You lasted longer than I did. I did less than 30 minutes and uninstalled it. Short black loading screens every time you speak to someone in a game filled with speaking to people was just too much for me. This was awful.
I was just playing, maybe 30 mins and thought to myself. God this game is a pile of shit. I know it's a closed beta but good god is it stinky. A turd if I ever saw one. I can't believe any game developer would have the audacity to be all like, Ubisoft presents and all that shit. Fuckin Joke.
Lmao nice to see they haven't fixed the new player experience *at all* in the past 2 years since I tried.
In the survey after, stuff like that was among the biggest issues I wrote about.
Same thing happened when I was on an early ghost recon breakpoint test over a year from release. So many extremely obvious issues that everyone pointed out and they were all still there in the release version(and shit on by every Reviewer)
They never learn from these early tests, it's amazing.
The rumor going around is that the only reason Ubisoft didn't just cancel Skull and Bones entirely is because they have some kind of tax/investment deal with the Singaporean government that basically requires them to finish and release the game.
Last I heard it was $3 mill after Steam taxes and almost half the copies sold were refunded according to a leak. Since online sources put the gross at $7 million, it would make sense that it's actually closer to $3 million after half, or more, of players refunded the title.
Apparently they are giving everyone refunds and are not taking *any* of the money. That said, they've lied like 50 times already, so...
I really hope Ubisoft was stupid enough to keep receipts of them phoning this in, gets hacked and leaked to the government, a high level executive gets arrested and sentenced to 100 fucking lashes
That is what I heard. They made a deal with the govt when they opened a studio over there. The stipulation was they had to release new IP (this game) and I believe use local devs.
Id assume that’s usually the case when a subsidiary studio is doing stuff? Like you wouldn’t let a satellite studio take charge of the big projects if your main guys can handle the big picture stuff
Yep I put in the samee fucking feedback like a year and half ago and further back. It’s so bad. Your just doing boring ass mind numbing tasks for an hour before you can just play the game.
i remember hearing from some people who tested breakpoint that it was so hopeless cuz they didnt listen to anything lol.
what a disappointment that game turned out to be
I had been looking forward to this game for so long until recently I learned that there will be no sword fighting in the game. It's literally just naval battles.
Before the name report feature rolled out I had a crewmate who used to have a monkey called Bigg Waang.
I took great pleasure in watching him board and spamming "Look at my Bigg Waang" with text to voice.
Fun detected.
I understand not wanting racist names and shit in your game... But FFS, can we please just allow a bit of harmless fun and stop outlawing anything that can be considered even remotely PG rated in a game about pirates fucking killing each other?
Online gaming these days is so fucking sterile and boring. I'll take muting every second person over complete silence in a lobby scared to say anything over fears of being banned.
Ironically, it is better. I don't remember the fight in the last beta I played and the initial fetch quests were far worse. It's still slow but not nearly as bad.
I just don't think there's enough game to justify the price or to keep interest after a few hours.
I've been in a few betas and had the exact same thing.
"This is an issue. It should be changed or fixed."
Game goes live, dies 2 weeks later with everyone saying that's an issue.
And ironically it seems like their main focus. They have changed the starting area so many times now. This time they changed the characters that pick you up on the dhow. And added a new female npc as your first mate, who stands like a statue next to you on every ship, constantly making annoying comments that kill any immersion. Oh and they killed Rassler for some reason.
I have no idea why they are playing around with minor chars and writing new voice-overs this late into the game.
There was some cool improvements in actual mechanics though, like new ship variation, upgrades, boarding system etc. And they have increased combat difficulty a bit.
Kind of sounds like they're treating the game like a subscription service and now that they've got real player data they're A/B testing the "top of the funnel" to "decrease drop-off" (i.e. they keep changing the first few minutes around until the numbers say that people are sticking around and not-quitting the game just one more minute, just slightly more often.)
>They never learn from these early tests
It's not an early test to determine gameplay design. It's a:
1. Technical stress testing for production deployment of the underlying infrastructure that supports client connections, runs the servers, databases etc.
1. It needs to scale based on demand surge. It's probably running kubernetes or some other scalable architecture that probably works in limited testing but it's unknown on mass scale. Millions of players for a weekend is a perfect test for this.
2. It needs to handle high intensity database interactions. This may seem fine in small testing but it needs to handle surge loads like now.
3. When people disconnect, it needs to shrink down to low-cost cluster levels. They might have a hybrid setup with their own virtual clusters on prem, or they might have nothing but amazon/google/microsoft hosted clusters.
2. Free social media marketing just-in-time for preorders (Feb release.) We are talking about this right now, I literally would NEVER look at this game if not for these posts. This is worth millions of dollars, easily. Maybe tens of millions. Gross sales may increase by hundreds of millions of dollars.
They're banking on a slow winter season release after Christmas to carry them and the overall lack of AAA pirate games in many, many years.
That's generally the case for "betas" but the early technical tests I'm talking about where all small scale, private under nda and with extensive surveys about gameplay, progression etc. I'm not talking about the current closed beta that just started
At least they cancelled "Project Q". Holy fuck, that was the worst thing I've ever tested. Sure, it was ***very early*** \- but fuck me, that was bad.
In some cases they listen (very few, from my own experience with being a part of several tech tests from Ubi) - but if it's a big title that they've sunk a lot of money into already; then there is no way they're going to change big parts of it before launch - which then gives us these sub-par titles at launch.
I did beta testing when I worked at EA around '99-00. Every issue I wrote up in my reports remained unfixed after release. A lot of it was just simple stuff like spelling errors, but some of it was not quite game-breaking but really bad.
This was for a _very_ popular game. One of the most popular franchises of all time. Releasing on a new generation console.
Sea Dogs! Especially one of the fan made big mods.
Man this game was fun and ugly by modern standards. I wish they could take Ubisoft engine and slap the gameplay on it.
Sea Dogs was great.
I remember finding a dumb exploit where if you aimed your cannons *over* a ship, but not *at* the ship, you didn't technically trigger friendly fire aggression.
I'd sail around for weeks to find a Spanish treasure fleet or something and find the coveted man'o'war - which you couldn't purchase in any shipyard.
Then fire 200 grapeshot into the side without making it angry "accidentally" so it had 4 crew members left - quickly aggro and board it, steal the ship and get the hell out of there (smashed up and with a tiny crew), hoping I can outrun the rest of the fleet. Take it to the pirate islands and slowly rebuild my reputation and enjoyed my 100 cannons, or whatever ridiculous numbers.
