The Tragedy of Skull and Bones

The disappointment lies less in the game itself and more in the industry as a whole

I've worked on Skull & Bones twice.

The first time was during my time at the Ubisoft editorial department. Then I moved on and joined another AAA production -Ghost Recon: Breakpoint- and after its release, I returned to the project, this time to lead the game design in the Paris studio co-development team. My second time on Skull & Bones ended, and I resigned from Ubisoft to join a newly founded startup. I stayed less than a year there, but that was still enough time to kickstart the pre-production of an ambitious adventure game. When I left the startup, I decided to create my own studio, worked hard to make a prototype, raised funds and hired a team to work on the full production of our first game.

And now, after all that, Skull & Bones is finally out.

Needless to say, my contribution to the project feels like an eternity ago. I've had a lot of time to think about the project, its design, and its production, and it significantly shaped me as a game designer.

Since I still need to play it, I won't discuss the game's faults in this article. Instead, I'd like to share my opinion on how it feels to work on such AAAA projects, which face increasing hostility from gamers, and why I believe Skull & Bones is much more than another: it's a symbol of a changing industry.

Why Skull And Bones is More Complex Than You Think

Since the day Skull & Bones was first announced, there has been an apparent mismatch between the players’ expectations and what the company could -or wanted to- do. By “company”, I mean everyone, from the developers to the creative leadership and the higher executives. We're not here to blame anyone in particular. These conflicting viewpoints on what the game should be continue to this day. Look at the reviews: there is no consensus. On the one hand, some people enjoy the game for what it is, and on the other hand, some people hate it for everything it's not.

The most common complaint is the comparison to Assassin's Creed: Black Flag. They say, “How come a 2024 game can achieve less than its decade-old inspiration?” And I'd answer, “It doesn't”. Skull & Bones focuses on different areas than Black Flag, which are incredibly complex to develop. The three main culprits? Online, systemic, open-ended.

First, making an online game where players can log in & out at will tends to create many unexpected problems where the usual shortcuts you'd use in a solo game are impossible to implement. For instance, here's one issue we had to solve with the Paris team: what happens if your ship gets sunk while you're on a beach? Do you lose it all and respawn far away? That would be unfair… Maybe your boat is resistant when docked then, but that introduces an exploit in PVP scenarios. If we let the other sink and loot you, we could respawn you with your inventory back, so nobody gets frustrated. Oh, but we've accidentally created a duplicate glitch exploit by doing so.

Everything is more complex online, and it doesn't get any better when the game is systemic too, as in “players have the freedom to do whatever, go wherever, unlock whatever progression”. In systemic games, even something as mundane as an NPC dialogue line to celebrate your last trip needs extensive rules & hundreds of recorded lines. You can't just comment on the heavily scripted previous story mission. If you're wondering why AAA productions need dozens of game designers, you have the beginning of an answer: to think of all the gazillion problems that may happen and prepare monstrous plans to cover all the edge cases.

To give a more concrete example, I also experienced while working on the project: making a cool chase mission. On the one hand, and I don't want to diminish Black Flag's team fantastic work, you can spawn the enemy AI ship discreetly during a cinematic, reload to a checkpoint if the player messes up and tweak the enemy speed according to the speed of the only ship available to the player. On the other hand, you can't do any of this, and other players (friendly or hostile) may also interfere in many ways with the mission. It takes a lot more time & effort to design systems that maintain the activity's fun, pacing and fairness.

And finally, the trickiest of all: you need the game to be open-ended, meaning the activities should be replayable indefinitely and in (almost) any order. Designing for variety & depth has nothing to do with finding the immediate fun for a 10-minute story mission.

The Strategic Mistake of AAAA Games

Game development isn't a contest of “who had it harder”. I'm not trying to find excuses for Skull & Bones in particular: if you give the same constraints to another studio/publisher, they may have done better; who knows?

The more important underlying question is, “Why”? Why do companies persist with AAAA-online-GaaS-live-service-behemoths that cause more harm than good? After the failures of Anthem, Marvel Avengers, Suicide Squad, Redfall and many others, why continue trying out?

The immediate answer could be “greedy publishers who want to maximize shareholder profits, “but it doesn't paint the whole picture. It's true that big companies don't just want to make games profitable but try to hit the home run with money-printing machines, which tend to be live-services games. However, the current gaming market also has an underlying truth that encourages them this way: mainstream gamers want it all (then complain about it).

Let's be honest for a minute: would people really accept a Black Flag ++ these days? In the 2020s, the quality standards required to convince players that a story-based game is worth 70$ are so much higher than they used to be in the past. Only a few studios worldwide, most of which work on Playstation exclusives, have the technical, artistic & narrative excellence to produce such games. Being open world was previously enough of an argument to counter-balance a weaker foundation (read Black Flag's reviews for a reminder of what people thought of the story, the characters, the repetitive activities, etc.)

