Was Skull And Bones worth playing for free? Not really. My experience as a freeloading freebooter.

Skull and Bones is one of the first games to make me think that AAA game design might actually be going backwards.

Skull and Bones had a free week and I “took advantage” of it to play about 30 hours; finishing the main story, such as it is, and getting 40 out of the 50 Xbox achievements. This involved pretty much no lifing it over the weekend and pouring my time into it during early mornings and evenings and is fairly emblematic of my poor life choices and propensity for playing bad games as a form of self-harm.

A lot of people have spilled a lot of virtual ink about how Skull and Bones is not as good as the 10 year old Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, which is true, but to be fair Black Flag is considered a minor classic and a lot of recent games have trouble matching its level of quality.

My thoughts while playing Skull and Bones were about another 10 year old Ubisoft game with which it shares a lot in common and which is better than it. It’s a game I played through earlier this year before it was unceremoniously shut down on the grounds that Ubisoft is Ubisoft and doesn’t want you to own your games (I took that Ubisoft wisdom to heart and do not own Skull and Bones, nor did I spend a penny to play it.) I speak, of course, about The Crew.

Before I extol the virtues of the Crew, a middling 10 year old game that got roughly the same Metacritic score of about 60 (@imunbeatable80 will tell you that Metacritic is the first and last word on a game’s objective quality) that Skull and Bones did, I should talk about the pirate game first. I will say that I didn’t hate my time with it and even briefly toyed with the idea of purchasing it at a reduced price, though by the time the free week was up I was pretty sure that barring some major reinvention it’s a game I’ll never want to play again.

Skull and Bones is a live service arcadey pirate open world game where you sail around engaging in half-decent naval combat, exploring, and doing a bunch of boring busy work in between. At this point every gamer in the know is aware that the game has a lot fewer features or things to do than Black Flag, of which it started its decade long troubled development as a spin off, and doesn’t do much to deepen or explore the few activities it does deign to let you participate in. Black Flag allowed you to jump off your ship and explore at any time and had an entire Assassin’s Creed game waiting for you on land complete with a complex plot, lots of stealth and sword fighting and assassinations to get in, and even a base building minigame, as well as fleet management, fishing, and underwater exploration.

Skull and Bones has none of that. You can sail around on your ship, attack other ships or try to plunder settlements, gather resources conveniently located on the shore of the land masses you pass (everyone knows the best zinc mines are just veins of metal glittering out of cliffsides like someone had painted them there), or go into one of the precisely two towns or 20 or so beach camps in order to trade or get quests. There’s a little bit more than that, like digging treasure out of one of those beach camps (which involves getting a treasure map and then finding the glowing spot and hitting a button to dig it up), outfitting your ship and managing your cosmetics, and then the very weird end game, but the bulk of the game is sail around and fight or walk around and get quests/trade. It’s not a lot for a live service game so if it’s going to focus on such a limited number of activities those activities better be fantastic, like Destiny’s shooting or Diablo’s character building.

The combat is alright, the exploration has its moments, and pretty much everything else is bare bones and subpar.

Combat in Skull and Bones will be familiar to anyone who played Black Flag, or its forgotten sequel Rogue. You steer your ship around the ocean and can switch to aiming mode, which lets you aim and fire your ship’s weapons (you start with bow, starboard, and port weapons but add stern weapons and a deck weapon that can fire in any direction when you get a medium ship.) Skull and Bones adds enemy weak spots that cause extra damage if you hit them and more status effects ranging from burning (damage over time) to torn sails (restricted movement), as well as crew attacks that do enormous damage if you get close, but also removes any kind of fighting during boarding sequences, allowing you to instantly plunder a damaged enemy ship if you can hook it with your grappling cords.

