Credit: Unsplash
Choppy waters continue to delay the voyage.
I didn’t play Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, but according to a friend of mine, the best part of that game was the ship combat, and apparently, that’s a commonly held belief. This is presumably why, back in 2017, Ubisoft announced the development of Skull & Bones, a naval combat game. It was supposed to have come out back in 2018, but then it got delayed to 2019. Then to 2020. Then to 2021. Then to 2022. And guess what? It’s been delayed again.
Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said during a company earnings call yesterday that Skull & Bones has been delayed once again, this time to a timeframe of either late 2022 or early 2023. Guillemot said that Ubisoft Singapore has been working on the game this entire time with the help of multiple additional studios, and that he has every confidence they’ll be able to deliver what they promised and more with a little more time.
Ubisoft CFO Frederick Duguet echoed Guillemot’s sentiments, saying “Production, led by [Ubisoft] Singapore, has been advancing well over the past 12 months, and the promise is better than ever.”
“The additional time will allow the team to fully deliver on its vision.”
I still have my Skull and Bones t-shirt from E3 2017.https://t.co/UY7DYLeTDU
— Danny Peña (@godfree) May 11, 2021
Back in 2020, the creative director of Skull & Bones, Elisabeth Pellen, mentioned in an update on the game that the delays have been primarily caused by a “new vision” for its design. Supposedly, the original design for the game was to be a hybrid of The Division and, obviously, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag in the form of a straightforward online game, but since then, things have shifted more toward a live service model. Some have theorized that this change came about after Ubisoft was scooped on the pirate thing by Rare and Microsoft’s Sea of Thieves, though Ubisoft Singapore firing its managing director, Hugues Ricour, after their major controversy with sexual harassment reports probably didn’t do them any favors.