In the current gaming market, if you want to appeal to a broad audience and justify your price tag, your best bet is to make the game online, systemic & open-ended. Don't get me wrong, that's a great thing: even if I'm more of a solo player myself, I also dreamed of playing Assassin's Creed coop with my brothers and having endless content to play. As the industry progressed and newer games achieved more, it has become harder to accept simpler experiences. Exceptions continue to exist, sure, but the norm for AAA games has changed.

And unfortunately, it dooms them.

Can The AAA Industry Change?

If you're familiar with game development (and I assume you are since you're reading a game developer newsletter), you've heard this a million times this advice: start small, don't over scope, find your audience, and expand over time. Part of the reason why live services fail is because they want to skip the “start small” part. Unfortunately, trying to build a skyscraper on shaky foundations is the recipe for a sure collapse.

Here's an interesting thought experiment: what if, instead of launching a first lackluster Assassin's Creed and then making a sequel that improves on all fronts, they delayed the first by two years to make it « perfect » from the start? I’m 99% certain the commercial performance of this super-AC1 wouldn’t have been that much higher, and certainly nowhere near the two episodes cumulated. So, this hypothetical super-game would have been considered less profitable and refrained Ubisoft from greenlighting a sequel. This is what big companies seem to have forgotten these days: the creative process isn't a linear function of time & money: no delay can replace the power of shipping a product, taking a step back and doing it again.

There are several causes for this. First, teams get exhausted and burned out working on the same product for an extended time. The more time passes, the higher the risk of turnover on release and, therefore, losing precious insights on how to improve for the sequel. Second, big budgets massively increase the financial pressure and, consequently, the odds of designing a game that appeals to everybody but pleases nobody. Third, chasing infinitely replayable systems typically forces one to spread the jam thin on the bread. Every gamer has figured by now that systems such as loot or procedural missions make games longer but not more fun.

Of course, the graal is to figure out a way to have both the quantity and the quality. Some franchises successfully evolved in that direction (such as Assassin's Creed or GTA), but it took several instalments to get there, it's impossible to go for everything right away. The team progressively learned what makes their IP the most entertaining; every opus gave them key learnings.

What's the solution, then? How can we get high-quality new AAA again? I suggest trying out building new franchises through smaller & faster projects, letting the team learn and grow until they can eventually hit the jackpot. Companies that operate like this today are the winners of tomorrow. Elden Ring would never have been a massive hit without all of From Software's previous games. The same goes for Supergiant and their game Hades (not a AAA budget, I know, but definitely AAA revenues) or Baldur's Gate 3 or Helldivers 2.

Now, it's a bold assumption to assume that AAA companies can become more flexible overnight and accept to make (slightly) unprofitable games. Hence, the solution is probably to hope for indies to scale up rather than AAA to scale down. After all, the big companies all started as what we'd consider indies nowadays.

Conclusion

So, what's the real tragedy of Skull and Bones? A subpar game isn't anything new; we have some every other week. But this one is different: it feels like the end of an era. Due to the development length and all the expectations that it should be “just” a Black Flag sequel, Skull and Bones represents all the games which will never exist because the window of opportunity has passed.

There used to be a time when games could be hits with “just” a cool fantasy, great gameplay mechanics and a nice story to follow, set within a free-roaming open world you could explore between missions. And that would arguably be perfect for our childish view of pirates’ adventures (we've seen the potential thanks to Black Flag). There used to be a handful of studios capable of delivering such experiences accross the globe, and now they have either shifted their focus or now work only on their in-house properties.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not whining about video game companies being “anti-consumer” or “misunderstanding expectations”. This is just the reality of an evolving market, player changing tastes and spending their money differently. The 2010s open-world era was always set to be replaced by something more modern, just like the 2D platformers who used to dominate the 90s eventually faded away from the mainstream market. Until, of course, indies picked the genre back up.

Hey!

Thanks for coming back (or discovering) my articles.

In recent times, I struggled to find moments to write, and had to prioritize the production of the first game of my studio. Life as an entrepreneur is more draining than as an employee, hence I preferred spending my leisure time away from the keyboard.

Why don’t I share more about my project? The reason is simple: I’ve signed with a publisher and agreed not to disclose our partnership nor any detail about the game so we have the best chance of making a great first impression when it’s announced this year!

Once the project is public, I’ll be able to share details about its design, how we work on it, what it taught me and thus write articles based on my actual experience (rather than analyzing other people’s games).

Until then, thanks for your patience, make sure to read (or re-read) past articles.

Cheers,
JB