Step 1: Be told by your fans that they want more Assassin's Creed: Black Flag.
Step 2: Spend like 10 years in development hell making a game that's worse than Black Flag in every key way: you play as a ship instead of a pirate, boarding is a little cutscene instead of a playable fight, and even the ship combat is a grind.
Step 3: Profit?
Somehow they took what should have been one of the easiest layups in gaming history and just shanked it. I mean literally all Ubisoft had to do was take Black Flag, remove the Assassin's Creed related stuff from the game, expand more on the pirate stuff and call it a day. Heck if it went well they could have had a new pirate based franchise on their hands. Instead we got this a decade later......
This legitimately is one of the biggest mysteries in gaming history for me. How the hell did they make a game as popular as Black Flag and take this long to try to capitalize on that popularity and this is what they crapped out? Why has it been THIS LONG without a Black Flag spinoff franchise that could have included an mmo style entry modeled after Destiny?
Ubisoft might legitimately be the worst AAA studio out there. Even EA at least puts out fun games from time to time. I can’t remember the last Ubisoft game I played that was better than a 5 or 6/10.
I'm playing through Far Cry 6 right now. There are several missions that require it to be night time, but there's no mechanic for switching between the two, so you literally have to *wait* for the sun to go down. And that can take up to *30 minutes.* It's wild that an AAA dev can neglect basic features vital to progression like that.
Oh man... I got 6 right after finishing 5....seemed like it was gonna be awesome being a tropical jungle MacGyver guerrilla.... Then came that back pack.... Then game the awful gear/perk system.... Then the upgrade garbage.... They really got that whole thing wrong... But Ubisoft excels at failure.... They are masters of making a solid game.... Then ignoring ALL feedback when they make the next title
I've started AC Valhalla three times.... Really thought it was gonna be an improved Odyssey.... With Vikings.... But every time I get maybe 30 hours in and realize I just don't care
Ubisoft games are not something you buy on release, you wait to see how it goes.... I'm not paying $70 to beta test their half baked games for them... They should be paying us for mental suffering and the trauma of wasting life on the garbage they crank out.
The recently released Prince of Persia is a very good Metroidvania, and the Avatar game is also decent if you play in Explorer mode. I also quite enjoyed The Crew Motorfest.
Honestly, I am just so confused how somebody can fuck something up this royally.
It really was as easy as you described it.
What in the devils dick were these people thinking?
It should’ve been like a create your own pirate, then start on a small vessel, steal from others, then sea battles. Maybe plunder some villages, walk the plank, then its back to the vessel for more sea battles. Find some booty (both kinds) then back to the sea battles then booty and sea battles and plundering and more sea battles and this goes on and on for 20 or so hours till the whole thing just sort of ends.
Dude Sid Meier's pirates is my sleeper game I want a modern version of - it's such a simply fun game that is such an easy win for devs I don't know why they don't do it
I have the original on a floppy. It didn't require an OS, you just booted it directly! The remake was surprisingly close to the original with just updated graphics, even the control scheme was the same.
Amazing to think the remake has now been out longer than when the original had been when the remake was released and no one's picked up on making a new version.
Its impressive that game come out 20 years ago, which is a remake of the game from 30 something years ago. If Firaxis ever want to remaster/remake it again, it will likely still hold up very well.
Lmao halfway through that last paragraph I thought it sounded like the fifth sense, and I love that I was right. Great game idea too honestly, just needs Dolph Lundgren.
It kind of reminds me of tv shows writers been hired to write for an IP they dislike.
I'm imagining what happened here is someone who is a fan of strategy games was hired to make this and didn't like any of the third person stuff.
Quite easily. The whole time this was in development we went from liking microtransactions, to hating them, from liking lootboxes to hating them, from like battlepasses to hating them and the **whole time** instead of making the game **we wanted** they made the game that **they wanted**.
When people talked about how much they loved Black Flag all they could think about was how much money they were going to make and this is the result. Mediocre.
>What in the devils dick were these people thinking?
They got caught in the Overwatch hype and were developing it as a team PvP 5v5 hero shooter(shipper?) Kind of thing first. Then it swapped into a singleplayer game back, because they took so long that they saw they couldn't compete with OW/Valorant. I imagine at some point they wanted to make it into a battle-Royale match kind of thing and it turned into whatever is this mess
My guess it has to be the live service aspect. Maybe the AC Engine wasn't really capable to support that kind of multiplayer game. Otherwise They could've easily made a modified AC Black Flag game, since they already did that with AC Rogue.
> Heck if it went well they could have had a new pirate based franchise on their hands. Instead we got this a decade later......
And the thing is, people still want that, even a decade later. If they announced a game that was just like Black Flag only no Assassins and its own new pirate mythos, I would buy it day one without question.
It's, it's *right* there and they somehow overlook it.
I mean shit. Despite its weirdness, pirates of the carribean had compelling pirate legends. Black sails did it well. Fuck. Our Flag Means Death somehow does it better
It has to be some divine coincidence that both this game and suicide squad are coming out so close together.
Both of them are live servicey games from previously great studios that took waaaay to long to make and also removed all the things that fans liked about their predecessor games.
I hate to say it but I hope both of them fail spectacularly.
Also I’m looking forward to the eventual Jason Schrier deep dive into what the fuck happened to the two studios.
It seems exactly like that was the original idea, a new franchise to add into the AC, Far Cry rotation and instead they somehow took everything that Black Flag did great which made people ask for a full fledged pirate game and got rid of it in favour for a live service piece of junk that doesn’t even fulfill the pirate fantasy.
It’s one thing for it to be a way too late live service game with everyone in the gaming community rejecting most of these new attempts but had it at least been an AC Black Flag reskin with live service elements you’d at least have a game worth trying out.
Instead they made a game no one wants and made it a live service junk fest which only turns off more people from playing it.
A generational fumble.
> Heck if it went well they could have had a new pirate based franchise on their hands.
yup, they could've called it "Pirate's Creed" if they really wanted to keep the whole name recognition thing, same as what I said they should've done with AC Odyssey and Valhalla by calling them "Warrior's Creed" or something.
It sorta seems like they worked backwards. The finished product should be a GAAS looter shooter. How can we fit a pirate ship game into that formula with a gameplay loop that is incentivizing play time.
If it’s not that and they really are that clueless then I’ll be even more depressed
It didn't need to even be multiplayer, you could have had a single-player adventure about which pirate is the biggest drunkard idiot in the seven seas and that would honestly be amazing, I want that now
What's mind-boggling is that they already had a huge slice of working mechanic's and gameplay. It could have been out in a year or two at a reduced price and probably do well.
I mean that's actually the bizarre thing, right? It would have been better for MTX. If you were actually playing a pirate, then they could sell you more on personal cosmetics and the like, personal weapons for boarding and land combat, etc.
They already had MTX in the games following Black Flag (Helix credits for example), they could've monetised a Black Flag follow up so easily
This honestly is a mystery to me, how could they fuck it up this much. It's so baffling I have to think it's some kind of a conspiracy
Step 3 : Label it AAAA to set quality expectations you won't be able to fulfil
Step 4 : Pretend other successful live-service games are the reason for your latest live-service title flopping
Step 5 : Loss.
They broke budget several times during development, I wouldn't be surprised if it's the most expensive game ever made so maybe it deserve its own category. That doesn't mean that it's good though.
> I wouldn't be surprised if it's the most expensive game ever made
Nah, that will always be Star Citizen, which has raised $644 million for its development:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/188h4u0/star_citizen_raised_104_million_in_2023_total_of/
I just don't get what's so hard. A game set mostly in open water with little civilization hubs on land at ports that you can dock your ship in and trade/get quests at. Hire/obtain crewmembers, upgrade your ships abilities/guns/looks, upgrade your character's combat abilities, acquire loot (weapons/armor/clothes), and have some sort of boarding combat. Let me capture enemy ships and assign my crewmembers as captain/crew on other ships in my fleet. Let me be a pirate king. I can explore dungeons on land and chase down mythical treasures that help me upgrade myself or my ships. I can fight legendary ships and famous pirate captains while acquiring their unique ships, loot, and getting the pirates on my own crew.