The greater variety of weapons (including torpedoes, rockets, and mortars) and the weak point system do add a bit more depth to the combat, but the much freer aim you have takes some away. In Black Flag you often had to work to hit an opponent with a broadsides from your cannon while avoiding theirs, whereas in Skull and Bones the only time you can't just aim and shoot at an enemy is if they’re out of range or they’re on your stern and you’re in a small ship with no gun back there. Combat is reasonably fun and it’s always satisfying to hit an enemy’s weak point and set them ablaze, or brace yourself perfectly so you don’t take any damage from an enemy attack (bracing in this game creates a rechargeable shield that absorbs a limited amount of damage.) Bracing also drains stamina, which is used either for that or to run your ship at full speed either in or out of combat. That’s right, your ship has draining stamina and you can’t go full speed if your bar is depleted, which is so dumb it almost feels like a meta joke. It turns out not to be an issue because you can recharge it with food, which is incredibly easy to obtain (just gather some coconuts or durian and cook them and you’ll never run out), but it’s a half-baked mechanic that adds nothing of value. In addition to food you have expendable repair kits that heal you or you can heal in town. If you die in combat you can respawn at a camp or at sea. In a nod to soulslikes, for whatever reason, respawning causes permanent damage that can only be repaired at a settlement, and you drop all your cargo (though not that from your warehouse) and have to pick it up before you die again or it is permanently lost. Permanent loss never happened to me because the game isn’t that hard and you can always just sail straight to your corpse and nab your stuff.

Other than combat the only thing the game really has going for it is exploration. Skull and Bones takes place in a fictionalized version of the Indian ocean with a bunch of fictionalized factions with names like the Ungwana, the Rempah, and the Dutch. The choice to fictionalize the non-European factions makes sense because your character is more or less a colonizer and you will be slaughtering an awful lot of them as you ambush their merchants and plunder their towns, but the main thing it does by way of fantasy is give everyone more or less European style ships, weapons, and economic systems. While this more or less ruins any attempt at world building, and serves to undermine and gloss over the themes of colonialism that the game makes a half-hearted attempt to recognize, the fictionalized land mass and settlements do help to make exploration fresh because you never really know what you’re going to find as you sail around. Discovering new settlements or outposts is fun and satisfying, and encountering new factions with new trade goods and quest lines seems interesting at first until you figure out that none of it matters. But those moments of coming to a broad river and deciding whether to keep sailing around the coast or to cut inland and see what’s there are genuinely exciting, and your first time crossing the open ocean area, full of deadly storms and mighty ships, is nerve wracking. This all wears off before the full map is exposed, but for a time it makes the downtime between combat still engaging. It’s worth noting that the stamina system is extra annoying here, and there’s also weather that can impede your progress, including winds that can slow you and storms on the open sea that throw out damaging rogue waves. Fighting in a storm is supposed to be thrilling and exciting but it just makes it a bit harder to aim. Overall the exploration is decent until you figure out that there’s not a huge amount of variety between regions and all the settlements pretty much look the same (and reuse a bunch of assets) at which point it becomes kind of meh.

Everything else is meh to flat out bad. To call the game’s story undercooked is to give it far too much credit. No attempt was made to cook anything here. There are more or less two major characters, two minor characters (smuggler sisters used to introduce the endgame), and everyone else is a vendor of some sort or another. Some of these vendors do have backstories that they will divulge to you for no apparent reason, and they might give you side quests, but it’s hard to feel immersed when talking to someone whose name is given as “warehouse,” even if they do have childhood trauma they want to share or a task for you.

The two main NPCs and story quest givers are only ever seen in their offices, where they mostly stand and talk at you, sometimes deigning to do dynamic cut scene things like take an object from you or walk around the room a little bit. The first is a pirate kingpin who comes off like the best actor in a community theater troop auditioning for a real professional job with a self-written monologue. The performance isn’t terrible but is extremely hammy, and everything he says is a cliché of some kind up to and including near the end of his quest line where he starts complaining to you about his bad childhood, at which pointed I wanted to say “why don’t you wait a few hundred years and tell that to a therapist, bud? I’m just here to rob and kill on your behalf.” As an NPC he’s okay, though not particularly memorable, and the static and repetitive presentation does a lot to sap any interest you might have in his story of trying to balance the needs of his paymasters in New York with the risk posed by the vicious French and other factions in the region.

