2024-02-16 12:43:52
Published16. February 2024, 1:43 p.m.
Video game: “Skull and Bones”, piracy, yes but rather in gangs
After years of chaotic development, Ubisoft’s new franchise is finally launched, under close surveillance.
par
Jean-Charles Canet
We might as well say it straight away, our opinion is not made up on “Skull and Bones”, the pirate game imagined and designed by various Ubisoft studios. After years of complicated development, the game comes to us (officially on February 16, 2024) in the form of a solo adventure but above all with several people in cooperation (up to 3 “friends”) and, sometimes, in “player once morest” confrontation. player” (PVP).
The action takes place in the Indian Ocean. It all begins with a shipwreck, our own, in a maritime action sequence that leaves us no chance of victory. The fallen captain that we have become is rescued by the crew of a small skiff. The objective is to bring together various objects scattered in the area of the lost naval battle in order to reach Sainte-Anne, a base where pirates come together and try to prosper. This is the learning sequence of the game, where you learn to pilot a ship, collect items, fish, visit small areas on foot, and, finally, get the direction to take to reach Sainte-Claude. Anne.
Once there, on the pirate island (there is at least one other HQ much later), we obtain the privilege of meeting various characters who entrust us with some tasks and complete our first mission at sea. Once the elements required in the hold, we then obtain the right to have a pirate ship built which is no longer a shell of nuts and the right to carry out some more perilous missions. The objective is to rise in rank by increasing our level of “infamy” and becoming a legend of piracy (a “kingpin”) which opens the door to a endgame whose activities remain to be discovered.
A “service game”
“Skull and Bones” is therefore indeed a “service game” which is played on servers (20 places per server), where the boundaries between solitary or group activities are blurred, where activities over a large playing area are to be both composed of predefined tasks, but also of activities which will be introduced according to the pleasure of the cooks. The objective is to offer a living and constantly evolving world. To form a definitive opinion when the game is barely beginning its life would therefore be presumptuous.
But based on what we’re seeing at this point, we’d say the game looks…
…Very pleasing to the eye, but with rather stiff characters. The water modeling is superb, as are the ships, but the avatars seem to move with a broom in the background, not to mention the rather rudimentary facial expressions. In other words, “Skull and Bones” is beautiful, but does not have the stylistic coherence of “Sea of Thieves” (pirate game exclusive to the Xbox ecosystem).
…Rather pleasant to learn, due to gameplay that puts your foot down very well, with it being easy at the start and a gradual increase in difficulty. It is skillfully constructed and, above all, less penalizing for the player wishing to progress solo. Which is not entirely the case for “Sea of Thieves”, which quickly becomes discouraging if not practiced as a team. For Skull, we note in particular that the management of naval combat is very well designed and completely manageable whatever the circumstances.
Still secretive
…But still secretive. Still in the phase of the necessary rise in power, we still wonder if, at one point or another, we will be grabbed by a mission, a contract, an objective that is sufficiently original and which cannot be summed up in a “report such or such such material in such and such a place”, in one “don’t forget to optimize your resources in order to be able to win the fights”, also in one “don’t forget to return to the place of your last defeat to recover the cargo you lost. For now, it’s okay. But in the longer term, we just want to be surprised.
“Skull and Bones” is not the catastrophe feared by those who followed its chaotic development. The game now tries to demonstrate that it is much more than a part of “Assassin’s Creed – Black Flag” that has earned its stripes. It might especially appeal to those who like to play in a group without leaving the loners on the sidelines. To be continued.
«Skull and Bones», ed. Ubisoft, disponible sur PC Windows (via Ubisoft Connect), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series.
A game whose development has undergone six successive postponements
Although a very present figure in popular culture, the pirate has rarely been exploited in the world of video games, despite often achieving success, whether for “Sid Meier’s Pirates!”, released in 1987 and reissued in 2004, “Black Flag”, from Ubisoft’s “Assassin’s Creed” series in 2013, or even “Sea of Thieves” in 2018.
It is also the success of “Black Flag”, widely acclaimed, which will push the developer to embark on the pirate adventure, entrusting the production to its Singapore studio, which had already largely participated in it.
Despite this successful genesis, the development of the game proved anything but simple: change of captain along the way, six successive postponements, numerous changes of direction. In the end, to avoid disaster, more than ten studios in the group worked on the project.
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