![]() And remember – you are the ship rather than an actual pirate, so you're not going to be courting the governor's daughter or hanging around in taverns. There will be more, but it'll most likely be in the form of other multiplayer modes rather than anything resembling a story. ![]() Staying on course or in a pack is tricky because wind plays a big part in the game, allowing for high-speed chases, as well as causing clusters of ships to rotate and meander as if they're navigating through molasses.īeyond that mode, I have no idea what Skull and Bones will offer. If one ship in your fleet is weighted down with pieces of eight, the rest should protect it rather than trying to hunt booty of their own, and if you are that ship, you'd best make sure you don't lose track of your mates. Carry a load of loot and you become a high profile target, and anyone sinking your ship can take the lot. Two pirate fleets, of five in this instance, seize as much loot as possible from NPC merchants and from each other, and then flee when the timer runs out and the hunters arrive. There will be a singleplayer mode, but the mode playable at E3 is clearly designed as a team vs team game. You're a raider and a robber, essentially, striking fleets with little in the way of defences, and scarpering before the Sea Cops arrive. That means you won't be disembarking and digging up buried treasure, and in that sense Skull and Bones is a more realistic depiction of pirate life. Sure, you have an avatar of sorts, barking commands at the crew as they scurry around the deck, manning the guns, trimming the topsail, and performing boarding actions, but you are very much in control of the ship rather than an individual on the ship. Instead, you are, essentially, a pirate ship. You're doing pirate things, smashing up merchant ships and stealing their haul, and outrunning pirate hunters, but you're not a pirate. The catch is that you are no longer a pirate. With Skull and Bones, Ubisoft Singapore have transplanted all of that good stuff into an even more beautiful world, with seas so vibrant and choppy that the waves are hypnotic. Black Flag served up all the delicious flavour of ship-to-ship combat and sailing without making you memorise a thousand button combinations, or forcing you to understand the configuration of the rigging, the cut of a jib, or the va-va-voom of a boom. The simulation wasn't complex, but it gave a sense of shouting orders and of wrestling the wheel of something too massive to master. Ships weren't simply a rehashed mode of transportation, behaving for all the world like sea-horses, they were huge, heavy, creaking juggernauts. That's partly because it lets you ignore the assassin stuff to live a pirate's life instead, with sea shanties and treasure hunts and rum, but it's also because the naval exploration and combat was exciting and new. For those who don't remember, Black Flag is the Assassin's Creed game that people who hate Assassin's Creed games are allowed to like. ![]() Skull and Bones is a distillation of the naval combat in Assassin's Creed: Black Flag. Here, we're with Ubisoft Singapore and the wonders of water. In this case, it's not procedural animation. Almost like a mega-bucks version of the animation experimentations of Grow Home. ![]() This is the result of Ubisoft having one of their apparently specialist studios build an entire game around their specialism. That has nothing to do with its setting or style, though a Black Flag follow-up of sorts is an attractive proposition – but, no, the appeal of Skull and Bones is more abstract. Skull and Bones is a game I've wanted for a long time. ![]()
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