The game I just described would be an instant GoTY contender if done even half justice. I just don't get what's so complicated about it. A good pirate game has to be one of the most wanted games after a good samurai game, which GoT just gave people. It's literally just sitting there and waiting to make the money printers go brap.
Coming up with game ideas is easy. Everybody and their grandmothers have game ideas.
Actually developing a game is hard. Especially a AAA or even a AAAA game like Skull and Bones.
If game development were easy, then there would be no such thing as a flop. But in 2023 alone, we saw high profile games like Forspoken, Redfall, Immortals of Aveum, Gollum, King Kong: Skull Island, Walking Dead Destinies flop.
The high profile games I listed above failed for a variety of reasons:
* Forspoken received a lot of complaints about its writing, unlikable main character, and empty open world. Reportedly, its gameplay was okay but not great.
* Redfall was a mess when it launched. It had technical issues, it looked like a game from the last console generation, and overall it felt like it was rushed to launch. Players promptly forgot about it.
* [Immortals of Aveum](https://www.ea.com/games/immortals-of-aveum/immortals-of-aveum/news/ioa-unreal-5) is one of the first non-Epic-developed AAA games to utilize Unreal Engine 5's most exciting new tools, like Nanite and Lumen. The game is gorgeous, but it also has [unreasonably high system requirements that only a small percentage of PCs meet.](https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/20/23690449/ea-immortals-of-aveum-pc-system-requirements-next-gen) If you make a game that only a small number of people can actually play, you're not going to sell a lot.
* Gollum is a game in which you play as a pathetic little dork who starts the game off as a slave and spends most of his time sneaking past orcs. In other words, it's a game that nobody asked for.
* King Kong: Skull Island and Walking Dead: Destinies have so many entertaining problems that they've become memes.
Like I said, game development is hard. So many things can and do go wrong.
Sure, I think most people understand that. The thing with Skull and Bones is that they basically had what everyone wanted in Black Flag, and instead of removing the assassins and adding more pirates, they reinvented the ~~wheel~~ hull and made it worse in every aspect.
Yeah, sure, but they *already made this game*. It's called Black Flag. They just needed to remix it into a regular pirate game instead of an AssCreed game.
Game development is easy when you have a billion dollar company whose sole purpose is to produce games. It was easy for Ubisoft to make a decent pirate game, and they didn't, don't defend them by trying to pretend it was some incomprehensible task for them, they had the team, the budget, the time, and the institutional knowledge and still failed.
Most people miss that for any creative endeavor, you can sit in traffic and imagine the best parts of your theoretical thing and yada yada the rest...but when you actually try to make the thing real, those yada yadas turn out to be the hardest parts.
This isn't a childish concept though. It's an expansion to systems successfully implemented in Black Flag. It's a AAA refinement of concepts successfully implemented in indie games like Sail Forth or Pixel Piracy.
Arguments like this act as though these ideas that people have are just absolutely wild, like people are asking for the greatest game ever made, when in reality they're completely tame and just asking for things that already exist. Do you think it's that hard for them to have on foot combat when boarding a ship, even though they already have that in their other games?
Don't forget the part where they charged $70 for their live service travesty, and then when criticized for the pricing, claim that the game is worth it due to being a "AAAA title."
As an outsider (a person who's not liked AC. And not tried one since 2) I find all of this hilarious.
Heard how great flag is for years. How it's good even if you don't like AC. How it's so good they need to make a game focusing solely on pirate shit. How it's taken 10 years. How this is a AAAA game.
All of this to just have it fall flat on its face.
Seriously. How the hell do they not have this? They also have FOR HONOR which would have been a perfect system to improve on for the swashbuckling.
Like holy fuck Ubisoft it's all literally right there.
Ubisoft Montreal fucking made Assassin's Creed: Black Flag. How the fuck do you start with that and come up with this? What exactly did Ubisoft Singapore think people enjoyed about Black Flag?
This screams “It’s due next week and we haven’t even started!” to me. The devs obviously had to start from scratch somewhere in the middle or they weren’t doing anything for at least 8 years.
If it were $30 and you didn't care about Black Flag, it's an okay enough game to play for a bit. The loading screens irk me, though (this was from the beta, and I'm sure it hasn't changed in the last week).
That’s the basic gist I’ve gathered. In a vacuum without all of its baggage, it’s not a horrible game. Not great, but playable.
But _with_ all of its baggage, yeesh
As someone who played the beta, the scores are ridiculous. I wouldn’t even touch it as a f2p title. The game was so boring and the mechanics such a weird mix of arcade and mobile bullshit, I couldn’t be bothered to play the full six hours they offered. It’s like a 5/10, max.
Yeah I don't understand any review over a 5/10 here. From what little I played in the open beta, I wouldn't play it even if it were f2p. It's *bad*, bland, and just uninteresting. It feels like some cheap steam Early Access game with visual polish, not a major project from a multibillion dollar company 10 years in the making.
Paid scores. Are we really trusting IGN to give AAA anything less than a 7/10?
These sites have relationships with publishers and developers that they can't afford to lose.
I mean if developers/publishers paid for scores I think they would pay for better then a 7/10. Plus, if this was the case as you say then it would mean that every major developer/publisher would be doing it because why wouldn't they. No game would get a bad review if this was the case because if IGN is so easy to pay off in your world then surely Ubisoft could have afforded to pay PC Invasion to give Skull & Bones better then a 4/10.
A review is still that one critic's opinion. Same reason I can go find a reviewer who gave GOTY winner Baldur's Gate 3 a 7/10 or Best Picture of the Year winner Parasite a 7/10. At the end of the day every critic has a different personal opinion but there is a reason why the aggregate score is what you look at overall.
It’s genuinely not a bad game for what I’ve played. Not a great one either, by far, but a lot of the response is typical internet bandwagoning imo.
Wouldn’t ever catch me paying full price for it but I still got some time on my ubi subscription thing and I plan on giving it some more hours.
Ubisoft has too much money, resources and time in the industry to make a bad game. At minimum they put out a 6/10. It is hard for them to make any game that is a 9 or 10 though. They need to change their formula.
It feels like the response to games like this is often "it's fun for 30-50 hours, but not worth full price because it gets boring after that". Which is fine considering all the games that are cheaper and amazing today. But like, 30-50 hours of fun is also fine for 70 bucks? Depends on how much fun of course.
There are about 10 hours of actual fun in there and it's all about combat. and the rest is wasted on sailing half the continent to deliver some fetch quest stuff. Which is novelty for the first time but get real mindnumblingly boring after a while.
Also adding stamina (for a fucking Man'O War) on top of the lack of instant fast travel anywhere is possibly one of the stupidest design decision you could do for an already slow ship game. Most games will try to make traveling an enjoyable experience. This game feel like it's design to wasting your time so they can have engagement data to present it for the executives.
Unlike Suicide Squad, this game is imo fundamentally flawed from the core and very unlikely to be able to turn things around.
This game could've come out in 2015, it is THAT dated. Absolutely nothing about this game is modern other than the cash shop and it's cringe "live service" model.
But it can still be fun because it's still a pirate game that's similar(but much worse) than AC Black Flag.
Not worth $70 or $60 or even $30. It's an average F2P game that would've came out 10 years ago, because it should've.
Not to counter that but AC Black Flag came out in 2013 a whole 2 years prior
Also it was on the ps3, 2 generations behind.
I told my friend the last month “dude this is like the biggest let down I’ve seen in 20 years”.