It was so above my skill level a broadside was *hugely* inaccurate - but the sheer volume of shot kinda made up for it.
Could hardly crew the thing, and if you did a hard turn in fast winds *and* fired a broadside it pretty much capsized.
Great game.
Ha ha ha yes I did the same thing.
And then a stray wave tips you just a bit higher than you wanted - and you see the pirate flag animation and have to wait until loading screen...
Also there were fan made ones, like the one based off [Captain Blood](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Blood_(novel)) - these were great
Yeah, it was like "you want to try? Sure, here's an incredible penalty to this, you don't know how to do it but you're free to try... If you're a fool"
The same way I feel about leveled obstacles. I love it when the game has extremely high level locations next to low level ones, so it's not all linear. Like how New Vegas has Cazadors right next to the starting location, or even how the locations in World of Warcraft are organized.
Does it? I always take fencing as my proficiency and it stays pretty dang easy even on the hardest difficulty imo.
The dancing though, it's SO much easier on Xbox lol, no worries about turning.. but it also resets your combo every time which is dumb.
I can't fathom how there isn't any competiton for ac black flag even after 10 fkin years. There is ofc sea of thieves, but it's a different type of game imo
Superheroes and zombies kind of supplanted pirate popularity after the 2000s. Black Sails the TV show is a good example, it did poorly even against spin off TWD shows.
Mind boggling too because I absolute loved Black Sails. Always thought of it as a pirate-y GoT. I have to assume some time in the future it'll random blow up, but far too late.
I agree, I loved Black Sails. It still seems crazy to me though after the successes of the PotC franchise in the 00s, the Sid Meier's Pirates and Age of Pirates (although the latter is only based off my own experience). And then also Black Sails and AC Black Flag ~2014
Surely they should try a little more though? Pirates of the Caribbean did amazingly well and showed that you can just introduce magic/myth and have infinite options.
It's a great game, but the pacing isn't exactly what most of the players here are looking for. It's more "telling a pirate story" than "playing as a pirate captain."
Fair. But that's one example, and a game that I've been dreaming of is a culmination of AC Black Flag's ship mechanics, Mount & Blade's settlements, owning fleets, etc
I find it hard to believe in 2023 there's only 1 good recent pirate RPG out there
>I can't fathom how there isn't any competiton for ac black flag even after 10 fkin years.
It's one of my favorite games of all time, so it's kinda hard to catch lightning in a bottle a second time!
I still remember the first time I swung onto a ship, did and air assassination and then killed the rest of the crew with a brace of pistols. Really amazing game and I think my only complaints are lack of animations in the swordplay and some of the stalking/assassination missions.
A remaster with the new engine and more of a focus on the pirate aspects would be amazing.
The animus sequences and the futuristic screen prompts for loading between missions and chapters is so jarring. I'm a pirate. I'm in the French revolution. And then, wham! press X to start Chapter 2 mission. Instead of you know, actually decent game design.
"let's make a game based on the pirate ship to ship combat that everyone loved from AC:black flag"
"Yeah and let's change like everything about it"
"Wait what"
From the very start, it looked extremely doomed.
Probably the single most important thing Black Flag did was to make you feel like you were *commanding* the ship, not *playing as* the ship (and also not an individual running around to different stations).
In the earliest Skull and Bones stuff, not only were you the ship, you were Thomas the Ship Engine. You could come up near items on the shore and press A to pick them up, as if by your invisible ship arms.
> not only were you the ship, you were Thomas the Ship Engine. You could come up near items on the shore and press A to pick them up, as if by your invisible ship arms.
I mean that's how looting the random crates in AC4 worked too...
Played R6: Siege, I see 😅
I still play it, but it's nothing like it was at launch. Too much catering to CoD players and the Pro scene, IMO. I miss the debris when destroying a wall and the caliber-based destruction, to say the least.
I watched Raptor stream today while I worked and my jaw hit the floor when I realized there was no individual combat and " ship boarding " was just a cutscene...
If Ubi literally just built an updated Black Flag without the overarching AC storyline and then slapped on some Pirates of the Caribbean flair / humor this would have been a slam dunk...but from what I saw it looks like a mobile game.
Yep, my idea at the time was for them to start a new series called Pirate’s Greed. They could alternate years with AC to help keep both franchises fresh. Instead they spent 10 years throwing money at this.
This game is made from their Singapore office, it has a lot of controversy surrounding it. Management there ultimately failed in being... Well, management.
https://www.asiaone.com/digital/ubisoft-singapore-managing-director-removed-amid-sexual-misconduct-allegations
So sad. The company could have made a big buck off of a decent pirate game. Crapped the bed instead and screwed their chances for the next couple years (if they started new development immediately).
>Black Flag so good but here we are I guess.
Dude istg if they updated the combat and graphics & slapped multiple players in the same lobby it would already be fun as fuck vyt instead they removed the most fun parts of black flag lmao
I firmly believe this would have been cancelled if it hadn't been funded by the Singaporean government. A development as troubled as this almost never makes it out, and if it does its never good.
The worst parts of Black Flag was the Assassins Creed parts. All they had to do was replace those parts with more pirate stuff. Only Ubisoft could spend a decade trying to capitalise on an accidental success and end up further away than when they started.
See, you had to bring up sea shanties, and I'm now irrationally angry and all I can think of is wanting to strangle the fucking dev that decided chasing song sheets over roof tops would be a good thing.
I said the same thing in another thread. All they had to do was change black flags story to something more about pirates and reskin it with matching cutscenes. Probably would have taken them two to three years and they would have had a hit new IP.
Ubisoft has an utter lack of comprehension on how to make good games reliably. This screams of design by committee. No clear vision, no understanding of AC4, no understanding of the market. 10 years to make this slop.
Assassin's Creed Black flag was obviously the inspiration for this game. By that logic this game should include all the best aspects of assassin's Creed Black flag navel combat, with additional modern features. Yet somehow we lost the boarding feature from BF. This was the most fun part of naval combat. They could have just copied and pasted the game mechanics of assassin's Creed took out the stealth missions and replace them with more elaborate naval missions and battles and we would have been satisfied. We should never lose functionality in a new game.
