is gone in this game.

I really hope that Ubisoft gets bought and Yves Guillemot and family get the boot. They've got so much talent in the teams, but their leadership are just incompetent.

i personally hate when people ask"why arent video games fun anymore?"... "maybe im too old and outgrew video games"... Then u get games like this that remind the gaming community that people, who are not gamers, make the final decisions for the games you play... after 6 years of doing nothing and cram 10 years of development in 3 years. *_cough_*_ Anthem, Cyperbunk, Battlefield 2042, Fallout 4 _*_cough_*

We need Rockstar to make a pirate era Game. A truly AAAA experience.

Small Game Developer - Has passion. Wants to make a game that other people would like. Tells a cool story, and creates something that lasts. Corporate - Ubisoft Skull and Bones.

I got some games to play and when Im done with those I hope this game will go on sale

"live service open world games cant just be made and print money... it takes a dev with understanding and directions how to envelop it into a working reality" best comment

Considering my game completely broke after starting the first tutorial quest and Ubi in no hurry, beating around the bush and sending me in circles to try and reset my progress on their side so I can restart, I completely understand why this game is on fire. I've been on multiple chats on discord, the bug reporter, and the ubi help site and the only thing I get is... "our team is looking into the issue". It's been almost a month since release and they still can't fix the problem. I think I'll just trade it for Helldivers 👍 At least then I can feel like I didn't completely waste my money.

Apparently UBI borrowed money from the Singapore government but at the promise of a working product....they were basically forced to releasing as it was otherwise they would of not released it atall.

I suppose it's good that they tried to create something new. Even if it was a spiritual successor. Many great games today wouldn't exist if the risk wasn't taken to create them. I haven't played the game and likely never will. I'm more interested in the looting, character progression and the logistics behind realistic sea-faring like COAS and by extension it's mods. I haven't even played Black flag as the assassin premise doesn't suit me.

Lets be honest here. I enjoyed Black Flag. The sea shanties, the sea combat, storms and whatnot. But by the end of the game I was kinda done. Maybe other people were different but i've yet to boot the game up since i beat it. I think if this game came out quickly afterwards it would have been ok. But after this long? And its somehow worse? oof.

All they had to do was copy black flag but take out all the stalking and assassination missions. Black flag was an amazing naval combat game and the islands and shipwrecks you had to explore to find upgrades were a perfect balance. How could they have gotten it sooooo wrong for an almost perfect starting point