Skull & Bones
Ubisoft Singapore breaks away for the high seas
PC, PS4, Xbox One
While it’s one thing to coat a vehicle combat game in pirate paint, it’s another to encourage interactions between players that evoke that fantasy on the fly, or to use the theme to suggest strategies with real competitive applications. Skull &
Bones’ strength isn’t that it’s a multiplayer pirate ship battle simulator; it’s that it could
only be a multiplayer pirate ship battle simulator. The fundamentals will be familiar to anybody who played Assassin’s Creed III,
Black Flag or Rogue – Ubisoft Singapore was responsible for the naval-combat sections in those games, and that expertise translates directly here. “What I saw was strong fundamental gameplay that addressed the fantasy of naval power and combat,” creative director Justin Farren, who joined Ubisoft Singapore as a closing producer on Black Flag, tells us. “The linear sequences in ACIII really leant themselves to something bigger.”
Huge age-of-sail warships are controlled from over the captain’s shoulder, with steering on the left stick and the camera on the right. Weapon selection is a matter of looking in a particular direction – lining up broadsides against opponents to the port or starboard, or firing deck guns and special weapons from the stern or bow. Speed is determined by furling (and unfurling) your sails in increments, which are influenced by the direction and speed of the wind. The boxed-off sections of the Indian ocean used for structured multiplayer have fixed wind patterns, and learning to take advantage of these is as important as learning the physical layout of each area.
There’s much more variety in ship types than in the Assassin’s Creed games where these mechanics made their debut. The difference between a frigate and a sloop is pronounced, both in how they handle and how much of a beating they can take. Broadly speaking, the ship archetypes fill in for character classes; there are tanks, snipers and close-range brawlers, although the nature of naval warfare changes the way these roles feel (as it should).
“We looked at traditional RPG archetypes that people would understand – they know what a tank is, what a healer is, what DPS is – and asked if this would make sense in our world,” Farren says. “What we found is that there were lots of ships that had similar roles, and that pirates were very adaptable and adaptive in how they’d modify their ships to be more effective predators.”
These are large, slow war machines encountering each other over a relatively flat ocean with little in the way of cover – save for other ships. Coordinating with your allies to effectively trap opponents, line up deadly shots, and protect vulnerable craft takes communication, skill, and good reading of the wind. There’s a high skill ceiling here, which
“We can’t set out to make ourselves an esport, but we can make it competitive”
bodes well for Skull & Bones’ competitive future and is quite the evolution for a set of systems that began life as a singleplayer bolt-on. They translate well to multiplayer, Farren argues, because of the simulation at their core: “Our game is entirely physics based: everything from the ocean to the cannonballs. Being able to read that stuff, in realtime, in a shared space with other players – you’re going to have to be really in tune with it.”
In Loot Hunt mode, two teams of pirates converge on a convoy of AI-controlled merchant ships. Destroying them yields, as you might have guessed, loot, which is held in the cargo hold of the player who collects it. Sunken players drop a portion of their haul when they die, but can respawn to attempt to reclaim it – up to a certain point. In the endgame of a match, powerful AI pirate hunters arrive and begin indiscriminately attacking both teams, who must race to a shared escape zone, no longer able to respawn if they die. The winning team is the one that extracts the most loot; no matter how many merchant ships a team raids, the only thing that counts is who escapes.
How a team solves that strategic problem is laudably open-ended. In our demo, a rather one-sided first game ends in ignominious defeat as our opponent commits four ships to open combat while a fifth, a heavily armoured frigate, focuses on raiding the merchant convoy. Although we hold our own in battle, we’re unable to catch the frigate before it can escape with an absolutely vast amount of gold – far more than we could muster even if we’d all made it out, which we haven’t. This ‘four protect one’ strategy, if you’ll forgive us some MOBA parlance, is devastatingly effective.
It has its weaknesses, however. Our opponent attempts the same strategy in the second match and, early on, it yields similar results, the pirate hunters arriving with another frigate heavily loaded with gold. This time, however, our team has been communicating more effectively, and we’ve switched to a fast, but lightly armoured sloop. Using our new craft’s long-ranged cannons and mortar, we’re able to strip the armour from the frigate’s port side – enough to sweep in close at full sail and begin a boarding action. Unlike the Assassin’s
Creed games’ naval combat, there’s no direct hand-to-hand combat in Skull & Bones. Boarding is more like a finishing move on a vulnerable opponent, playing out as a short cutscene. Crucially, though, doing it doesn’t just destroy your enemy. It steals their gold, too.
Suddenly, that ultra-valuable frigate is exposed as a huge strategic liability, and our sloop has become the most valuable ship in the area. Knowing that they can’t win unless they take us down, the remaining enemy ships come about in an attempt to block our exit. Spying an opportunity, a teammate in a frigate pulls ahead and positions the bulk of their ship between our sloop and the enemy team, physically blocking the first round of cannon fire. They then turn hard into the enemy line, colliding with the lead ship and tangling the others for long enough for us to escape and win the game for our team. It’s a punch-theair moment, the kind of against-all-odds victory that the best team-multiplayer games make space for. Crucially, it stems from the strategic decisions made by both teams, rather than random chance. Had our opponents chosen to spread the treasure between all of their ships, the scenario would have played out very differently.
“We wanted to give players an opportunity to have comebacks,” Farren says. “We wanted players to feel that if they worked together at the beginning they could set the tone of the match, but if they were unsuccessful they had a way to come back. We can’t set out to make ourselves an esport, but we can make good decisions to make it competitive.”
Ubisoft Singapore isn’t talking too much about Skull & Bones’ broader structure, which will extend the principles of competitive matches to much bigger and more freeform hunting grounds. Loot Hunt, however, is designed to be a microcosm of the open-world half of the game. “The mode reflects the model of the world,” Farren says, “which is that pirates want loot, so they go to a trade route, and when they get there there’s not enough loot so they fight. That’s the way the world works.”