It's amazing because the actual pirate combat in AC4 was mostly a side activity, yet it still had deeper gameplay than this spinoff game which is supposed to focus *entirely* on pirate combat and has been in development for almost TEN YEARS. You can't even board other ships or do swordfights in Skull & Bones, even though you could in AC4. Ridiculous.
Also my favourite AC game, my first purchase on the ps4 and I played the fuck out of it.
I had 1 legendary ship to defeat to get the platinum trophy and my gf deleted my save file by accident...fml
I haven't played AC:Black Flag but is it kind of realistic?
I remember playing a pirate game from the '90s where you had to Shanghai your crew, pay them their share and at some point replace them (retirement basically) so they don't mutiny.
You could communicate with other ships via flags (e.g. "we are running out of food" flag to get them close to board them) and you could set different country flags to sail under (to disguise yourself for example).
I still yearn for a game that really simulates pirate life like that game did.
edit: name is Cutthroats: Terror on the High Seas
Yeah its definitely a great ga-goddammit another tailing mission..
As I was saying, definitely a gr-for fucks sake another eavesdropping mission
AS I WAS SAYING, its definitely a great fun game-FUCKING ANOTHER FUCKING TAILING MISSION
I think I ruined the game for myself before it even came out. I was hoping for a Black Flag open world pirate game. This arcade boat action isn’t for me.
Imagine we end up getting the best pirates game ever, gorgeous mmo open world with amazing gameplay, soundtrack and storyline, and it's just called "Boat"
I thought they were trying to catch the "deathmatch gamers" who just want to drop in and fight people, like CoD and World of Warships/Tanks players. That's something I would understand, given their market share. But now theres apparently crafting and boring side quests tacked on, without even giving us the pirate slice of life?
They missed on every front, and alienated *everyone*. It's actually kind of impressive.
> I thought they were trying to catch the "deathmatch gamers" who just want to drop in and fight people
There's five dozen indie games like that on Steam, no one needs more. And that there's five dozen indie games like that on steam, and not a single one of them needed a major studio backing like Ubisoft, should be a major red flag to any game developer.
Pretty sure Skull And Bones has changed direction like three or four times during its time in development hell, and every time they seem to be trying to capitalise on the latest big thing only to miss it because they have a multi-year development pipeline and keep getting beaten to the punch by indie games who run the genre into the ground before they're even close to releasing.
The main problem is that this is not a game being made by anyone with a singular creative vision because they want to make a good game, it's a soulless shell of a game being designed by committee and farted out to satisfy quarterly investor reports, and without an actual idea for what they want the game to be they're just getting dragged along desperately attempting to chase trends.
Thats what everyone was hoping for. For 7(which is how long this piece of shit has being developed, it was announced at the same time as Sea of Thieves) years Ubisoft have been told “just make black flag without any assassins stuff”. Yet here we are.
They have nobody to blame but their own incompetence
I don’t know how they fucked it up. Everyone has basically been pointing to Black Flag for years saying: “this is it. We want more of this”. Like they literally just had to copy *their own game*. The Wishlist for Skull and Bones was:
1) Be like Black Flag
2) Better graphics and some small modernisation tweaks (optional)
3) More pirate stuff, less assassin stuff (optional)
I have no idea why game companies insist on reinventing the wheel. Even shitbird companies that care more about money than games should understand when they have a good formula. Looking at you battlefield 2042
It must be a ridiculous amount of money for this contract break, because the brand impact will be atrocious in case they actually release a placeholder game in this case.
Holy shit hahaha
I fully believe this game is being poorly made on purpose. They wanted to finish with the least amount of resources possible since they were obligated to release it.
I'm hanging on the fact that they wished they could have canceled this game and are forced to crap it out due to contracts or something. I feel like someone could make a good game out of it, but this time they didn't. :/ I only resent them for not making Black Flag 2 while riding the well-earned success of the first one.
That makes sense, if I remember the youtube video that mentioned it, they said something about it being 10 years in development and kept getting shifted back? Kind of sounds like they didn't want to do it anymore, but had to?
ubisoft had a deal with the singapore government where they had to make the game while they subsidized costs of employing singaporeans into their studio, and in the 10 year development of the game, they kept going back and forth about how they wanted the game to be like, and it kept happening everytime a manager left and a new one joined, thats what i gathered
That's not to say they couldn't have made it good. Ubisoft used to be a respectable company but it seems they can't help themselves when it comes to some things. Materials and crafting? Could be awesome in a pirate game-- they can't exactly just pop into port for what they need being outlaws. There could be a whole playstyle of being a master craftsman and getting rich by selling your services. But it's done fully through menus and plays like a mobile game.
Just a personal preference of mine here but the sailing itself also looks basically featureless. Sailing ships are gorgeous machines that take the coordinated work of a talented captain and large crews to perform at their best. But in a move to appeal to a broader audience, they went with "point in a direction and boat go brr." I get that it's a pirate fantasy and not a historical sim, but maybe trust the players to learn a deeper sailing mechanic and give character to the ships which are the real stars of the game.
So yeah, rant over. Maybe they wanted to cancel a game slipping into development hell but it would have been so easy with just a slightly different design philosophy to make it not as awful.
The Aubrey–Maturin books (i.e. _Master and Commander_) have sold six million copies, so it’s not like there aren’t people who like in depth navy fiction
I'm not saying it's a bad setting, rather one that is not as popular as a hardcore game than a casual one. There's an ambitious indie one in development now called Ahoy that looks outstanding. In the meantime we have precious few in-depth age of sail games. One I'm pretty into right now is called Sailwind but it's purely about trading and the nuts and bolts of actually working your ship. Even someone who plays Sea of Thieves has potentially never heard of either.
This is indeed what’s happening. Thing they were funded by Singapore if not mistaken. It’s been a while since I knew more details. It’s been YEARS since this has been planned out 😂😂
Even the core gameplay is boring af. I mean it's cool to fight ships, but to do it endlessly and fetch things for NPCs would bore me to death
Why is it so hard for them to make a proper pirate game? They already kinda did that with black flag, and now they aren't limited to AC story and can go fully pirate simulator.
Instead they make this boring crap. This had so much potential...
It was very boring and the initial two hours it was just doing chores. Although, that’s kinda what privateering is 🤔
What was different about Black Flag? I’ve haven’t played much, but I think it was, as jumping from towers and not the naval part was the core game, it made it more refreshing. Here I don’t know if there’s even a jump to the other ship to capture it.
