Skull and Bones First Impressions | Not so smooth sailing

After so long, Skull and Bones is finally launching in just a few days! While people are slowly getting to experience the game with the recent open beta, we were able get some hands-on time with the game during a special media event in Ubisoft Singapore. Our time with the game lasted roughly around 3 hours so, while I wasn’t able to really explore anything amazingly deep with the game, I was able to get through the opening moments of the game and then we got to experience some late game content. In a nutshell, the game does look great and its amazing that its here but it seems to be lacking a bit of wind on it sails. Here are my Skull and Bones first impressions.

First off, I wanna get it out of the way that the visuals of this game look really good. This is especially true for the main towns that you go to that serves as hubs for you to do your shopping, upgrades, quests, etc. The structures and the details just all look really nice especially since the devs did mention that they drew inspiration from various real world locations. Sailing looks nice as well especially when you go first person and you’re able to see the people inside your ship and you can see the waves splash as you tear through the sea. Looking at the various things you can explore over the horizon is pretty nice as well especially when you see things like a huge sea monster that you need to fight. So yes, I can say that this game nails the visuals.

In terms of things to do, this game was, while it does have story, which I sadly can’t comment on as I didn’t have much time to play the game’s campaign, it’s safe to say that this game was really built with multiplayer in mind. While sailing around, you’ll practically see a whole horizon’s worth of things to do and explore. From what I saw, there were places where you could dock, places where you could farm resources, elite enemy ships that you could battle, and even massive sea monsters that you could slay! World events would happen as well where you could go PVP to get possession of a treasure map and it would be a race on who could get it and dig up the treasure first. On paper, there are tons of things for you to just do especially with friends.

However, there are also the negatives that weigh the game down. For the parts that I played, I honestly think that the game needs more compelling music to drive home the epic feel of being a pirate sailing across the seas. A few moments, I felt, could have been more epic with the right music playing. I will admit that at certain parts of my playthrough, I kept wishing that the game would play something that would resemble the music from the Pirates of the Caribbean. I mean, sure, there are the shanties that you could make your crew sing but I just felt that better music would have aided this game so much.

The open waters, as interesting as they may be, were kind of weighed down by 2 specific things for me – the combat loop and the traversal. Let’s talk about the latter first. So you need to sail. Fast travel can only be done while you’re on land so if you find yourself at sea, ya gotta hoof… err sail it. The weird thing is that the ship had a stamina meter. Lemme describe this. When you’re sailing, you have 3 levels / modes / gears (at least from what I played. Don’t know if this changes later on). The first gear is STOP – basically, sails go down and movement stops. Second gear is to GO – sails go down and you can start moving. The last gear is GO FASTER which makes your ship speed up but at the cost of a draining stamina bar. I’ll be honest that, while I was traversing, this mechanic really didn’t feel as great.

Finally, you have combat. So the way it works is that, depending on your set-up, you would have canons on the left, right, front, and back of your ship, all of which you can use to fire at opponents. You would also have an alternate fire where (at least in my case) you could rain Molotov-ish fire over your enemies. This seems great and all but it is something that feels like it gets old fast. This is mostly because, even if you have so many cannons, you will most likely only use one side in a certain battle. Maybe a mix of the side and the front maybe, which is 2 sides but the problem becomes that combat will look like this: FIRE > RELOAD (which takes a while) > FIRE AGAIN > ALT FIRE WHEN AVAILABLE. Rinse repeat. I mean there is a chance that maybe I wasn’t playing optimally but, in my case, I’ve had battles where I was face-to-face with a ship and we just like were waiting for our canons to reload while awkwardly staring at each other. There were other mechanics in battle as well that I noticed. If I was close enough, it would (at times) trigger a musket rifle attack from the people in my ship to theirs for some added damage. Then there was a prompt that allowed me to board my enemy’s ship which is a finisher of sorts. At first, I did think that this would allow me to do some other combat mechanic like maybe a hand-to-hand showdown of sorts but this was actually just more of a cutscene that shows my men jumping to board the other ship and would cut.

Does this mean that Skull and Bones is a game that isn’t fun? I wouldn’t say that. While the flaws are there, these can possibly get overshadowed by a strong multiplayer experience. This being a live service game, Ubisoft has revealed their one year roadmap and, hopefully, the content there can make the game shine over these setbacks.

As of writing this though, we are already in the process of making a full review of the game so do stay tune for that. This game has been long in the making so I do hope that it works out especially for the fans who really waited for this game’s launch. While my Skull and Bones first impressions is that the game is bound to have some rough waves on launch, hopefully, the game can power through with content and maybe a few tweaks here and there.