Skull & Bones - Assassin's Creed Black Flag with less assassins and more pirates

Assassin's Creed Black Flag gains 31% more Xbox players after Skull & Bones beta.

Phil Spencer has played a total of 2 Minutes on Skull and Bones.

AAAA game btw...

Who the fuck is Phil Spencer???

CEO of Microsoft Gaming.

french video about the failure of development (it was released a few days before launch).
To give a rough timeline:

2013: Assassin's Creed: Black Flag is a massive success, with the pirate portion widely praised. Ubisoft HQ gets the idea of makign something with it. A standalone multiplayer version, a spinoff, an Expansion Pack... befire they decide that they don't have time to work on a new game in the assassin's creed series, since anything they start work on now would inevitably compete with the nex Assassin's Creed title (remember, they were still on a yearly release cycle at that point). So, they eventually decide to separate it from the Assassin's Creed franchise entirely and make it its own IP, which will be worked on by Ubisoft Singapore, as not only did Ubi Sing work on the praised naval combat part of black Flag, the singaporean government also gives massive tax breaks and subsidies to studio creating new IP in the country. They send a mid-level director of Black Flag, stephane... somthing, to be the game's director.
2015: the last two years have been spent designing prototypes, sending them to Ubisoft HQ in France, only for HQ to refuse them for one reason or another. Ideas are started, worked on, dropped, again and again. Stephane, realizing he's not cut out for the position of game director at all, quits the project, and is replaced by Justin Farren. Justin has an idea of what he wants the game to be: Rainbow Six Siege, but with boats. quitck matches ala Siege "extraction", with players workign to capture/protect a cargo.
2018: Development has been somewhat rocky, but progress has been made and released is planned for the end of the year. And then Sea of Thieves comes out. Suddenly, everyoen at Ubisoft HQ starts panicking, that Skull & Bones will look bad compared to it. Their tight, match-based, ship-only game, coming out and being compared to this sprawling open-world with World Events, PvE (with Pv P optional), meeting and teaming up with other players, being able to get in and out of your ship as you want? There had been talks and some work done to implement these things in Skull & bones, but very much in a "big patch after release" way. but Sea of Thieves coming out with these things on launch day? And free?! Skull & Bones is gonna be ridiculed. So, scrap everything UbiSing has been working on. New directive is to copy Sea of Thieves, but with an Ubisoft coat of paint.
2019: With the new direction Skull & Bones is taking, Justin Farren is deemed no longer adequate as game director, and is given the boot. To be replaced by Elisabeth Pellen. With the new direction the game is taking, higher-ups also want to add survival elements to Skull & Bones, crafting and the likes. After months of working on a prototype, Ubisoft HQ wants them to go back to "what the plans of 2016 were". Massive burnouts ensues, quitting and resignatiosn at almost all ranks.
2023: Pellen is given the boot as well. And the new directive is to get the game out as soon as possible, no matter the state, because the Singaporean government is askign questions about where their subsidies went.

So the big news lately is that apparently Skull and Bones flopped harder than Suicide Squad did.

Which is impressive.

It was truly a flop of AAAA proportions.

Edited by TheLivingDrawing on Mar 12th 2024 at 5:04:38 AM

The AAA industry — or AAAA industry I suppose — is in a race to the bottom.