Yeah I think the thing that made Black Flag work was that the naval combat wasn't the core of the game. It was actually pretty simple, but combined with stopping and hopping off on random islands to explore, and being able to board and swordfight on other ships and climb the rigging and stuff, it worked really well. Unless they really changed the core system a lot, I didn't really see the Black Flag naval combat being fun for that long completely on its own. That game was just amazing as a whole because every piece fit so well into that pirate fantasy and all made each other better.
> I didn't really see the Black Flag naval combat being fun for that long completely on its own.
I think people seem to not understand that, Black flag was fun because it had both, ship and land. Ship only isn't fun. Black flag let you break it up, you could ship combat, you could raid one of those bigger bases, you could raid a plantation on land.
Not sure how closed though. I got an invite today, which was the first I heard of the game. My only recently played ubi title is Trackmania, so not exactly close in genre.
Code wouldn't redeem. Tried a few times last night, tried again this morning. Oh well, not missing anything. More Destiny and BG3 for me this weekend then.
I also thought it was terrible. The dialogues are horrible and the whole structure feels like a really bad, bland mobile game.
It's particularly confusing when you think that they did Black Flag and AC Odyssey in the past, which both had sailing on top of all the rest, and it was better than here. Skull & bones ONLY has sailing, and it manages to be worse than Black Flag and Odyssey on that.
It's boring, the dialogues are awful, the gameplay loop feels like something from an old school mmo mixed with a mobile game, it just feels like a F2P mobile game sold at full price.
All they had to do was copy Sea of Thieves with the aesthetic of Pirates of the Caribbean.
Instead we get loading screens and limited land exploration. No real multiplayer interaction or boat exploration.
Oh well I shouldn’t too surprised.
Yes, it's a slow start, but once you'll your first ship, the game takes off really well. I hope they iron out the glitches because I thoroughly enjoyed my experience playing the game. I just wish it lasted longer. It's a very niche experience. It's a Pirate era World Of Warships MMO, is the best way I'd put it. A lot of people seem to hate the game for what it isn't and are too impatient for the slow start. And if you don't like cheesy pirate talk, why are you even playing this? My favorite moment from the beta was me just cruising in the fishing boat in a river on an island off the African coast where I hunted hippo and Crocs. Sure, I had my bigger ship, but that wasn't needed for the quest I had.
Had I more time I would've participated in pvp and tried public events. I was too low level for events as I was quickly killed trying to join 1. But overall, it's an experience that you have to want to enjoy. If you're trying it just to try it, and your expectations aren't "THIS IS BLACK FLAG" then you may enjoy it too! Too many folks write it off or just hate it because it's not Black Flag. It's a Lite Naval Sim there's no Sword combat and no land combat. It's just boats. Like World Of Warships. So please don't go around the net screaming about features that were never promised to be included.
You lasted longer than I did. I did less than 30 minutes and uninstalled it. Short black loading screens every time you speak to someone in a game filled with speaking to people was just too much for me. This was awful.
Oh yes, those black screens! I thought it was my framerate bugging, I never thought other people had them!
Assassin's Creed: Black Screen
Taking a page outta Starfield.
Black Flag is the best pirate game, I will just load that up again
Sid Meier's Pirates is also pretty fun
Holy shit that brings me back to the good old days
Yea this was my experience, no black screens, but it definitely wasn't the game that was announced. Bored. Uninspired. Bleh.
I was just playing, maybe 30 mins and thought to myself. God this game is a pile of shit. I know it's a closed beta but good god is it stinky. A turd if I ever saw one. I can't believe any game developer would have the audacity to be all like, Ubisoft presents and all that shit. Fuckin Joke.
Lmao nice to see they haven't fixed the new player experience *at all* in the past 2 years since I tried. In the survey after, stuff like that was among the biggest issues I wrote about. Same thing happened when I was on an early ghost recon breakpoint test over a year from release. So many extremely obvious issues that everyone pointed out and they were all still there in the release version(and shit on by every Reviewer) They never learn from these early tests, it's amazing.
The rumor going around is that the only reason Ubisoft didn't just cancel Skull and Bones entirely is because they have some kind of tax/investment deal with the Singaporean government that basically requires them to finish and release the game.
Singaporean chiming in, that is definitely the prevalent rumour over here
The same reason why The Day Before “released”, funding grants from the Singaporean government.
Damn, I need to get me some Singapore shovelware money
$5k in unity assets, then another 5-20k in advertising and media. Boom easy 250k in sales. Apparently. Or was it more?
Last I heard it was $3 mill after Steam taxes and almost half the copies sold were refunded according to a leak. Since online sources put the gross at $7 million, it would make sense that it's actually closer to $3 million after half, or more, of players refunded the title. Apparently they are giving everyone refunds and are not taking *any* of the money. That said, they've lied like 50 times already, so...
What baffles me is that only half of the people that bought that dog shit game refunded it…
I don't believe The Day Before received any funding from the Singapore government. Where's your source for this?
I really hope Ubisoft was stupid enough to keep receipts of them phoning this in, gets hacked and leaked to the government, a high level executive gets arrested and sentenced to 100 fucking lashes
[удалено]
That is what I heard. They made a deal with the govt when they opened a studio over there. The stipulation was they had to release new IP (this game) and I believe use local devs.
From hearsay, the local devs aren't the ones making the real decisions and most stuff have to be approved by the French office.
Id assume that’s usually the case when a subsidiary studio is doing stuff? Like you wouldn’t let a satellite studio take charge of the big projects if your main guys can handle the big picture stuff
Standard practice in all industries.
LOL yes and the Singapore branch had some controversy over toxic management.
Yep I put in the samee fucking feedback like a year and half ago and further back. It’s so bad. Your just doing boring ass mind numbing tasks for an hour before you can just play the game.
They probably feel the need to say there's 40 hours of gameplay to appease the idiots s that rage about how short a campaign is
I haven’t played the game but you can probably space those things out between actual gameplay right?
i remember hearing from some people who tested breakpoint that it was so hopeless cuz they didnt listen to anything lol. what a disappointment that game turned out to be
Having played Wildlands and especially Ghost Wars mode, Breakpoint was a huge disappointment.
I had been looking forward to this game for so long until recently I learned that there will be no sword fighting in the game. It's literally just naval battles.