Eventually you are told to sail across the sea to the second half of the map, where you meet the second main NPC, an indigenous admiral who has been exiled after a failed rebellion. I’m going to be frank here; she kind of sucks. The first problem is that they hired an apparent non-native speaker as a voice actress, which is, of course, fine, but then they gave her an ornate and complex script that she clearly struggles to wrap her mouth around, resulting in a wooden performance. The second issue is the character herself, who is supposed to be complex and layered, a noble rebel who is also cold and ruthless to those around her, but spends much of her time whining and lecturing you about how powerful men unfairly exclude women and how much the Dutch suck. I am pretty lefty in my politics and I fully agree with the substance of what she has to say, but I don’t know that a shallow pirate game is a good place for facile lectures about the plight of powerful women, delivered completely ahistorically over and over by a character I didn’t care about. It’s not that I was offended as an insecure white dude, I was just bored and wished they’d focused on making her a more colorful, over the top, character rather than lecturing me. Or if they felt the need to lecture at least done a better job of it. I came close to skipping a bunch of her dialog, which is something I never do in games. The game completely lacks side characters or compelling villains or anything else that would drive the narrative forward and it really feels like the story is just there because they had to do something since people expected it, and the live service stuff is not enough to carry the rest of the game.

The admiral’s forced politics speak to another issue with the game, which is that after a while the world feels more like a theme park you’re sailing around in than any kind of actual living place. The non-main characters are among the laziest attempts I’ve seen in gaming. A castaway on some forgotten rock in the middle of the ocean who tells you upon meeting you that he only wants to save up some money and go home will also refuse to sell you certain blueprints for crafted items because you’re not high enough rank. “Yes I want to get out of here but I’m not taking the silver (the game’s primary currency) of some mere Corsair for these blueprints I inexplicably have!” All vendors can also buy as much as you want to sell them, raising the question of how much this dude needs to save up when he can fork over the value of an entire fleet of ships for my gemstones and ivory? That’s a small, albeit funny, issue, but the bigger issue is that none of the factions differentiate themselves in any meaningful way. Because the factions have no depth to them they all kind of blend together and start to feel like they’re digital cast members at a Pirates of the Indian Ocean type attraction. They’re all pretty interchangeable and it’s impossible to care about the politics or the anti-colonial message of a game that doesn’t care enough about its characters or cultures to make them remotely interesting. Perhaps you could get more of a feel for things if you could visit their settlements but you can’t even get out of your ship in the factions’ main cities, just trade with them (in a very limited way) or attempt plunder.

You also can’t do much of anything on foot in the places you can go, so like a theme park if feels like you can run around and buy things and look at stuff but not touch any of the exhibits. Outside the static towns and camps all the gathering activities feel exactly the same, with slightly different timing based QTEs, and while you technically can hunt aquatic animals it’s just the same as regular combat and if you want usable skins you need to use a spear from your smallest ship, meaning that you need to go back to port and switch ships if you want to do any real fishing, so nobody does. During my entire time with the game I never remember seeing anyone fishing and the “fish everything” achievement on Xbox has a 1% completion rate. I did a little and it was boring and annoying.

