Yahtzee Croshaw (Zero Punctuation, Fully Ramblomatic)

Skull and Bones | Fully Ramblomatic

"Making this game should have been the easiest fucking job in the world, Ubisoft, 'cos you'd already done it." Thank you, Yahtzee.

Oh, wow, people weren't kidding. This game uses a stamina meter for your ship's sprint ability. I think someone needs to bang around Ubisoft's headquarters and carefully explain to people how sailing works, if they can find anyone who hasn't been assimilated into the Borg.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 6th 2024 at 12:15:09 PM

A game that should have expanded and improved on Black Flag's naval combat instead does it worse.

I admit, everything I see about the game makes me genuinely wonder how a game, which seems at first glance just to be the boat mechanics from Assassin's Creed repackaged into its own game, instead somehow managed to reinvent the wheel from scratch and turn it into a square.

Is this Springtime for Hitler? Have they just been embezzling all the funding and don't want anyone to know?

Edited by TobiasDrake on Mar 6th 2024 at 9:23:14 AM

It does almost seem as if Ubisoft wanted this game to fail, never mind Yves Guillemot going on about how it's a "AAAA" release. Surely he can't be that stupid. I mean, obviously he can, but there must be some minimum intellectual qualification for CEO positions.

No ceiling on cynicism, though, so maybe that's it.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 6th 2024 at 12:27:10 PM

Well you don't want the shareholders to accuse you of causing the game to fail and not making money after all the money already sunk into the project.

I've read opinions that Skull and Bones was released so that the Singaporean government wouldn't claw back the millions of dollars it spent to sponsor the game's development. Any profit it made was beside the point.

" Have they just been embezzling all the funding and don't want anyone to know?"

Yes, it's the thing they do when CE Os get bonuses while developers get firings.

Like, "you've done it already" is a cool quote, but with the constant churn, is there even anybody left in the company who knew how Black Flag was made?

Edited by Adannor on Mar 6th 2024 at 11:50:59 PM

As I was thinking about this game, I flashed back to Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, and I remembered that the framing story involves Ubisoft Montreal Abstergo Entertainment, a division of Ubisoft Abstergo, being ordered to make a schlocky, mass-market, pirate-themed simulation game for the consumer version of its Animus. The player is a researcher for Abstergo whose job it is to rifle through the genetic memories in Desmond Miles' DNA to come up with material that can be sanded down into inoffensively bland content for said game.

It was widely discussed at the time that the portrayal of Abstergo's management and its treatment of its developers was a secret cry for help, and indeed it proved to be so when all of the abuse allegations came out. What we had no way of knowing was that it also literally and perfectly predicted Skull & Bones: a sanded down, mass-market schlock version of Black Flag.

They tried to warn us, and we didn't listen.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 6th 2024 at 4:33:46 AM

I don't want to sound too aggressively American, but is Yahtzee's pronunciation of Yves Guillemot one of his bits or the actual way it's pronounced?

I'm fairly sure that's not how it's pronounced, although I won't even try to type it out phonetically. I can count on the fingers of zero hands how many 'tubers I've heard say it properly of late.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 6th 2024 at 6:23:41 AM

The Moral Dilemmas that Weren't | Semi-Ramblomatic

Vampyr and Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden share a common element: a story based around a moral dilemma that completely fails in its execution. In the first case, it's because there's no meaningful gameplay penalty to choosing the "good" path. In the latter, it's because the "evil" path undermines every point made in the story and is clearly there just in case you decide to roleplay as the most selfish person in the world.

If choosing the good or evil path has meaningful gameplay consequences, it's one thing. But here it's effectively nothing more than an option to replay the game as a complete bellend.

Ships can boost when they have oars, but many sailing games ignore that part.

Yeah, it's kind of embarrassing that an assassination game did the pirate game thing better than actual dedicated pirate games.

its that weird thing where just having a choice means its an actual choice and not just fulfilling mark on checklist. But however, when the story's themes are about hard choices, it feels off when the "good" option is really no harder at all in meaningful way

I feel like a better way to do moral choices is to not make it good and evil choices or make them both shitty. A lot of 40K games get it and present the choices as shitty, pointless in the long run or downright bad for you. You want to be a good person? The refugees you just saved turned out to be chaos cultist. Give money to a abused little girl? Well you just paint a target on her back and cause her dad to be killed. The games also make the "evil" options really tempting with cool armors, powers and weapons.

For me, that's a good way to head straight into Too Bleak, Stopped Caring territory. But to each their own.

Yeah you gotta keep out of that pitfall too.

If you have just binary choice, its usually better to not do "good or evil" choice yeah. That said, it does have place in "instead of game assuming you are nice to character, you have to choose to be nice to them" way, but games usually go with the not nice option being over the top cruel instead of something more realistic. And I agree that going opposite way of "no matter what you choose, shit sucks" isn't really much better in the end.

That said there is another issue and usually reason why games favor the "good" option: its really hard to make story where multiple options have make for equally good story. Its easier to write one as the "default" and other as alternative option. Lot of "good/evil" option games instead of going for hero/villain thing kinda make the evil option kind of weird tragicomedy.

Edited by SpookyMask on Mar 7th 2024 at 10:38:19 AM

Or sometimes all the choice is "you do the same thing but you're grumpy about it".

Crpg's are better about this. In Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous you still follow the same general story beats in all routes. But the Evil Mythic Paths aren't just for show, and there are consequences for going Evil. And if you want to commit to being a Demon, a Lich, a Devil, or a living swarm of flesh-eating bugs...you're going to do some heinous shit.

The last path in the spoiler is so bad in fact that you drive off all of your allies, leaving you all alone. But that's fine since you're a living swarm — you can just replace them all with more bug clones.

Edited by M84 on Mar 7th 2024 at 9:44:49 PM

Having good choices with nasty consequences is just being sadistic towards the player.

Fittingly enough, I think I prefer it when the game makes it clear that it's a Sadistic Choice from the word go, even before you click on one or the other. Where you know it's less of choosing the objectively right or wrong answer, and more picking the lesser poison.

For some setting it's kinda on brand. Like in Rogue Trader, if you know the setting, you know that the best intention can be twist to nasty results. Knowing that, would you still try to be a good person? And not like every good choices will lead to nasty end. Like my little girl example, yes her dad died but he was an asshole, yes her life will be in constant danger now but she now has a guardian that could protect her and lead her to a better life. It offer hope even in hopelessness because the god of hope is also an asshole in 40K.

I agree, but I feel stories shouldn't indulge too much in such cynicism, lest they fall into Too Bleak, Stopped Caring territory.

@ shigmiya64

Yves Guillemot's name is pronounced (I'm not good with phonetic writing): Eve (as in Eve Online or Eavesdrop) and his surname is Gee-(as in Ghee) Moe

Hope that makes sense

Witcher 3 was good with that. Sometimes you would try to take the right path, and it would backfire on you. And sometimes you would do the "bad" thing, and get practical results if not any satisfaction, in or out of universe—somtimes it was just easier to take a moral shortcut.

The tricky part was balancing all of this, but the game was pretty good at that too, with the overall message being that it was usually better to at least try the right path, even though they acknowledged that sometimes, good intentions just go awry.

Edited by ArthurEld on Mar 12th 2024 at 9:57:37 AM