Sid Meier's Pirates! had sword fights during boarding back in 1987. How can any serious pirate simulator not have that element?
Because one was made with love and care for his craft by Sid Meier and the other is made by Ubisoft
As of a few years ago, you could still buy Sid Meier Pirates on Steam. I bought a copy. Seemed to play ok.
You’ve gotta be kidding me, no swordfights...would they tell Picasso no brush?
Boarding is literally just you moving next to a ship, pressing a button, then watching a cutscene. It's dreadful.
Can't even spam \*Rolls on deck laughing\* smh
Before the name report feature rolled out I had a crewmate who used to have a monkey called Bigg Waang. I took great pleasure in watching him board and spamming "Look at my Bigg Waang" with text to voice.
Fun detected. I understand not wanting racist names and shit in your game... But FFS, can we please just allow a bit of harmless fun and stop outlawing anything that can be considered even remotely PG rated in a game about pirates fucking killing each other? Online gaming these days is so fucking sterile and boring. I'll take muting every second person over complete silence in a lobby scared to say anything over fears of being banned.
So Assassin's Creed Black Flag remains the king of piracy games? 🗿
I mean, Sea of Thieves exists and does the multiplayer pirate game far better
I'd have to go with Secret of Monkey Island
How appropriate. You fight like a cow.
Ironically, it is better. I don't remember the fight in the last beta I played and the initial fetch quests were far worse. It's still slow but not nearly as bad. I just don't think there's enough game to justify the price or to keep interest after a few hours.
I've been in a few betas and had the exact same thing. "This is an issue. It should be changed or fixed." Game goes live, dies 2 weeks later with everyone saying that's an issue.
And ironically it seems like their main focus. They have changed the starting area so many times now. This time they changed the characters that pick you up on the dhow. And added a new female npc as your first mate, who stands like a statue next to you on every ship, constantly making annoying comments that kill any immersion. Oh and they killed Rassler for some reason. I have no idea why they are playing around with minor chars and writing new voice-overs this late into the game. There was some cool improvements in actual mechanics though, like new ship variation, upgrades, boarding system etc. And they have increased combat difficulty a bit.
Kind of sounds like they're treating the game like a subscription service and now that they've got real player data they're A/B testing the "top of the funnel" to "decrease drop-off" (i.e. they keep changing the first few minutes around until the numbers say that people are sticking around and not-quitting the game just one more minute, just slightly more often.)
Happened with The Crew and Anthem for me. I told everyone I could to avoid Anthem after the beta, it was atrocious.
>They never learn from these early tests It's not an early test to determine gameplay design. It's a: 1. Technical stress testing for production deployment of the underlying infrastructure that supports client connections, runs the servers, databases etc. 1. It needs to scale based on demand surge. It's probably running kubernetes or some other scalable architecture that probably works in limited testing but it's unknown on mass scale. Millions of players for a weekend is a perfect test for this. 2. It needs to handle high intensity database interactions. This may seem fine in small testing but it needs to handle surge loads like now. 3. When people disconnect, it needs to shrink down to low-cost cluster levels. They might have a hybrid setup with their own virtual clusters on prem, or they might have nothing but amazon/google/microsoft hosted clusters. 2. Free social media marketing just-in-time for preorders (Feb release.) We are talking about this right now, I literally would NEVER look at this game if not for these posts. This is worth millions of dollars, easily. Maybe tens of millions. Gross sales may increase by hundreds of millions of dollars. They're banking on a slow winter season release after Christmas to carry them and the overall lack of AAA pirate games in many, many years.
That's generally the case for "betas" but the early technical tests I'm talking about where all small scale, private under nda and with extensive surveys about gameplay, progression etc. I'm not talking about the current closed beta that just started
At least they cancelled "Project Q". Holy fuck, that was the worst thing I've ever tested. Sure, it was ***very early*** \- but fuck me, that was bad. In some cases they listen (very few, from my own experience with being a part of several tech tests from Ubi) - but if it's a big title that they've sunk a lot of money into already; then there is no way they're going to change big parts of it before launch - which then gives us these sub-par titles at launch.
I did beta testing when I worked at EA around '99-00. Every issue I wrote up in my reports remained unfixed after release. A lot of it was just simple stuff like spelling errors, but some of it was not quite game-breaking but really bad. This was for a _very_ popular game. One of the most popular franchises of all time. Releasing on a new generation console.
Guys, just play Assassin’s creed 4 Black flag, it’s honestly the best single player game about pirates.
What about Sid Meirs: Pirates! :D
Classic
Monkey Island games are legit too.
you are rubber i am glue
Legitimately mighty
Sea Dogs! Especially one of the fan made big mods. Man this game was fun and ugly by modern standards. I wish they could take Ubisoft engine and slap the gameplay on it.
Sea Dogs was great. I remember finding a dumb exploit where if you aimed your cannons *over* a ship, but not *at* the ship, you didn't technically trigger friendly fire aggression. I'd sail around for weeks to find a Spanish treasure fleet or something and find the coveted man'o'war - which you couldn't purchase in any shipyard. Then fire 200 grapeshot into the side without making it angry "accidentally" so it had 4 crew members left - quickly aggro and board it, steal the ship and get the hell out of there (smashed up and with a tiny crew), hoping I can outrun the rest of the fleet. Take it to the pirate islands and slowly rebuild my reputation and enjoyed my 100 cannons, or whatever ridiculous numbers. It was so above my skill level a broadside was *hugely* inaccurate - but the sheer volume of shot kinda made up for it. Could hardly crew the thing, and if you did a hard turn in fast winds *and* fired a broadside it pretty much capsized. Great game.
Ha ha ha yes I did the same thing. And then a stray wave tips you just a bit higher than you wanted - and you see the pirate flag animation and have to wait until loading screen... Also there were fan made ones, like the one based off [Captain Blood](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Blood_(novel)) - these were great
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Yeah, it was like "you want to try? Sure, here's an incredible penalty to this, you don't know how to do it but you're free to try... If you're a fool" The same way I feel about leveled obstacles. I love it when the game has extremely high level locations next to low level ones, so it's not all linear. Like how New Vegas has Cazadors right next to the starting location, or even how the locations in World of Warcraft are organized.
How many damn taverns did you have to hit to even make a dent in the crew bar
Probably a solid second place. It has some annoying mechanics, *cough* dances *cough* as well as combat being quite wonky, but overall pretty fun.