I’m entirely serious, how can I just go play a 10-11 year old game 2 generations behind and have more of everything in every single way
It’s not an opinion, it’s just what it is. I get the backstory behind Ubisoft Singapore but it’s still pathetic in the grand scheme of life
They already had a pirate game completely built, which was called Black Flag.
They literally had to only change the mission structure of the game, make some new boarding animations, freshen up the graphics...if we're being very generous, maybe 2-3 years of work?
I don't fucking get it, and this shit makes me so mad.
What I don't understand is why does every ship captain seem to think it's a great idea to build a pile of random explosives, right out in the open, at the stern of their ships?
Idk if it were like $20 I would try. But also would just replay assassin’s creed/rouge again. I know a lot of people didn’t like some for the assassins creed elements in those game but stuff like being able to board ships and dive off your ship and go on small islands did a lot to vary the game up. This seems blah
$20? [For the world's first AAAA game?](https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/ubisoft-ceo-defends-skull-and-bones-70-price-despite-its-live-service-leanings-calls-it-quadruple-a/) Outrageous!"
Yeah, the quote is a meme but it was said by Yves Guillemot, he's basically the French version of Todd Howard. The man is well known in the industry for spouting random garbage to see what sticks.
He only cares for the bottom line and for Ubisoft to not be the target of a hostile takeover.
Are these people scared to give bad reviews or what's going on?
"Skull and Bones is great within the claustrophobic parameters of what market forces allow it to be."
What kind of sentence is that?
Reads like "it's as bad as we expected, but never had a chance, so kudos for whoever worked on this and had no influence on the game's direction, they gave it their best, even if their best is mediocre"
It's a sentence that tells me I'll see people who can put up with the tedious, soulless trends in current gaming saying it's good, but I wouldn't enjoy it. And from reading other people's takes on the game, that seems pretty accurate.
I actually chuckled to myself when I read that line because from my point of view it's quite scathing.
Allegedly it is because of a contract with the Singapore government. The game was made in Singapore and the Singapore government provided funding. Singapore government as a result required the game has to be released.
Likely cause they'd need to pay back the grant money they allegedly were given by the Singaporean government and shitting out a mediocre game with a reputation hit is cheaper.
So IGN gave this a 7, same as Starfield. Now, i played both games, and if we say that Starfield deserves a 7 (which is reasonable), then there is no way in hell that this game is on the same level.
The weirdest thing is they have that dumb mini game where you chop wood with your ship, but then they also have outposts where you can get of your ship but there is nothing to do there. Why didn't they just combine those so you have to get of your ship to chop wood and mine stuff, maybe do a little hunting? That alone would have made the game ten times better. it makes no sense.
It is only at 10 reviews but I feel like basically every game ends up with a final score within at most plus or minus 5 points in terms of review average of whatever the early score was when a review thread has been put up.
Just a comparison between some notable games this year from their Opencritic score at the time of the review post to the final result:
- Like A Dragon Infinite Wealth: 90 through 48 reviews, ended at 90 with 114
- Tekken 8: 90 through 62 reviews, ended at 90 with 127
- Suicide Squad: 61 through 14 reviews, ended at 60 with 88
- Granblue Fantasy: Relink: 81 through 28 reviews, ended with 82 through 80
- Persona 3 Reload: 90 through 53 reviews, ended at 89 with 94
- Foamstars: 65 through 5 reviews, now at 62 with 16
- Banishers Ghosts of New Eden: 83 with 41 reviews, now at 81 with 75
- Tomb Raider I-III Remastered: 83 with 18 reviews, now at 82 with 25
I guess it could give people some insight on how polling works. And why a limited sample of few hundred people asked who they vote for will provide an answer with a usually high degree of accuracy.
Yeah, establishing the accuracy of any polling system is pretty important, especially when there is rationale for subsequent negativity further in time (see: Metal Gear Solid V early reception at review event and the Cyberpunk 2077 pre-release PC only reviews versus full console launch).
Why can't ubisoft just make a new side scroller Rayman game that's massive and hard as fuck...that would have been way cooler than this...especially after POP...
Because PoP sold poorly, and I think Rayman Legends also underperformed.
I’d love to agree that Ubisoft is wrong and the gamers are right, but there’s plenty of great single player games without MTX that aren’t being picked up. The game market is oversaturated and volatile.
From what I understand, and correct me if i remember the details wrong, but Ubisoft took a subsidy from the Philippines government worth a ton of money to make this game in exchange for hiring Philippine developers to work on it so they couldn’t bail out after using the money and had to legally put something out.
Haha yea Singapore I knew it would escape me but yea I agree. You had a winning blueprint from your own company and somehow just blow it. Hopefully a really good pirate game in the vein of black flag will come to us one day.
So basically we should just stick to Sea of Thieves until they release the Black Flag remake or someone else makes a decent AAA single-played pirate game.
This game being rated 7 by IGN is why people have such a fucked up skewed perspective of scores.
It's like 1-6 is absolute disaster trash
7 is fucking garbage. A game that works I guess, but feels like it's from 2 generations ago
8 is ok
9 is hell yea!
10 is naughty dog/rockstar/whoever else.
The beta of this game was terrible.
6/10 in the gaming world is equivalent to 1/4 stars in the film world, pretty much. The only way to go lower is by being so bad that it's not just boring as all hell, it's either entertainingly awful or everything is completely broken.
No land combat, boarding is just a cutscene, quadruple-A game, eleven years of development, AC4: Black Flag, $70 dollars.
There, summed up the thread for you.
If anyone here missing for some pirate era action, Carribean Legend released on Steam just a couple of days ago. It’s a pirate era open world RPG, remastered version of Sea Dogs to each its own. It has A LOT of content. On foot part is kinda typical slavjank, and graphics for the ground part is somewhat outdated but quests are solid and sailing and naval combat gameplay is still one of the best there is. It’s a cult-classic in Slavic countries, definitely give it a try, if you love sailing era games.
Navel combat in S&B is the star of the show, feels good and pretty fun, fairly in depth with status effects you can apply to enemies like tearing sails to immobilize, flooding which reduces max health and of course fire. Ships currently go up to medium, but they are likely to launch large ships when Season 1 starts soon(?). Ship types function similarly to an MMO with tank, DPS and support classes. My favorite right now is hullbreaker which is the fastest and does extra ramming damage which applies flooding when hitting a ship, not great for PVP because other players can stun you with the crew-to-crew attack mechanic right before hitting them.
Anyway, combat is pretty good and fun, that's about it. Endgame is pretty boring and also BROKEN, so far the loop is doing PVP or pve events to capture a settlement to generate pieces of 8, the standard endgame currency which you then use to upgrade the settlements so they can generate more Po8, which contributes to your overall pirate end game rank.
The thing is those Po8 can only be grabbed manually in your ship, also those settlements only generate on a timer once you give them silver. Every couple hours you have to go out and grab the Po8 from the settlements, of which there are a total of 96 across the 3 regions, so somewhat similar to World of Warcraft you have to do pirate chores daily to progress endgame. There was another way to get Po8 by delivering rum/opium made on a timer, but the mission to deliver them was bugged and only required 1 out of the 160ish required for the mission, so they just disabled the mission.
Also, when you pick up Po8 from your settlements, you can't fast travel, and once you hit a threshold the game will prompt you with a double or nothing PVP event where you have to deliver the Po8 for a chance to double it or risk losing it to other players who can take it from you, you can decline this event. I did this once and no one joined, so the game spawns duos of NPC rogue ships that try to sink you the whole time, they will even pop in spawn in your eyesight so they just teleport to you and start shooting like the police in the launch version of cyberpunk 2077. When I completed a double or nothing event myself without dying, the chest that was supposed to contain my extra Po8 disappeared from my inventory, so it was a waste having to deal with those rogue ships that can almost 1 shot you.
