Ubisoft unveiled a new seafaring game about piracy today called Skull & Bones. It looks like you roam around in a pirate ship in the Indian Ocean at the start of the 18th century.
There’s a mini-explosion of games with pirates in them. Ubisoft got excited about the pirate ship warfare in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. And Microsoft’s Rare is working on Sea of Thieves, a co-op player experience. Ubisoft announced the game at its press event at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the big game trade show in Los Angeles this week, and it’s coming in fall 2018.
Justin Farren, creative director for Skull & Bones, said the average life of a pirate was just a few months, since the life was so dangerous. You can get into a ship “armed to the teeth.”
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You can play solo or form a gang of pirates. But in contrast to other pirate games, Skull & Bones has much more realistic ships, while Sea of Thieves is cartoon-like. Skull & Bones also has only a single player per ship, while there are four players in a Sea of Thieves ship.
It comes from Ubisoft Singapore, a studio that has previously assisted other studios in making games. Ubisoft showed a gang of five players with five ships giong against another team with five ships. Victory goes to the team that has the most loot at the end.
There’s a difference between “bloodlust” and claiming loot, as it drives you to make different decisions about how to attack. That means you want to board rivals, rather than just sink ships.
The trailer showed how ships can work together to take on large vessels in the Loot Hunt, and this appears to be how Skull & Bones handles co-op player-vs.-player combat.