Also pretty useless is the game’s trade system. You do need quite a lot of silver to keep your ship upgraded and to pay for fast travel, which is expensive and only works from port to port (meaning you need to sail back to an encampment whenever you want to move around the map; very annoying), but while commodities will occasionally be higher or lower price at a given location there’s no good way to track it and you can only buy very limited amounts at a given time so you won’t be playing a trader in this game. Even entire lumbermills will have a max of like 30 planks to sell you, and apparently entire capital cities only have 7 of many commodities. Instead your best ways to make money are doing missions, attacking random ships, or, my personal best, just raiding the random shipwrecks that dot the map, often so close to one another that they reminded me of the old jokes about “meet me at the Starbucks across the street from the other Starbucks.” The economy in general is broken. I got 30,000 free silver to start with from Ubisoft Connect (or maybe just a new player bonus) and never hurt for money for the rest of the game because of it. The rewards for activities have nothing to do with how difficult or time-consuming they are, with entire missions often rewarding a few hundred to a couple thousand silver while each shipwreck will give you 3-400 after you get access to the tool to loot the bigger ones. Plundering settlements is a pointless waste of time because the rewards are so low, and nobody seems to do it except when missions require it. As a gameplay mode it’s basically just point defense, where you sail around within a defined radius and fight off waves of attackers after taking out the settlement’s towers. Mission variety is also lacking. It’s basically all “collect X number of things” or “destroy Y ships/plunder Z settlements” with no real variation.

There is no permanent faction reputation so even after you finish the exiled admiral’s storyline and defeat the Dutch champion the Dutch will continue to ignore you unless you attack them and even trade with you. Some factions are hostile to one another and will fight, allowing you to pick up the loot or defeat the weakened survivors, and there are a couple minor factions that will attack you on sight, but in general the world is placid and nonthreatening. It just all contributes to a world that feels dead with nothing to do. There is nominally PVP but I never engaged with it or saw anyone doing it. You can trade with other players but nobody ever tried to with me. The only real interaction I had with other players was joining a few in random battles, including against some of the larger “world boss” type enemies, which was okay, I guess, but nothing particularly memorable.

Throughout Skull and Bones you are building your reputation and unlocking new ranks, which unlocks new blueprints for ships and equipment to buy and additional missions. This reputation grind feels like normal progression to keep you feeling more powerful as you continue to do things in the world, but it is, in fact, the entire point of the first 25 or so hours of the game. Once you reach Kingpin level, which doesn’t happen naturally by the end of the story though I was close, a lot more mechanics open, and the end game reveals itself as…a mobile game style grindfest. I mentioned the two sisters you meet during the course of the story, both of which run smuggling dens, one in each of the two cities you can go to, and about halfway through the story you are introduced to a premium currency called “pieces of eight” that you can earn through making rum or opium and running it across the map to a buyer (you also have to buy or raid the sugar cane or poppies to do this.) Refining the rum or opium is done on a timer and you only get a certain number of buyers or ingredient capture missions per day.

There’s a black market where you can spend the currency for the best equipment in the game, but the whole thing starts out feeling like yet another side activity. In fact it is the focus of the end game. After you reach kingpin you gain the ability to capture and run “manufactories,” which are located at settlements you can trade or plunder with normally and which you can fund with silver to produce more pieces of eight over time, which you then have to manually pick up (or send one of your other ships to go collect.) Additional currencies are also unlocked and basically the whole activity is a time gated currency sink where you spend your pieces of eight to upgrade your manufactories so they can hold more currency between pick ups (and thus have to be attended to less often) and then you have to capture mor and defend them and spend money to open up new territories etc… This is how you get the best equipment in the game. It all feels like grindy busy work and I wanted none of it, but end game players have leader boards to compete in and gear up through this process to take on the seasonal bosses, who are just extra tough world bosses sailing around the world, not interesting or unique dungeons or activities.

It's worth noting that at Kingpin level you also unlock the ability to refine the materials you collect in the world (up until then you can mine nickel and you can buy or steal nickel ingots for crafting but you can’t refine nickel into ingots until like 25 hours in) and upgrade the base stats of your ship (rather than just swapping out guns, armor, and equipment.) Why are these mechanics locked to so deep in the game? Presumably to give you something new to do, but it’s stupid and makes material collection totally pointless for the first 20 or so hours.

In terms of monetization, Skull and Bones is not that bad. There are cosmetics you can buy, and a battlepass with free and premium tiers (the free tiers give you access to some very good guns, which does a lot to undermine the game’s loot and crafting systems), but it’s not really pay to win and also not overly obtrusive. It’s very strange because there are a bunch of currencies associated with the black market, but they are gameplay focused as far as I can tell.