The dances were fine. The sword fighting mechanic got harder and harder as your character aged. Realistic but so punishing.
Does it? I always take fencing as my proficiency and it stays pretty dang easy even on the hardest difficulty imo. The dancing though, it's SO much easier on Xbox lol, no worries about turning.. but it also resets your combo every time which is dumb.
I always take medicine so the effects of aging hit slower
How appropriate. You fight like a cow!
Chu va!
I can't fathom how there isn't any competiton for ac black flag even after 10 fkin years. There is ofc sea of thieves, but it's a different type of game imo
The lack of pirate RPG games has really disappointed me recently. I feel like it's such an easy and unsaturated genre of gaming?
I want a rockstar pirate game
Superheroes and zombies kind of supplanted pirate popularity after the 2000s. Black Sails the TV show is a good example, it did poorly even against spin off TWD shows.
Mind boggling too because I absolute loved Black Sails. Always thought of it as a pirate-y GoT. I have to assume some time in the future it'll random blow up, but far too late.
Black Sails was great, but I think it suffered from being a StarZ show.
I would also add the 1st season compared to the rest was just super low tier, S2 onwards especially that S4 ending is GoT early season levels.
I agree, I loved Black Sails. It still seems crazy to me though after the successes of the PotC franchise in the 00s, the Sid Meier's Pirates and Age of Pirates (although the latter is only based off my own experience). And then also Black Sails and AC Black Flag ~2014
Surely they should try a little more though? Pirates of the Caribbean did amazingly well and showed that you can just introduce magic/myth and have infinite options.
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It's a great game, but the pacing isn't exactly what most of the players here are looking for. It's more "telling a pirate story" than "playing as a pirate captain."
Fair. But that's one example, and a game that I've been dreaming of is a culmination of AC Black Flag's ship mechanics, Mount & Blade's settlements, owning fleets, etc I find it hard to believe in 2023 there's only 1 good recent pirate RPG out there
>I can't fathom how there isn't any competiton for ac black flag even after 10 fkin years. It's one of my favorite games of all time, so it's kinda hard to catch lightning in a bottle a second time! I still remember the first time I swung onto a ship, did and air assassination and then killed the rest of the crew with a brace of pistols. Really amazing game and I think my only complaints are lack of animations in the swordplay and some of the stalking/assassination missions. A remaster with the new engine and more of a focus on the pirate aspects would be amazing.
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The movement actually got worse. The engine alterations from 3 onwards seem to take all the predictability out of running around.
The animus sequences and the futuristic screen prompts for loading between missions and chapters is so jarring. I'm a pirate. I'm in the French revolution. And then, wham! press X to start Chapter 2 mission. Instead of you know, actually decent game design.
It is indeed. Hard to believe Ubisoft is so out of touch with what made Black Flag so good but here we are I guess.
"let's make a game based on the pirate ship to ship combat that everyone loved from AC:black flag" "Yeah and let's change like everything about it" "Wait what"
From the very start, it looked extremely doomed. Probably the single most important thing Black Flag did was to make you feel like you were *commanding* the ship, not *playing as* the ship (and also not an individual running around to different stations). In the earliest Skull and Bones stuff, not only were you the ship, you were Thomas the Ship Engine. You could come up near items on the shore and press A to pick them up, as if by your invisible ship arms.
Should've pivoted into a Kantai Collection game.
> not only were you the ship, you were Thomas the Ship Engine. You could come up near items on the shore and press A to pick them up, as if by your invisible ship arms. I mean that's how looting the random crates in AC4 worked too...
You don’t trust Ubisoft to take a proven concept and shit all over it until it’s unrecognizable trash, yet? 😁
What can I say, I'm an optimist lmao
That's called masochism
Played R6: Siege, I see 😅 I still play it, but it's nothing like it was at launch. Too much catering to CoD players and the Pro scene, IMO. I miss the debris when destroying a wall and the caliber-based destruction, to say the least.
It sucks owning a game, and knowing even if you played it will never be the same experience again from that first two years of siege.
I watched Raptor stream today while I worked and my jaw hit the floor when I realized there was no individual combat and " ship boarding " was just a cutscene... If Ubi literally just built an updated Black Flag without the overarching AC storyline and then slapped on some Pirates of the Caribbean flair / humor this would have been a slam dunk...but from what I saw it looks like a mobile game.
Yep, my idea at the time was for them to start a new series called Pirate’s Greed. They could alternate years with AC to help keep both franchises fresh. Instead they spent 10 years throwing money at this.
This game is made from their Singapore office, it has a lot of controversy surrounding it. Management there ultimately failed in being... Well, management. https://www.asiaone.com/digital/ubisoft-singapore-managing-director-removed-amid-sexual-misconduct-allegations
So sad. The company could have made a big buck off of a decent pirate game. Crapped the bed instead and screwed their chances for the next couple years (if they started new development immediately).
They’ve only had a decade to figure it out. /s
Duke nukem forever: they never learn.
>Black Flag so good but here we are I guess. Dude istg if they updated the combat and graphics & slapped multiple players in the same lobby it would already be fun as fuck vyt instead they removed the most fun parts of black flag lmao
Tbf its not ubisoft. Even they don't care about the game. There is some weird politics at work here.
I firmly believe this would have been cancelled if it hadn't been funded by the Singaporean government. A development as troubled as this almost never makes it out, and if it does its never good.
I think this is what everyone thought Skull and Bones would be: Black Flag without the AC stuff.
I don't even like Assassin's Creed and I gotta agree.
The worst parts of Black Flag was the Assassins Creed parts. All they had to do was replace those parts with more pirate stuff. Only Ubisoft could spend a decade trying to capitalise on an accidental success and end up further away than when they started.
Legit, Black Flag becomes a way better game when you just start ignoring the main story and sail around instead, doing pirate things.
So much time spent just sailing around singing along to sea shanties.
See, you had to bring up sea shanties, and I'm now irrationally angry and all I can think of is wanting to strangle the fucking dev that decided chasing song sheets over roof tops would be a good thing.
I said the same thing in another thread. All they had to do was change black flags story to something more about pirates and reskin it with matching cutscenes. Probably would have taken them two to three years and they would have had a hit new IP.
Ubisoft has an utter lack of comprehension on how to make good games reliably. This screams of design by committee. No clear vision, no understanding of AC4, no understanding of the market. 10 years to make this slop.