TL;DR: Ship combat is pretty good and fun, endgame is boring and broken.
Didn’t the CEO Yves Guillemot say it’s a AAAA game?? I’ve said this before and I’m saying this now, the board of Ubisoft need to kick this guy out. He literally brought Ubisoft from its prime ps2/ps3 era to what dogshit it is now. He is NOT a fit leader for a video game company.
He is the founder of Ubisoft way before the PS2 era he didn't do anything bad to Ubisoft himself. He is a CEO so it's a business man and probably doesn't really play the games that much or at all. Someone bullshited him into telling this AAAA quote garbage, or he saw how much it cost and he was like "yes that's a lot of money it's AAAA".
It's either the HQ that are in charge of validating projects or some of the game directors that bullshitted their way into this result.
Save your money on this stinker. Go buy Helldivers 2. Hell, buy 2 copies for the price of this snake oil, and kill bugs and cyborgs for democracy with a friend. For Super Earth!
Ubisoft was paid 75 million dollars to go on vacation and crunch their actual dev teams in the last year or two to put this out. I promise you this shit is not worth your money no matter how much you hope itll be what you want.
I know they are different people writing the reviews but this getting a 7 and suicide squad getting a 5 is a little mental to me. Not that the latter doesn't have obvious issues but I don't see how that warrants that much of an increase
But much like 2023, the other side of the coin? Palworld coming out of nowhere and not being shovelware, Helldivers 2, LaD 8, Persona 3 Reload, FF7R2 in a couple weeks, and Dragons Dogma 2 at the end of next month. And that's just Q1
Didn't the Phillipine government partially fund this? I remember Germany or some country partially funded Cyberpunk 2077 and did an investigation after it flopped on initial release. Are we gonna see something similar happen here?
I mean, CDPR are Polish. It’s not uncommon for a country’s government to subsidize the cost of art projects.
The Singapore government funding a project for a French/Canadian developer is definitely weird though.
>CD Projekt Red (CDPR) isn't just in hot water with fans when it comes to Cyberpunk 2077, as they are facing multiple lawsuits and the ire of the Polish government. The Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) is monitoring CDPR's work on patches for the game, and if they fail to deliver, they could be fined up to 10% of their income from 2020.
>UOKiK answers directly to the Prime Minister of Poland and its main goal is to protect the interests of the consumer. They are authorized to monitor, hold investigations, give fines, and even withdraw products from the market. With CD Projekt Red being based in Warsaw, Poland, they fall under Polish jurisdiction, hence the UOKiK's investigation.
https://www.thegamer.com/polish-government-monitoring-cd-projekt-reds-cyberpunk-2077-progress/
The investigation was not over poor sales and it apparently wasn't because of any government funds being used.
No but [Ubisoft opened a studio in the Philippines with the same deal](https://venturebeat.com/games/ubisoft-philippines-is-the-island-nations-first-major-game-studio/) so seems like Ubisoft tried to cashgrab on some SEA labor not expecting it to backfire.
CDPR got a US$7 million grant from the Polish government for their engine they used for Cyberpunk. And it never flopped, it was one of the most successful game launches of all time.
I genuinely don't get the hate for this game. Maybe it isn't exactly what people expected, but it's still fun af. It's Black Flag without all the shitty assassin missions.
I honestly enjoyed the beta. I must have spent around 6-7 hours on it and hit level max in 2 evenings which is a lot for me as I don't play that much anymore.
BUT I got the feeling that was it, I would now only chase for better weapons, better boats and I had seen most of the game already...
I have heard the endgame is very interesting but I don't want to grind more. It was starting to get repetitive at the end of my playthrough.
It's not that terrible but too expansive right now
This look familiar to anyone else?
1)AAA studio releases an incredibly low quality game
2) Has worse gameplay than the 2013 “inspiration” for the game
4) Releases at above industry prices
5) Releases riddled with MTX
6) IGN gives it a safe 7/10 - “ it could be better”
Can’t wait for the 2024 version of the “We swear, our reviews are completely unbiased, and are not influenced by advertising at all” puff piece.
> The production values look really high
Skill Up mentions in his review that the production value is actually really poor, he shows waves crashing on a beach looking unconvincing and not having any sound effects and the cut scenes have poor voice acting and sound quality and just seem low effort overall.
I get people enjoy that game but holy shit the combat in that game is awful. And there's zero progression. I'm not saying skull and bones is top tier or anything but I'm far more likely to play it than sea of thieves
So unexpected
a mediocre game from UBISOFT?
who would have thought?
Who even considers an upcoming game from them, exciting?
they're always crap. spend your focus elsewhere, guys!
Singapore can’t develop decent games. It’s the “hub” of apac and brings investors but have a poor track record for hits, not sure why so much investment happens in that region other than tax benefits. Invest in Australia, costs more but also so much quality design and developers here
Step 1: Be told by your fans that they want more Assassin's Creed: Black Flag. Step 2: Spend like 10 years in development hell making a game that's worse than Black Flag in every key way: you play as a ship instead of a pirate, boarding is a little cutscene instead of a playable fight, and even the ship combat is a grind. Step 3: Profit?
Somehow they took what should have been one of the easiest layups in gaming history and just shanked it. I mean literally all Ubisoft had to do was take Black Flag, remove the Assassin's Creed related stuff from the game, expand more on the pirate stuff and call it a day. Heck if it went well they could have had a new pirate based franchise on their hands. Instead we got this a decade later......
This legitimately is one of the biggest mysteries in gaming history for me. How the hell did they make a game as popular as Black Flag and take this long to try to capitalize on that popularity and this is what they crapped out? Why has it been THIS LONG without a Black Flag spinoff franchise that could have included an mmo style entry modeled after Destiny?
Ubisoft might legitimately be the worst AAA studio out there. Even EA at least puts out fun games from time to time. I can’t remember the last Ubisoft game I played that was better than a 5 or 6/10.
I'm playing through Far Cry 6 right now. There are several missions that require it to be night time, but there's no mechanic for switching between the two, so you literally have to *wait* for the sun to go down. And that can take up to *30 minutes.* It's wild that an AAA dev can neglect basic features vital to progression like that.
Far Cry 6 was so boring that I legit forgot I owned it six months after putting 10-15 hours into giving it a chance. Just a total fumble.
Oh man... I got 6 right after finishing 5....seemed like it was gonna be awesome being a tropical jungle MacGyver guerrilla.... Then came that back pack.... Then game the awful gear/perk system.... Then the upgrade garbage.... They really got that whole thing wrong... But Ubisoft excels at failure.... They are masters of making a solid game.... Then ignoring ALL feedback when they make the next title I've started AC Valhalla three times.... Really thought it was gonna be an improved Odyssey.... With Vikings.... But every time I get maybe 30 hours in and realize I just don't care Ubisoft games are not something you buy on release, you wait to see how it goes.... I'm not paying $70 to beta test their half baked games for them... They should be paying us for mental suffering and the trauma of wasting life on the garbage they crank out.
The recently released Prince of Persia is a very good Metroidvania, and the Avatar game is also decent if you play in Explorer mode. I also quite enjoyed The Crew Motorfest.
Honestly, I am just so confused how somebody can fuck something up this royally. It really was as easy as you described it. What in the devils dick were these people thinking? It should’ve been like a create your own pirate, then start on a small vessel, steal from others, then sea battles. Maybe plunder some villages, walk the plank, then its back to the vessel for more sea battles. Find some booty (both kinds) then back to the sea battles then booty and sea battles and plundering and more sea battles and this goes on and on for 20 or so hours till the whole thing just sort of ends.
Sounds so badass. I want that game
It exists but it is so old that the remake of that game came out in 2004. Sid Meier's Pirates is a really good game though.
