It’s easy to mock Ubisoft for this, but it’s important to remember that individual people are involved in making this game, being pulled in several different directions at once, with no end in sight.

Three years after it was supposed to be in our hands, it’s finally in a vaguely playable state. This game was initially supposed to launch in 2018 - in mid-2021, it just passed Alpha. It’s difficult to oversell how chaotic Skull & Bones is as an entity - and it’s not chaotic in the fun pirate ship kind of way either. But it never needed to be that way, especially when Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag was sitting right there. It has had such a strange, drawn-out development process, and those recent reports also reveal that, predictably, this process has been toxic in places too. This week, we got a boatload of information about Skull & Bones, including the bizarre reveals that years into development, the team was still deciding whether you would play as the pirate or the boat, and that because of a deal with the Singaporean government, Ubisoft has essentially been forced to continue with the game.

Assassins creed black flag ubisoft