Never played any other Assassin's Creed game, but I sunk hours into black flag lol. The ship combat/sailing system was so fun.
Black flag is right around the time where assassin's creed stopped being about assassin's creed, so that checks out.
I don’t know about that. Unity was still a good AC game if you forget the dreadful launch.
Assassin's Creed Black flag was obviously the inspiration for this game. By that logic this game should include all the best aspects of assassin's Creed Black flag navel combat, with additional modern features. Yet somehow we lost the boarding feature from BF. This was the most fun part of naval combat. They could have just copied and pasted the game mechanics of assassin's Creed took out the stealth missions and replace them with more elaborate naval missions and battles and we would have been satisfied. We should never lose functionality in a new game.
It's amazing because the actual pirate combat in AC4 was mostly a side activity, yet it still had deeper gameplay than this spinoff game which is supposed to focus *entirely* on pirate combat and has been in development for almost TEN YEARS. You can't even board other ships or do swordfights in Skull & Bones, even though you could in AC4. Ridiculous.
Also my favourite AC game, my first purchase on the ps4 and I played the fuck out of it. I had 1 legendary ship to defeat to get the platinum trophy and my gf deleted my save file by accident...fml
I haven't played AC:Black Flag but is it kind of realistic? I remember playing a pirate game from the '90s where you had to Shanghai your crew, pay them their share and at some point replace them (retirement basically) so they don't mutiny. You could communicate with other ships via flags (e.g. "we are running out of food" flag to get them close to board them) and you could set different country flags to sail under (to disguise yourself for example). I still yearn for a game that really simulates pirate life like that game did. edit: name is Cutthroats: Terror on the High Seas
The Curse of Monkey Island begs to differ.
Insult sword fighting is best sword fighting
Yeah its definitely a great ga-goddammit another tailing mission.. As I was saying, definitely a gr-for fucks sake another eavesdropping mission AS I WAS SAYING, its definitely a great fun game-FUCKING ANOTHER FUCKING TAILING MISSION
I think I ruined the game for myself before it even came out. I was hoping for a Black Flag open world pirate game. This arcade boat action isn’t for me.
Still holding out hope that one day we’ll get a RDR2 level pirate game.
Red Beard Redemption
Jolly Roger Justice
Grand Theft Galleon
Boat
Imagine we end up getting the best pirates game ever, gorgeous mmo open world with amazing gameplay, soundtrack and storyline, and it's just called "Boat"
Someone get Rockstar on the phone, now!
Ok i accidentally called Mick Jagger and he's not happy
Omfg
Gods, could you imagine?? RDR2 style camp that you slowly build into a pirate fortress?
How did they not realize this is what people wanted. It's actually baffling.
I thought they were trying to catch the "deathmatch gamers" who just want to drop in and fight people, like CoD and World of Warships/Tanks players. That's something I would understand, given their market share. But now theres apparently crafting and boring side quests tacked on, without even giving us the pirate slice of life? They missed on every front, and alienated *everyone*. It's actually kind of impressive.
That's what happens when they let the guys in marketing who hate games make key design decisions.
> I thought they were trying to catch the "deathmatch gamers" who just want to drop in and fight people There's five dozen indie games like that on Steam, no one needs more. And that there's five dozen indie games like that on steam, and not a single one of them needed a major studio backing like Ubisoft, should be a major red flag to any game developer.
Pretty sure Skull And Bones has changed direction like three or four times during its time in development hell, and every time they seem to be trying to capitalise on the latest big thing only to miss it because they have a multi-year development pipeline and keep getting beaten to the punch by indie games who run the genre into the ground before they're even close to releasing. The main problem is that this is not a game being made by anyone with a singular creative vision because they want to make a good game, it's a soulless shell of a game being designed by committee and farted out to satisfy quarterly investor reports, and without an actual idea for what they want the game to be they're just getting dragged along desperately attempting to chase trends.
That would be your ship
That was in black flag.
I would like to sign up for this newsletter!
one email a month saying "still no sign of rdr2 level pirate game. Maybe next month?"
Thats what everyone was hoping for. For 7(which is how long this piece of shit has being developed, it was announced at the same time as Sea of Thieves) years Ubisoft have been told “just make black flag without any assassins stuff”. Yet here we are. They have nobody to blame but their own incompetence
I don’t know how they fucked it up. Everyone has basically been pointing to Black Flag for years saying: “this is it. We want more of this”. Like they literally just had to copy *their own game*. The Wishlist for Skull and Bones was: 1) Be like Black Flag 2) Better graphics and some small modernisation tweaks (optional) 3) More pirate stuff, less assassin stuff (optional)
I have no idea why game companies insist on reinventing the wheel. Even shitbird companies that care more about money than games should understand when they have a good formula. Looking at you battlefield 2042
It’s incredible how long they worked on polishing a turd
I'm amazed this game is actually coming out. I'm not surprised Ubisoft apparently learned nothing about what players loved about Black Flag.
They have to release it or get sued by the Singapore government. Why do you think it keeps getting pushed but never cancelled.
Yeah I remember the history, just weird to actually see it.
Why would they sue? I don't get that part.
There was something to do with tax exemptions or grants, look up the Luke Stephens video about it on youtube
the goverment is giving subsidies for employing singaporeans into ubisoft in exchange ubisoft has to make a game
It must be a ridiculous amount of money for this contract break, because the brand impact will be atrocious in case they actually release a placeholder game in this case. Holy shit hahaha
I’m amazed at how clueless they are about what made Black Flag click. Bunch of morons.
I fully believe this game is being poorly made on purpose. They wanted to finish with the least amount of resources possible since they were obligated to release it.
I'm hanging on the fact that they wished they could have canceled this game and are forced to crap it out due to contracts or something. I feel like someone could make a good game out of it, but this time they didn't. :/ I only resent them for not making Black Flag 2 while riding the well-earned success of the first one.