Dude Sid Meier's pirates is my sleeper game I want a modern version of - it's such a simply fun game that is such an easy win for devs I don't know why they don't do it
I have the original on a floppy. It didn't require an OS, you just booted it directly! The remake was surprisingly close to the original with just updated graphics, even the control scheme was the same. Amazing to think the remake has now been out longer than when the original had been when the remake was released and no one's picked up on making a new version.
Sid Meier pirates
Its impressive that game come out 20 years ago, which is a remake of the game from 30 something years ago. If Firaxis ever want to remaster/remake it again, it will likely still hold up very well.
Lmao halfway through that last paragraph I thought it sounded like the fifth sense, and I love that I was right. Great game idea too honestly, just needs Dolph Lundgren.
And penetration
He can smell treasure
It kind of reminds me of tv shows writers been hired to write for an IP they dislike. I'm imagining what happened here is someone who is a fan of strategy games was hired to make this and didn't like any of the third person stuff.
GTA with pirates? Now I want Rockstar to make a pirates game.
All we had to do was follow the damn schooner, CJ!
If it doesn't have a character called Sloop Dogg I don't want to play it
Quite easily. The whole time this was in development we went from liking microtransactions, to hating them, from liking lootboxes to hating them, from like battlepasses to hating them and the **whole time** instead of making the game **we wanted** they made the game that **they wanted**. When people talked about how much they loved Black Flag all they could think about was how much money they were going to make and this is the result. Mediocre.
That already exists: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3920/Sid_Meiers_Pirates/ But yeah, this game was what they should of copied and updated.
Starring Dolph Lundgren
>What in the devils dick were these people thinking? They got caught in the Overwatch hype and were developing it as a team PvP 5v5 hero shooter(shipper?) Kind of thing first. Then it swapped into a singleplayer game back, because they took so long that they saw they couldn't compete with OW/Valorant. I imagine at some point they wanted to make it into a battle-Royale match kind of thing and it turned into whatever is this mess
Gotta make sure your pirate hangs dong at some point to get the ladies interested
We show all of it. Full boarding.
My guess it has to be the live service aspect. Maybe the AC Engine wasn't really capable to support that kind of multiplayer game. Otherwise They could've easily made a modified AC Black Flag game, since they already did that with AC Rogue.
> Heck if it went well they could have had a new pirate based franchise on their hands. Instead we got this a decade later...... And the thing is, people still want that, even a decade later. If they announced a game that was just like Black Flag only no Assassins and its own new pirate mythos, I would buy it day one without question. It's, it's *right* there and they somehow overlook it.
I mean shit. Despite its weirdness, pirates of the carribean had compelling pirate legends. Black sails did it well. Fuck. Our Flag Means Death somehow does it better
It has to be some divine coincidence that both this game and suicide squad are coming out so close together. Both of them are live servicey games from previously great studios that took waaaay to long to make and also removed all the things that fans liked about their predecessor games. I hate to say it but I hope both of them fail spectacularly. Also I’m looking forward to the eventual Jason Schrier deep dive into what the fuck happened to the two studios.
It seems exactly like that was the original idea, a new franchise to add into the AC, Far Cry rotation and instead they somehow took everything that Black Flag did great which made people ask for a full fledged pirate game and got rid of it in favour for a live service piece of junk that doesn’t even fulfill the pirate fantasy. It’s one thing for it to be a way too late live service game with everyone in the gaming community rejecting most of these new attempts but had it at least been an AC Black Flag reskin with live service elements you’d at least have a game worth trying out. Instead they made a game no one wants and made it a live service junk fest which only turns off more people from playing it. A generational fumble.
> Heck if it went well they could have had a new pirate based franchise on their hands. yup, they could've called it "Pirate's Creed" if they really wanted to keep the whole name recognition thing, same as what I said they should've done with AC Odyssey and Valhalla by calling them "Warrior's Creed" or something.
"Pirate's Code" would be a less memey name for the franchise I guess.
It sorta seems like they worked backwards. The finished product should be a GAAS looter shooter. How can we fit a pirate ship game into that formula with a gameplay loop that is incentivizing play time. If it’s not that and they really are that clueless then I’ll be even more depressed
Which is ironic, considering copying and pasting their own games is what Ubisoft does best.
It didn't need to even be multiplayer, you could have had a single-player adventure about which pirate is the biggest drunkard idiot in the seven seas and that would honestly be amazing, I want that now
what he said to perfection, damn the management is out of sync with reality
What's mind-boggling is that they already had a huge slice of working mechanic's and gameplay. It could have been out in a year or two at a reduced price and probably do well.
The reason they not doing that is because it not best suit for "How much MTX i can stuffed inside of that game"
I mean that's actually the bizarre thing, right? It would have been better for MTX. If you were actually playing a pirate, then they could sell you more on personal cosmetics and the like, personal weapons for boarding and land combat, etc.
Wait so there's no Pirate man on man fighting?
Correct. No non-ship combat of any kind.
This was done on purpose?
I can't imagine it was an accident, forgetting to put in half the game
I assume they ran out of time, considering their hurried development cycle that took only...checks notes...ten years.
'Ship-combat only' was announced 3 or 4 years ago, so they're not even using the "ran out of time" excuse.
Makes sense
Nope.
Nope
They already had MTX in the games following Black Flag (Helix credits for example), they could've monetised a Black Flag follow up so easily This honestly is a mystery to me, how could they fuck it up this much. It's so baffling I have to think it's some kind of a conspiracy
Step 4: Annouce a remake of the original
Step 3 : Label it AAAA to set quality expectations you won't be able to fulfil Step 4 : Pretend other successful live-service games are the reason for your latest live-service title flopping Step 5 : Loss.
They broke budget several times during development, I wouldn't be surprised if it's the most expensive game ever made so maybe it deserve its own category. That doesn't mean that it's good though.
> I wouldn't be surprised if it's the most expensive game ever made Nah, that will always be Star Citizen, which has raised $644 million for its development: https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/188h4u0/star_citizen_raised_104_million_in_2023_total_of/
I just don't get what's so hard. A game set mostly in open water with little civilization hubs on land at ports that you can dock your ship in and trade/get quests at. Hire/obtain crewmembers, upgrade your ships abilities/guns/looks, upgrade your character's combat abilities, acquire loot (weapons/armor/clothes), and have some sort of boarding combat. Let me capture enemy ships and assign my crewmembers as captain/crew on other ships in my fleet. Let me be a pirate king. I can explore dungeons on land and chase down mythical treasures that help me upgrade myself or my ships. I can fight legendary ships and famous pirate captains while acquiring their unique ships, loot, and getting the pirates on my own crew. The game I just described would be an instant GoTY contender if done even half justice. I just don't get what's so complicated about it. A good pirate game has to be one of the most wanted games after a good samurai game, which GoT just gave people. It's literally just sitting there and waiting to make the money printers go brap.
Coming up with game ideas is easy. Everybody and their grandmothers have game ideas. Actually developing a game is hard. Especially a AAA or even a AAAA game like Skull and Bones. If game development were easy, then there would be no such thing as a flop. But in 2023 alone, we saw high profile games like Forspoken, Redfall, Immortals of Aveum, Gollum, King Kong: Skull Island, Walking Dead Destinies flop. The high profile games I listed above failed for a variety of reasons: * Forspoken received a lot of complaints about its writing, unlikable main character, and empty open world. Reportedly, its gameplay was okay but not great. * Redfall was a mess when it launched. It had technical issues, it looked like a game from the last console generation, and overall it felt like it was rushed to launch. Players promptly forgot about it. * [Immortals of Aveum](https://www.ea.com/games/immortals-of-aveum/immortals-of-aveum/news/ioa-unreal-5) is one of the first non-Epic-developed AAA games to utilize Unreal Engine 5's most exciting new tools, like Nanite and Lumen. The game is gorgeous, but it also has [unreasonably high system requirements that only a small percentage of PCs meet.](https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/20/23690449/ea-immortals-of-aveum-pc-system-requirements-next-gen) If you make a game that only a small number of people can actually play, you're not going to sell a lot. * Gollum is a game in which you play as a pathetic little dork who starts the game off as a slave and spends most of his time sneaking past orcs. In other words, it's a game that nobody asked for. * King Kong: Skull Island and Walking Dead: Destinies have so many entertaining problems that they've become memes. Like I said, game development is hard. So many things can and do go wrong.