I can’t say that I hated my time with Skull and Bones but as I played more and got deeper in it all felt more and more pointless. There’s just nothing driving this game other than the desire to see the numbers go up. The story isn’t compelling, the upgrades mostly don’t meaningfully change things, the world feels dead and static, and while the combat is fun it’s not so fun that it can carry the entire game, which it has to once you’re done exploring the map (and honestly before then.) It’s clear from the way all the systems fail to interact and work alongside each other that this was a very troubled development without a lot of direction. I can see why someone might play this if they really love pirate games and just want a world to tool around in, sinking merchants and harvesting coconuts, but I got sick of it in less than a week of admittedly fairly heavy play. Okay for a normal world game but not great for a live service title. It works best as a podcast game, but the lack of pausing and the static world make it limited even for that.

I should note here that the technical performance on the Xbox was quite bad. I had three crashes that forced me to literally unplug my console to get it working again. Several times there were interactions that stopped working and forced me to quit and restart. The final climactic battle of the game had a weird bug that killed me through crew mutiny for being outside the boss arena even though I was actually inside it, and more or less ruined the encounter because of the disadvantage it put me at with reduced health. This is several months after release and I’m not the only one who experienced bugs and glitches. For an AAAA game it lacks a lot of polish.

As I said at the outset I couldn’t help think about The Crew as I played Skull and Bones. The Crew was also a vehicle based open world online only game, got a very similar critical reception, but somehow had so much more to it than the 10 year later game. Much more varied environments, large cities to check out, a number of NPCs with distinct and memorable personalities, including actual villains who did stuff to you rather than just having you hear about their villainy by actors struggling with their lines, and so much more gameplay variety it’s almost unfair to compare them. When I wrote about The Crew I talked about the little challenge activities that popped up as you drove around the world. There was more variety in those little throwaway activities than in all of Skull and Bones. The Crew’s story missions and side activities also gave you more to do, and the constant leveling up of your cars as you got new parts upgrades was very satisfying. Skull & Bones’ best pitch is as a podcast game where you sail around harvesting and raiding and having a chill time, but The Crew is so much better as a cruise game that it feels unfair to compare them.

And the Crew was mediocre! It was widely seen as a creative failure! I’m not even arguing that it’s great. It has a lot of flaws. However, at least it tries to engage the player and feels like it was made by developers who were trying to do something meaningful, and succeeded in building out a truly impressive and enjoyable map. Skull and Bones looks prettier but otherwise feels like it was put together by people who had to make a semi-functional game with a lot of randomly imposed features dictated by executives who were much more focused on funneling players into a mobile game style grind for some reason (more on that in a separate post.) The fact that critics viewed them as equivalent shows how expectations has fallen. In 2014 reviewers expected a solid campaign and sharp racing and were put off by the mediocre story, subpar handling, and exploitative microtransactions. In 2024 it feels like reviewers were mostly content to have a game that mostly worked and had some fun that could be squeezed out of it. While game design has advanced in a lot of ways in the last 10 years at the top end, I think that mediocre games have gotten worse. They now focus more on monetization and less on trying to be ambitious. I want to write about this more, but suffice it to say I’d recommend playing The Crew over Skull and Bones if it were still possible to play The Crew, which it isn’t, because Ubisoft.

So do I recommend playing Skull and Bones at all? No. Not really. Especially in exchange for money. It might be worth it for 5-10 hours of tooling around and seeing the pretty world and the decent combat, but it doesn’t go anywhere worthwhile, choosing instead to just sail around in circles wasting your time. If it were $10 or less I’d probably still be slightly tempted to pick it up just because I like revisiting open worlds from time to time to tool around a bit, but other than that I don’t have any urge to go back. I did put in 30 hours, though, so if you read my blogs or interact with me in forums over the next few years expect me to whip it out to prove my bad game bonafides. It may not quite be Balan Wonderworld, but it’s closer to that than it is to Tears of the Kingdom. AAAA!