Too Little, Too Late? – ‘Skull and Bones’ Is Finally Adding Land Combat, but Do Enough People Actually Care?

Skull and Bones has to be one of the longest-running jokes in the gaming industry. Launching as the world’s first “AAAA” game, players were quick to drop off of the pirate simulator. The main reason being? You couldn’t actually be a pirate when the time came. You were, more or less, your ship and nothing more. Maybe the success of Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii has Ubisoft reconsidering what it means to be a pirate. Seeing how quickly Sea of Thieves dominated the PlayStation fanbase had Ubisoft ready to set sail again. The Year 2 Roadmap for Skull and Bones is finally bringing land combat to the game, but is it too late for a proper redemption arc?

If ‘Skull and Bones’ Would Have Launched With This Content, Maybe We’d See a Better Response to the Game Overall

11 years. It took Ubisoft 11 years, multiple restarts, and countless dollars to finally get Skull and Bones out of port. And when it finally was released? It wasn’t received as well as they may have hoped. The biggest complaint was the lack of things to really do. You could explore the lands on foot, sure. But who wants to play a Pirate game if they can’t actually be a pirate? In a massive overhaul to the base game, Skull and Bones is finally getting a proper roadmap, alongside plenty of new content along the way.

But is this enough to save the game? This feels more like a sunk cost fallacy than anything of note and importance. Maybe it’s a way to get people ready for the oft-rumored Black Flag remake. Or maybe it’s just a way to try to save one of the most expensive video game projects ever created. Regardless, I’ve had a copy sitting in my Ubisoft account since release, and I have yet to find a reason to boot it up.

Will I check this out to see if it has enough juice to save the game? Maybe. If done right, this could be the shot in the arm that Skull and Bones needs to be a more competitive option in the multiplayer scene. But with recent comments by higher-ups at Ubisoft, I feel like there just isn’t enough here to justify more people playing the game.