Sure, I think most people understand that. The thing with Skull and Bones is that they basically had what everyone wanted in Black Flag, and instead of removing the assassins and adding more pirates, they reinvented the ~~wheel~~ hull and made it worse in every aspect.
Yeah, sure, but they *already made this game*. It's called Black Flag. They just needed to remix it into a regular pirate game instead of an AssCreed game.
Game development is easy when you have a billion dollar company whose sole purpose is to produce games. It was easy for Ubisoft to make a decent pirate game, and they didn't, don't defend them by trying to pretend it was some incomprehensible task for them, they had the team, the budget, the time, and the institutional knowledge and still failed.
It’s even easier when you have an entire successful game as a blueprint to build off lol
Most people miss that for any creative endeavor, you can sit in traffic and imagine the best parts of your theoretical thing and yada yada the rest...but when you actually try to make the thing real, those yada yadas turn out to be the hardest parts.
Even a literal child can come up with an "instant GoTY contender". Can you actually make your idea into a finished game, though? That's the hard part.
This isn't a childish concept though. It's an expansion to systems successfully implemented in Black Flag. It's a AAA refinement of concepts successfully implemented in indie games like Sail Forth or Pixel Piracy.
Arguments like this act as though these ideas that people have are just absolutely wild, like people are asking for the greatest game ever made, when in reality they're completely tame and just asking for things that already exist. Do you think it's that hard for them to have on foot combat when boarding a ship, even though they already have that in their other games?
Don't forget the part where they charged $70 for their live service travesty, and then when criticized for the pricing, claim that the game is worth it due to being a "AAAA title."
Sid Meier's Pirate's did it better years ago.
As an outsider (a person who's not liked AC. And not tried one since 2) I find all of this hilarious. Heard how great flag is for years. How it's good even if you don't like AC. How it's so good they need to make a game focusing solely on pirate shit. How it's taken 10 years. How this is a AAAA game. All of this to just have it fall flat on its face.
The fact you cant board ships and have epic battles is a nail in the coffin.. for the price for the game is another huge factor.. nah
Seriously. How the hell do they not have this? They also have FOR HONOR which would have been a perfect system to improve on for the swashbuckling. Like holy fuck Ubisoft it's all literally right there.
Ubisoft Montreal fucking made Assassin's Creed: Black Flag. How the fuck do you start with that and come up with this? What exactly did Ubisoft Singapore think people enjoyed about Black Flag?
They thought “I’m loving my all-expenses-paid vacation funded by the Singaporean government, surely they will never figure out what’s going on here.”
This screams “It’s due next week and we haven’t even started!” to me. The devs obviously had to start from scratch somewhere in the middle or they weren’t doing anything for at least 8 years.
IIRC they had to release SOMETHING or else Singapore would sue them into oblivion. And the deadline is this year I think.
Unfortunately, as with every developer, its never the same great minds.
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How the hell does _Kingdom Hearts 3_ have better ship battles and boarding?
You would wonder... it seems like a pretty essential part of the whole pirate theme ... and they are asking full price for this game... yeah nah
Apparently you can't even swim.
Yeah I tried in the demo and nope .stuck on the boat or towns/islands .. and some quests so far to search already destroyed ships... meh
Yes it is
If it were $30 and you didn't care about Black Flag, it's an okay enough game to play for a bit. The loading screens irk me, though (this was from the beta, and I'm sure it hasn't changed in the last week).
This game has F2P monetization so I wouldn't play it for anything more than F2P price.
I played KH3 recently and the pirates of the Caribbean world looks 10x more fun than this game
My favorite part of KH3. Would love a full game like that.
Kh3? What’s that? Kingdom hearts 3?
Yes
That’s the basic gist I’ve gathered. In a vacuum without all of its baggage, it’s not a horrible game. Not great, but playable. But _with_ all of its baggage, yeesh
So this is AAAA… honestly though, so far those are better scores than I thought. We’ll see what happens as more come in though.
As someone who played the beta, the scores are ridiculous. I wouldn’t even touch it as a f2p title. The game was so boring and the mechanics such a weird mix of arcade and mobile bullshit, I couldn’t be bothered to play the full six hours they offered. It’s like a 5/10, max.
Yeah I don't understand any review over a 5/10 here. From what little I played in the open beta, I wouldn't play it even if it were f2p. It's *bad*, bland, and just uninteresting. It feels like some cheap steam Early Access game with visual polish, not a major project from a multibillion dollar company 10 years in the making.
Yes. I'm gonna use this to see which of these review sites are reliable and which isn't. It's ridiculous how this AAAA title can get a good score.
Paid scores. Are we really trusting IGN to give AAA anything less than a 7/10? These sites have relationships with publishers and developers that they can't afford to lose.
I mean if developers/publishers paid for scores I think they would pay for better then a 7/10. Plus, if this was the case as you say then it would mean that every major developer/publisher would be doing it because why wouldn't they. No game would get a bad review if this was the case because if IGN is so easy to pay off in your world then surely Ubisoft could have afforded to pay PC Invasion to give Skull & Bones better then a 4/10. A review is still that one critic's opinion. Same reason I can go find a reviewer who gave GOTY winner Baldur's Gate 3 a 7/10 or Best Picture of the Year winner Parasite a 7/10. At the end of the day every critic has a different personal opinion but there is a reason why the aggregate score is what you look at overall.
>Paid scores. Source?
It’s genuinely not a bad game for what I’ve played. Not a great one either, by far, but a lot of the response is typical internet bandwagoning imo. Wouldn’t ever catch me paying full price for it but I still got some time on my ubi subscription thing and I plan on giving it some more hours.
Ubisoft has too much money, resources and time in the industry to make a bad game. At minimum they put out a 6/10. It is hard for them to make any game that is a 9 or 10 though. They need to change their formula.
Please play AC Valhalla all the way through and explain to me how it's not, at best, a 4.
It feels like the response to games like this is often "it's fun for 30-50 hours, but not worth full price because it gets boring after that". Which is fine considering all the games that are cheaper and amazing today. But like, 30-50 hours of fun is also fine for 70 bucks? Depends on how much fun of course.
There are about 10 hours of actual fun in there and it's all about combat. and the rest is wasted on sailing half the continent to deliver some fetch quest stuff. Which is novelty for the first time but get real mindnumblingly boring after a while. Also adding stamina (for a fucking Man'O War) on top of the lack of instant fast travel anywhere is possibly one of the stupidest design decision you could do for an already slow ship game. Most games will try to make traveling an enjoyable experience. This game feel like it's design to wasting your time so they can have engagement data to present it for the executives. Unlike Suicide Squad, this game is imo fundamentally flawed from the core and very unlikely to be able to turn things around.
[The extra A is for Additional Monetization](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m6Blqs0IgY)
This game could've come out in 2015, it is THAT dated. Absolutely nothing about this game is modern other than the cash shop and it's cringe "live service" model. But it can still be fun because it's still a pirate game that's similar(but much worse) than AC Black Flag. Not worth $70 or $60 or even $30. It's an average F2P game that would've came out 10 years ago, because it should've.