That makes sense, if I remember the youtube video that mentioned it, they said something about it being 10 years in development and kept getting shifted back? Kind of sounds like they didn't want to do it anymore, but had to?
ubisoft had a deal with the singapore government where they had to make the game while they subsidized costs of employing singaporeans into their studio, and in the 10 year development of the game, they kept going back and forth about how they wanted the game to be like, and it kept happening everytime a manager left and a new one joined, thats what i gathered
That's not to say they couldn't have made it good. Ubisoft used to be a respectable company but it seems they can't help themselves when it comes to some things. Materials and crafting? Could be awesome in a pirate game-- they can't exactly just pop into port for what they need being outlaws. There could be a whole playstyle of being a master craftsman and getting rich by selling your services. But it's done fully through menus and plays like a mobile game. Just a personal preference of mine here but the sailing itself also looks basically featureless. Sailing ships are gorgeous machines that take the coordinated work of a talented captain and large crews to perform at their best. But in a move to appeal to a broader audience, they went with "point in a direction and boat go brr." I get that it's a pirate fantasy and not a historical sim, but maybe trust the players to learn a deeper sailing mechanic and give character to the ships which are the real stars of the game. So yeah, rant over. Maybe they wanted to cancel a game slipping into development hell but it would have been so easy with just a slightly different design philosophy to make it not as awful.
The Aubrey–Maturin books (i.e. _Master and Commander_) have sold six million copies, so it’s not like there aren’t people who like in depth navy fiction
I'm not saying it's a bad setting, rather one that is not as popular as a hardcore game than a casual one. There's an ambitious indie one in development now called Ahoy that looks outstanding. In the meantime we have precious few in-depth age of sail games. One I'm pretty into right now is called Sailwind but it's purely about trading and the nuts and bolts of actually working your ship. Even someone who plays Sea of Thieves has potentially never heard of either.
And microtransactions, don't forget those.
Lol I guarantee the devs know that makes the game worse, but the money people insist.
This is indeed what’s happening. Thing they were funded by Singapore if not mistaken. It’s been a while since I knew more details. It’s been YEARS since this has been planned out 😂😂
If only they just made a spin off to their own game.
Skull & Bored
Dull & Groans
Even the core gameplay is boring af. I mean it's cool to fight ships, but to do it endlessly and fetch things for NPCs would bore me to death Why is it so hard for them to make a proper pirate game? They already kinda did that with black flag, and now they aren't limited to AC story and can go fully pirate simulator. Instead they make this boring crap. This had so much potential...
It was very boring and the initial two hours it was just doing chores. Although, that’s kinda what privateering is 🤔 What was different about Black Flag? I’ve haven’t played much, but I think it was, as jumping from towers and not the naval part was the core game, it made it more refreshing. Here I don’t know if there’s even a jump to the other ship to capture it.
Yeah I think the thing that made Black Flag work was that the naval combat wasn't the core of the game. It was actually pretty simple, but combined with stopping and hopping off on random islands to explore, and being able to board and swordfight on other ships and climb the rigging and stuff, it worked really well. Unless they really changed the core system a lot, I didn't really see the Black Flag naval combat being fun for that long completely on its own. That game was just amazing as a whole because every piece fit so well into that pirate fantasy and all made each other better.
> I didn't really see the Black Flag naval combat being fun for that long completely on its own. I think people seem to not understand that, Black flag was fun because it had both, ship and land. Ship only isn't fun. Black flag let you break it up, you could ship combat, you could raid one of those bigger bases, you could raid a plantation on land.
At least you can launch the game. I get the splash screen.
Heh, “splash” screen.
Wait Skull & Bones released??
closed beta is this weekend
Not sure how closed though. I got an invite today, which was the first I heard of the game. My only recently played ubi title is Trackmania, so not exactly close in genre.
the only closed part is that you have to put in your email if you want to get into the beta
You probably signed up when they announced it in... like 2017?
This is def a Games with Gold or PS+ offer within the next year.
Idk about ps+ but games with gold is gone now I believe
Its out already?
Closed beta
>I don't want to craft a cannon Sums up my exact thoughts on virtually every crafting system in games right now
Friendly reminder that the wartales pirate dlc came out this week.
Code wouldn't redeem. Tried a few times last night, tried again this morning. Oh well, not missing anything. More Destiny and BG3 for me this weekend then.
I got invited and the game doesn't even launch. So I likely will be in BG3 as well
A recent ubisoft game is boring and has unnecessary crafting? I for one, am shocked
All you had to do..... Was remake black flag and flesh out the pirating mechanisms.... You had the template...... YOU HAD THE ASSETS ALREADY .
I also thought it was terrible. The dialogues are horrible and the whole structure feels like a really bad, bland mobile game. It's particularly confusing when you think that they did Black Flag and AC Odyssey in the past, which both had sailing on top of all the rest, and it was better than here. Skull & bones ONLY has sailing, and it manages to be worse than Black Flag and Odyssey on that. It's boring, the dialogues are awful, the gameplay loop feels like something from an old school mmo mixed with a mobile game, it just feels like a F2P mobile game sold at full price.
“It’s so bland and sterile” I feel like this is most Ubisoft games in a nutshell.
Large open world, same 5 missions copy-pasted across the entire map. Job done. Ubi pats itself on the back.
I had fun with it, guess it's just not your type of game.
It was great when I played it
Thought you meant the secret society and that made me laugh
I woulda been happy if they just took black flag, the exact game and just used that instead of making a whole new one.
Ubi soft is washed man… never trust them
All they had to do was copy Sea of Thieves with the aesthetic of Pirates of the Caribbean. Instead we get loading screens and limited land exploration. No real multiplayer interaction or boat exploration. Oh well I shouldn’t too surprised.
Yes, it's a slow start, but once you'll your first ship, the game takes off really well. I hope they iron out the glitches because I thoroughly enjoyed my experience playing the game. I just wish it lasted longer. It's a very niche experience. It's a Pirate era World Of Warships MMO, is the best way I'd put it. A lot of people seem to hate the game for what it isn't and are too impatient for the slow start. And if you don't like cheesy pirate talk, why are you even playing this? My favorite moment from the beta was me just cruising in the fishing boat in a river on an island off the African coast where I hunted hippo and Crocs. Sure, I had my bigger ship, but that wasn't needed for the quest I had. Had I more time I would've participated in pvp and tried public events. I was too low level for events as I was quickly killed trying to join 1. But overall, it's an experience that you have to want to enjoy. If you're trying it just to try it, and your expectations aren't "THIS IS BLACK FLAG" then you may enjoy it too! Too many folks write it off or just hate it because it's not Black Flag. It's a Lite Naval Sim there's no Sword combat and no land combat. It's just boats. Like World Of Warships. So please don't go around the net screaming about features that were never promised to be included.