Skull and Bones' endgame is a mobile style grind and it scares me about what designers think is "fun"

I recently posted a blog about my experience with Skull and Bones, the oft-derided Ubisoft flop that they recently let people play for a week for free in the hopes that they'd like it enough to buy it, which seems unlikely given what it's actually like to play.

I got to the endgame within that week, because I'm stupid, and once I arrived there I was surprised at what I found.

At about the halfway point of the main campaign you're introduced to two sisters who are smugglers of booze and opium, and start working for The Golden Helm, helping make and smuggle contraband with them. This is a required part of the main campaign. The smuggling introduces you to a currency called Pieces of Eight, which are used in a special black market for the best items in the game. Then after you hit "kingpin," more or less the XP level cap for the game, you unlock the actual mechanics for "the helm," which involves "taking over" what the game calls manufactories, which you then fund with silver (the game's main currency) to produce Pieces of Eight that you then have to go and manually collect (though later you can assign extra ships you own to do that for you.)

This sets you down the rabbit hole of mobile style mechanics. You have daily quests you can complete. You have multiple different currencies. You have random loot boxes you can buy (for this in game currency). It's all there. Your manufactories fill up with pieces of eight pretty quickly (in real time) at first but you can then spend those pieces of eight to upgrade them so they can hold more. You can also buy bonuses to get more pieces of eight from certain regions. If you level your manufactories up high enough they start getting attacked and you have to defend them or they stop functioning for a time.

The game more or less becomes a Farmville style cooldown management and currency juggling game (I know Farmville wasn't technically mobile when it exploded, but it used the same principles) with some pirating stuff thrown in on the side. Sure you CAN still sail around plundering or fighting the seasonal bosses if you want to, but that's not really where the game seems to push you. And yes it's true that in order to take over the manufactories (you don't really "take them over" because every player can "own" the same manufactory, you just get them tagged to you so they can produce) or to defend them you have to do fighty pirate stuff, and all of it feeds into equipment for your ship, but the actual console game parts of this are the same activities you've been doing the whole game. The actual end game portion is the mobile grind.

This is different from a game like Destiny, where the end game grind becomes about running raids or special PVP lists. Or a game like Diablo where it builds out its systems with paragon levels and more unique items. It's basically an entirely different game mode layered on top, and while the idea of running a smuggling empire makes sense for a pirate game the way it's structured is straight out of mobile.

The thing is...as far as I can tell there's no predatory monetization. Obviously Skull and Bones is monetized with its season pass and cosmetics, but I do not think you can directly purchase pieces of eight or any of the other end game currencies. And in some ways that's worse.

The whole reason that this particular suite of mechanics was invented was to get people to spend real money. Yes, mobile games (or their Facebook equivalents) were not the first to introduce daily quests or real time delays to things or any of these other mechanics, but that genre was where those mechanics really took root and became fundamental. Real-time waiting was a gimmick in some early PC games when designers were exploring new ideas, but it was never common place, at least until persistent online games, because there was no point in forcing repeated engagement in a physical item you sold once. Nobody at Sega cared if you played Sonic the Hedgehog every day or just played it a lot for a week straight and then moved on; they just wanted you to buy the game and maybe the sequel and tell your friend about it. This was why in many ways game design was better (at least outside the arcade) in the pre-live service era. Designers and players had much closer goal alignment, with the designers rewarded for creating games the players would enjoy most rather than the games that would frustrate players into spending more money to get around artificial barriers to enjoyment.

But Skull and Bones isn't trying to frustrate players into spending more (though it does want them to keep engaging with the game; presumably to sell them cosmetics.) Instead the designers, many of whom probably worked in mobile before moving to the world's first AAAA game, have presumably just come to understand that these mechanics originally intended to manipulate people are...good and enjoyable on their own. They think "it's fun to have to log in every 2 hours to collect your money or your thing stops producing, and then to be able to spend money so you can log in less frequently." They think it's enjoyable to invest time and resources into building out a smuggling empire that will be reset every season (to be fair there IS a seasonal leaderboard so some people might like that aspect.) They think players want to be forced to constantly micromanage a bunch of menus and repeated activities to advance in the game.

And maybe they do?

The Skull and Bones Reddit is full of people who seem to like this system for some reason. Maybe it's the leaderboard aspect, maybe it's just because they were raised on mobile games so it's what they expect, I don't really understand it. What I do know is that I'm in some ways more disturbed when this kind of grind is created not to extract money by manipulation but for its own sake. It shows just how deeply these engagement tactics have infiltrated gaming. The annoying part you pay to get rid of has become the part of the game you...like?

I feel old. And while I'm not playing Skull and Bones anymore, and I barely scratched the surface of this end game stuff, I worry that it's going to infest the games I do like and want to play. Is the next Final Fantasy going to feature real time chocobo raising where you have to wait 3 days from hatching to be able to ride your bird? Will the next Zelda require you to collect Rupees every 5 hours unless you spend all your rupees on extra room at the rupee investment bank? Are we going to get daily quests in Mario?

I play games in part for immersion and to live in a world with less of the "filler" of every day life. I always bristle at being expected to do things on a game's schedule and I don't really like inconvenience for its own sake (which is different from engaging challenge, which I do enjoy.) To see these things work their way into full price games as actual mechanics makes me feel nervous and out of touch. It's not just that I'm old and I don't like change, it's that I'm old and I really don't like THIS particular change.

Because it's bad.