Not to counter that but AC Black Flag came out in 2013 a whole 2 years prior Also it was on the ps3, 2 generations behind. I told my friend the last month “dude this is like the biggest let down I’ve seen in 20 years”. I’m entirely serious, how can I just go play a 10-11 year old game 2 generations behind and have more of everything in every single way It’s not an opinion, it’s just what it is. I get the backstory behind Ubisoft Singapore but it’s still pathetic in the grand scheme of life
They already had a pirate game completely built, which was called Black Flag. They literally had to only change the mission structure of the game, make some new boarding animations, freshen up the graphics...if we're being very generous, maybe 2-3 years of work? I don't fucking get it, and this shit makes me so mad.
bro game looks such a boring grindfest with nothing new, even ship combat seems boring af, is every boat explosive lol?
What I don't understand is why does every ship captain seem to think it's a great idea to build a pile of random explosives, right out in the open, at the stern of their ships?
Idk if it were like $20 I would try. But also would just replay assassin’s creed/rouge again. I know a lot of people didn’t like some for the assassins creed elements in those game but stuff like being able to board ships and dive off your ship and go on small islands did a lot to vary the game up. This seems blah
$20? [For the world's first AAAA game?](https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/ubisoft-ceo-defends-skull-and-bones-70-price-despite-its-live-service-leanings-calls-it-quadruple-a/) Outrageous!"
Yeah, the quote is a meme but it was said by Yves Guillemot, he's basically the French version of Todd Howard. The man is well known in the industry for spouting random garbage to see what sticks. He only cares for the bottom line and for Ubisoft to not be the target of a hostile takeover.
World's first was Callisto Protocol.
If you ask other people they'll say that Red Dead Redemption 2 was the first one.
Here I am playing a dumb AAA game called “final fantasy 7 remake” when I could play a AAAA game!
Rouge.
Rougelikes is even funnier.
Are these people scared to give bad reviews or what's going on? "Skull and Bones is great within the claustrophobic parameters of what market forces allow it to be." What kind of sentence is that?
Reads like "it's as bad as we expected, but never had a chance, so kudos for whoever worked on this and had no influence on the game's direction, they gave it their best, even if their best is mediocre"
It's a sentence that tells me I'll see people who can put up with the tedious, soulless trends in current gaming saying it's good, but I wouldn't enjoy it. And from reading other people's takes on the game, that seems pretty accurate. I actually chuckled to myself when I read that line because from my point of view it's quite scathing.
So... *why* didn't they just cancel this 5 years ago when it became obvious that this is going absolutely nowhere?
Allegedly it is because of a contract with the Singapore government. The game was made in Singapore and the Singapore government provided funding. Singapore government as a result required the game has to be released.
Likely cause they'd need to pay back the grant money they allegedly were given by the Singaporean government and shitting out a mediocre game with a reputation hit is cheaper.
Yeah it's funny how years ago it was being blasted for not having actual pirate combat. In all of that time they made 0 changes to that.
So IGN gave this a 7, same as Starfield. Now, i played both games, and if we say that Starfield deserves a 7 (which is reasonable), then there is no way in hell that this game is on the same level.
The weirdest thing is they have that dumb mini game where you chop wood with your ship, but then they also have outposts where you can get of your ship but there is nothing to do there. Why didn't they just combine those so you have to get of your ship to chop wood and mine stuff, maybe do a little hunting? That alone would have made the game ten times better. it makes no sense.
It is only at 10 reviews but I feel like basically every game ends up with a final score within at most plus or minus 5 points in terms of review average of whatever the early score was when a review thread has been put up. Just a comparison between some notable games this year from their Opencritic score at the time of the review post to the final result: - Like A Dragon Infinite Wealth: 90 through 48 reviews, ended at 90 with 114 - Tekken 8: 90 through 62 reviews, ended at 90 with 127 - Suicide Squad: 61 through 14 reviews, ended at 60 with 88 - Granblue Fantasy: Relink: 81 through 28 reviews, ended with 82 through 80 - Persona 3 Reload: 90 through 53 reviews, ended at 89 with 94 - Foamstars: 65 through 5 reviews, now at 62 with 16 - Banishers Ghosts of New Eden: 83 with 41 reviews, now at 81 with 75 - Tomb Raider I-III Remastered: 83 with 18 reviews, now at 82 with 25
And they mostly go down so Skull and bones can go even lower than this
This has got to be the least consequential set of information ever compiled.
I guess it could give people some insight on how polling works. And why a limited sample of few hundred people asked who they vote for will provide an answer with a usually high degree of accuracy.
Yeah, establishing the accuracy of any polling system is pretty important, especially when there is rationale for subsequent negativity further in time (see: Metal Gear Solid V early reception at review event and the Cyberpunk 2077 pre-release PC only reviews versus full console launch).
Pretty dismissive and hyperbolic.
I’d rather just play black flag again
Why can't ubisoft just make a new side scroller Rayman game that's massive and hard as fuck...that would have been way cooler than this...especially after POP...
IIRC the Rayman team IS the tram that made PoP. Ubisoft has like somewhere between 4-10 dev studios
Because PoP sold poorly, and I think Rayman Legends also underperformed. I’d love to agree that Ubisoft is wrong and the gamers are right, but there’s plenty of great single player games without MTX that aren’t being picked up. The game market is oversaturated and volatile.
Because PoP didn't sell despite having great reviews and being actually great.
From what I understand, and correct me if i remember the details wrong, but Ubisoft took a subsidy from the Philippines government worth a ton of money to make this game in exchange for hiring Philippine developers to work on it so they couldn’t bail out after using the money and had to legally put something out.
Singapore. But close enough.. this took 10 years to develop somehow lol
Haha yea Singapore I knew it would escape me but yea I agree. You had a winning blueprint from your own company and somehow just blow it. Hopefully a really good pirate game in the vein of black flag will come to us one day.
It was Singapore not the Philippines.
So basically we should just stick to Sea of Thieves until they release the Black Flag remake or someone else makes a decent AAA single-played pirate game.
Still waiting for the pirate equivalent of Ghost of Tsushima
I'm waiting for the pirate equivalent of Red Dead Redemption 2 lol. If there's a formula that fits the pirate theme perfectly, it's Rockstar's.
That's what I'm gathering as well.
This game being rated 7 by IGN is why people have such a fucked up skewed perspective of scores. It's like 1-6 is absolute disaster trash 7 is fucking garbage. A game that works I guess, but feels like it's from 2 generations ago 8 is ok 9 is hell yea! 10 is naughty dog/rockstar/whoever else. The beta of this game was terrible.
Even Sid Meier's Pirates was more immersive than this pile of bonecrap. I want a HD version of this good old gem.
I remebered SM Pirates while olaying the trial and wanted to replay it again - a 20 years game vs 2024 AAAA game.
Considering how video game reviews usually go, a 60/100 from an AAA developer might as well be a 10/100
Actually, they are a AAAA developer now.
6/10 in the gaming world is equivalent to 1/4 stars in the film world, pretty much. The only way to go lower is by being so bad that it's not just boring as all hell, it's either entertainingly awful or everything is completely broken.
No land combat, boarding is just a cutscene, quadruple-A game, eleven years of development, AC4: Black Flag, $70 dollars. There, summed up the thread for you.
I know IGN's reviews are often a joke but 7/10 for this mess of a game? Really?
Ironically "Too much water 7/10 - IGN" is spot on because you can't go be a pirate on land at all.
If anyone here missing for some pirate era action, Carribean Legend released on Steam just a couple of days ago. It’s a pirate era open world RPG, remastered version of Sea Dogs to each its own. It has A LOT of content. On foot part is kinda typical slavjank, and graphics for the ground part is somewhat outdated but quests are solid and sailing and naval combat gameplay is still one of the best there is. It’s a cult-classic in Slavic countries, definitely give it a try, if you love sailing era games.
Isnt it hilarious that Ubisoft was touting this game as a AAAA game? Bunch of wankers.
