YMMV / Skull & Bones

• Audience-Alienating Premise: One of the many reasons why the game struggled to resonate with a playerbase is the fact that, despite being a game marketed heavily around the fantasy of being a pirate, the game eschews most of the aspects one would expect out of the traditional pirate fantasy in favor of more run-of-the-mill tropes typical in open-world/live service games. There is no melee combat, meaning that there is no swashbuckling of any kind, and boarding ships amounts to little more than a cutscene that plays after you sink a ship. Likewise, instead of killing, stealing and looting (the ways one would expect a pirate to get the things they need), the game places far greater emphasis on mining ore, cutting trees, collecting blueprints and crafting in order to grow in strength and get upgrades.
• Awesome Music:
  • 2wei's rendition of the Wellerman sea shanty, which plays during the game's trailer, has been praised for being an enjoyable pirate song with excellent vocals.
  • Skull and Bones, by Home Free is a sea-shanty that was comissionned by Ubisoft to promote the game, and it is extremely good.
• Bile Fascination: Easily the main draw to the game is people wanting to see just how bad it is, given the combination of infamously long and tedious Troubled Production, failed marketing campaigns and the negative reception on premiere. In other words: watching the ship sink became more interesting than sailing one.
• Critical Dissonance: While nobody is praising the game, the critics gave it simply mediocre reviews, while players keep roasting the game.
• Fandom Rivalry: With Sea of Thieves. Due to notable SoT streamers being hired for marketing Skull and Bones, with a few even announcing their (temporary) retirement from the former game, some Sea of Thieves fans resented the implication of Skull and Bones being hyped as SoT's replacement.
• Memetic Mutation: "Quadruple A"/AAAA^ExplanationThe Ubisoft CEO justified the hefty $70 price tag for Skull and Bones, despite being a live-service game riddled with micro-transactions, season passes, and premium in-game currency by stating that it was beyond the scope of a triple-A game, it was a "quadruple-A game". This comment was widely mocked as a desperate attempt to drum up hype for what many clearly see as a sinking ship, given the game's infamously prolonged Troubled Production and going massively over-budget.
• So Okay, It's Average: General consensus is that while not terrible, the game also is nothing to write home about, and it feels undercooked despite over a decade it spent in development, still barren of content (with the idea being that it will be filled over the course of its lifetime as a lot of live-services do). Many critics have called out the game for not justifying its asking price on release or the now infamous title of being the first AAAA game.
• Spiritual Successor: Skull and Bones is widely seen as Ubisoft's standalone successor to Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, a game often touted as one of the great modern pirate games (at least before Sea of Thieves came along as competition). This reputation worked heavily against Skull and Bones after it was released to tepid reception, with one of the most common criticisms being its notable lack of features from Black Flag (swashbuckling combat, robust story, world map size and most land-based interaction in general), with many wondering how Ubisoft made such an inferior game to one they made over a decade prior, taking a solid foundation and doing less with it.
• Tainted by the Preview: Pre-release footage shows that the game lacks any boarding combat and instead has a harpoon mechanic that shows a cutscene and gives loot after completion. Many were upset about this and quickly pointed out that Black Flag did have boarding combat.

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