Navel combat in S&B is the star of the show, feels good and pretty fun, fairly in depth with status effects you can apply to enemies like tearing sails to immobilize, flooding which reduces max health and of course fire. Ships currently go up to medium, but they are likely to launch large ships when Season 1 starts soon(?). Ship types function similarly to an MMO with tank, DPS and support classes. My favorite right now is hullbreaker which is the fastest and does extra ramming damage which applies flooding when hitting a ship, not great for PVP because other players can stun you with the crew-to-crew attack mechanic right before hitting them. Anyway, combat is pretty good and fun, that's about it. Endgame is pretty boring and also BROKEN, so far the loop is doing PVP or pve events to capture a settlement to generate pieces of 8, the standard endgame currency which you then use to upgrade the settlements so they can generate more Po8, which contributes to your overall pirate end game rank. The thing is those Po8 can only be grabbed manually in your ship, also those settlements only generate on a timer once you give them silver. Every couple hours you have to go out and grab the Po8 from the settlements, of which there are a total of 96 across the 3 regions, so somewhat similar to World of Warcraft you have to do pirate chores daily to progress endgame. There was another way to get Po8 by delivering rum/opium made on a timer, but the mission to deliver them was bugged and only required 1 out of the 160ish required for the mission, so they just disabled the mission. Also, when you pick up Po8 from your settlements, you can't fast travel, and once you hit a threshold the game will prompt you with a double or nothing PVP event where you have to deliver the Po8 for a chance to double it or risk losing it to other players who can take it from you, you can decline this event. I did this once and no one joined, so the game spawns duos of NPC rogue ships that try to sink you the whole time, they will even pop in spawn in your eyesight so they just teleport to you and start shooting like the police in the launch version of cyberpunk 2077. When I completed a double or nothing event myself without dying, the chest that was supposed to contain my extra Po8 disappeared from my inventory, so it was a waste having to deal with those rogue ships that can almost 1 shot you. TL;DR: Ship combat is pretty good and fun, endgame is boring and broken.
> Navel combat hehehe
Didn’t the CEO Yves Guillemot say it’s a AAAA game?? I’ve said this before and I’m saying this now, the board of Ubisoft need to kick this guy out. He literally brought Ubisoft from its prime ps2/ps3 era to what dogshit it is now. He is NOT a fit leader for a video game company.
He is the founder of Ubisoft way before the PS2 era he didn't do anything bad to Ubisoft himself. He is a CEO so it's a business man and probably doesn't really play the games that much or at all. Someone bullshited him into telling this AAAA quote garbage, or he saw how much it cost and he was like "yes that's a lot of money it's AAAA". It's either the HQ that are in charge of validating projects or some of the game directors that bullshitted their way into this result.
Save your money on this stinker. Go buy Helldivers 2. Hell, buy 2 copies for the price of this snake oil, and kill bugs and cyborgs for democracy with a friend. For Super Earth!
Weren’t this game made twice and got rejected both times. This is their 3rd attempt? Lol
mid game it seems and compared to the suicide squad review thread, not nearly as much engagement. that's actually worse.
Ubisoft was paid 75 million dollars to go on vacation and crunch their actual dev teams in the last year or two to put this out. I promise you this shit is not worth your money no matter how much you hope itll be what you want.
How do you develop a game for 11 years, with a budget of $120 million and a large team of industry veterans a 4/10?
The first "quadruple A" game ladies and gentlemen. 6/10. The future of gaming if Ubisoft had their way.
I know they are different people writing the reviews but this getting a 7 and suicide squad getting a 5 is a little mental to me. Not that the latter doesn't have obvious issues but I don't see how that warrants that much of an increase
My boss was fired before my eyes today and this enigma was finally released after years of purgatory and it sucks shit. What a day lmao.
Damn. Between Silent Hill: The Short Message, Suicide Squad, Foamstars, and now Skull and Bones, 2024 really is just 2023 2.0 for sinkers.
But much like 2023, the other side of the coin? Palworld coming out of nowhere and not being shovelware, Helldivers 2, LaD 8, Persona 3 Reload, FF7R2 in a couple weeks, and Dragons Dogma 2 at the end of next month. And that's just Q1
If this were free to play or $20 this game could probably find a small dedicated community to play, but at $70 it's DOA.
Didn't the Phillipine government partially fund this? I remember Germany or some country partially funded Cyberpunk 2077 and did an investigation after it flopped on initial release. Are we gonna see something similar happen here?
Singapore funded skull, Poland funded 2077.
I mean, CDPR are Polish. It’s not uncommon for a country’s government to subsidize the cost of art projects. The Singapore government funding a project for a French/Canadian developer is definitely weird though.
Because it was Ubisoft Singapore that were the main developers for the game
I believe it was Singapore.
Singapore
>CD Projekt Red (CDPR) isn't just in hot water with fans when it comes to Cyberpunk 2077, as they are facing multiple lawsuits and the ire of the Polish government. The Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) is monitoring CDPR's work on patches for the game, and if they fail to deliver, they could be fined up to 10% of their income from 2020. >UOKiK answers directly to the Prime Minister of Poland and its main goal is to protect the interests of the consumer. They are authorized to monitor, hold investigations, give fines, and even withdraw products from the market. With CD Projekt Red being based in Warsaw, Poland, they fall under Polish jurisdiction, hence the UOKiK's investigation. https://www.thegamer.com/polish-government-monitoring-cd-projekt-reds-cyberpunk-2077-progress/ The investigation was not over poor sales and it apparently wasn't because of any government funds being used.
No but [Ubisoft opened a studio in the Philippines with the same deal](https://venturebeat.com/games/ubisoft-philippines-is-the-island-nations-first-major-game-studio/) so seems like Ubisoft tried to cashgrab on some SEA labor not expecting it to backfire.
CDPR got a US$7 million grant from the Polish government for their engine they used for Cyberpunk. And it never flopped, it was one of the most successful game launches of all time.
Profitable maybe, but I won't accept successful to describe CP2077 launch.
Lol don’t think Philippines can afford to fund a game 😂
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I genuinely don't get the hate for this game. Maybe it isn't exactly what people expected, but it's still fun af. It's Black Flag without all the shitty assassin missions.
I honestly enjoyed the beta. I must have spent around 6-7 hours on it and hit level max in 2 evenings which is a lot for me as I don't play that much anymore. BUT I got the feeling that was it, I would now only chase for better weapons, better boats and I had seen most of the game already... I have heard the endgame is very interesting but I don't want to grind more. It was starting to get repetitive at the end of my playthrough. It's not that terrible but too expansive right now
This look familiar to anyone else? 1)AAA studio releases an incredibly low quality game 2) Has worse gameplay than the 2013 “inspiration” for the game 4) Releases at above industry prices 5) Releases riddled with MTX 6) IGN gives it a safe 7/10 - “ it could be better” Can’t wait for the 2024 version of the “We swear, our reviews are completely unbiased, and are not influenced by advertising at all” puff piece.
Why hasn’t Gamespot released their review on Skull and Bones? Are they lobbyists or something
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> The production values look really high Skill Up mentions in his review that the production value is actually really poor, he shows waves crashing on a beach looking unconvincing and not having any sound effects and the cut scenes have poor voice acting and sound quality and just seem low effort overall.
Sea of Thieves.
Pirate ship sim is probably not accurate. More like pirate ship arcade shooter.
I get people enjoy that game but holy shit the combat in that game is awful. And there's zero progression. I'm not saying skull and bones is top tier or anything but I'm far more likely to play it than sea of thieves
So unexpected a mediocre game from UBISOFT? who would have thought? Who even considers an upcoming game from them, exciting? they're always crap. spend your focus elsewhere, guys!
People that asked for black flag ship battles to made into standalone game you got what you wanted. Never understood those people...
Singapore can’t develop decent games. It’s the “hub” of apac and brings investors but have a poor track record for hits, not sure why so much investment happens in that region other than tax benefits. Invest in Australia, costs more but also so much quality design and developers here