if we be real for a sec, lower budget will make the creators develop the game in more creative ways usually to achieve certain tasks. unlike today, slap that UE5 engine and raytracing and call it a day.
I have a cousin who worked in the Singapore office. This game single-handedly turn his dream of working in game dev to agreeing with his mother when she said decades ago that working in video games would bring him neither happiness nor wealth.
to be brutally honest if you apply / work at ubisoft and call yourself a game dev after ...2015, you need immediate psychiatric help but in general that sucks for your cousin
If you guys feel bad for the Ubisoft staff that used to make the good games in past, dont. Since they were fired long ago, clearly shown by decline in game quality.
I think there was a previous video from asmongold where either veilguard or the assassin's creed game had half of its developers were fresh outta water.
This is true. Patrice Désilets, the original creator of AssCreed has made exactly one game since AC:Brotherhood in 2010, and it was garbage. Michel Ancel, the creator of Beyond Good & Evil is a literal scammer. BG&E2 has been in development for 15 years.
The senior devs that made Black Flag have left the SIngapore studio from 2016-2019. The ones who ship S&B are the new guys who don't make AC Black Flag.
This is so common amongst studios that, in previous eras, you’d consider reliably capable of delivering good/great games. Bioware/EA, the many studios acquired by MS, CDPR*. Big companies ->more draconian HR departments ->more crusty old men ousted = brain drain. Replaced, evidently, by creatively and ethically bankrupt “talent” who subscribe to modern propaganda. If I’m being optimistic, I feel like we’ll have to suffer maybe 5 more years of this nonsense, as a lot of the long developed games get flushed out and fail miserably. Then maybe activist shareholders can do us all a favour for once and go after the board for failing in their fiduciary responsibility by targeting the non existent modern audience. Then again, the shareholders will probably vote for more loot boxes. A big part of me is indifferent to all this, I’ve got most of my enjoyment from indies and eastern developed games in recent years anyway. Let big western devs burn themselves to the ground. *The jury is out on CDPR for me personally, but as they’re a Canadian studio now I’m not optimistic.
When you are ideologically inclined to push out the "old guard"(mostly talented vets and normal talented people), you will eventually have 150% of the worst talent and junior devs that need heavily babysat to make up for it. I'm surprised half of these games even boot up. Lol
there is no way the people who own the studios not know this. They just don't care, to them it's either money or no money. There should be a global wipe of all characters that think that way. Reduce the player base on Earth y'know
@dabartos4713 your right, it's about money, the fact is, the more experience and skill you have, the more valuable you are. The more valuable you are the more the company has to pay you for your work. Why do that when I can fire you and hire 10 18-22 year olds to replace you for half the cost!. It sounds smart. If you lobotomize yourself first.
@@dabartos4713 they make their money from investors, stickmarkets, and backdoor deals etc.... game sales dont matter as much anymore like they used to thats why they release compmete SLOPFEST across the industry regardless of what we buy or dont buy
@@dabartos4713they make their money from investors, stickmarkets, and backdoor deals etc.... game sales dont matter as much anymore like they used to thats why they release compmete SLOPFEST across the industry regardless of what we buy or dont buy
Also a year ago, they released a remastered version of it with full co-op, graphic update, all the mission packs and some extra and modern system control/ settings options. If you already owned the game before, it was a just free patch.
@@YaToGamiKuro it's not the same people lmao that's why it's good, people are still experiencing or coming back from years of not playing it and they finish it because it's a good game.
I’ve been in the insider program for skull and bones since the announcement of the game and I can 100% confirm they sunk the ship because of the bad leadership decision making. They have redone the game and its concept multiple times, they even removed finished ship models from the game that you see in the E3 Trailer. The game in the current state is the least user friendly game. Like the game actively tries to make you quit the game and play something else. The E3 2017 version had a lot of meat on it and its pvp modes, its such a shame they have thrown that version away. It basically outperforms the current version in every way: All Ship classes, PVP modes, pve open world, settlement raids, realistic sailing, customization and more. It was an already finished game comparably to For honor but with much more content to start with. In 2024 almost 2025 they started to add pvp elements and that’s it. They try to steal your money with an insane amount of microtransactions and they don’t even have their map expansion or big ship classes yet. They just add random cosmetics and reskinned ships every season. Really I am serious, the new ships are basically remodeled ships that already exist. They just change stats and slightly the appearance. Skull and bones deserves the worst managed game of the year award
If you account for outsourcing and the whole decade of development, sources say it's actually 650 to 850 millions not 200. Concord was around 400 millions (200 millions before the alpha, 200 millions after)
@@Lograh Lets assume they have 4 times the amount on all other platforms. Its still £20000 per player just for dev cost... Not sure that's really better.
A quick look at Ac: Black Flag will tell you everything about why Skull and Bones failed. The gameplay, graphics, art style, everything was BETTER in a game 10 years older than skull and bones.
Ubisoft wanted to cancel it long ago, but Singaporean goverment didnt let them because they had a partnership, and Singapore wanted to produce a AAA game to promote their country and public image of it
@@SadBoysCollectiveCirca96Nah man, I lost a friend to AC BF. He was gone for like a whole year. Old school AC fans might not have liked it but it was a massive hit
Between digital distribution being way cheaper, and having a larger audience to sell to, AAA devs should be making more than ever. They're inflating their costs through the roof for no reason, and making moves like this where a game is delayed 6 times, looks like shit, and still gets launched.
The funniest thing I remember seeing about Skull n' Bones was when, if you're starting a new game, it gives you this spiel about how you need to not cheat, and be kind to any & all players you are with... in a game about _pirates,_ mind you.
It's crazy when you think about it, AC black flag is probably the best Ubisoft pirate game adaptation. They really spent 8 years. Building a new pirate game with inspiration drawn from AC Black flag, but it was actually worse and less than its inspiration. How do you make less when you had more to start with?
Easy, drop a good vase and try to put it back together. You will usually miss a few tiny pieces. it will usually look ok, unless you're Ubisoft and kept dropping it for eight years in a row, there was no way they were gonna put this Fabergé back together.😂
Many publishers/developers have failed to maintain their game engine. The talent who made it possible are rarely at the companies anymore, so you have a bunch of people coming in to try to understand and work around something that they often have little or no understanding of.
EVE online has basically collapsed because of this. At one point they tried to turn off the billboards in the game and it broke the entire game for a week 😂
Sid Meier made a compelling and addictive pirate game on an 8bit computer with 42kb of ram. Design vision is everything. Ubisofts vision: 1- pirates 2- make money
Black flag was such an easy lay up for this game, they could have extended the tech to make this amazing but they fumbled badly. It's truly staggering incompetence and Sea of Thieves came along and beat them to it starting from scratch. They could have taken Black Flag, network the ocean using shared RNG seeds and clock sync, network the vessels, finessed the wave LODs mesh generation for improved inter-ship vis (really the only semi-expensive part). Keep the combat system and construct whatever game mechanics you choose around that core (treasure farming, sea monster raids, and ship upgrades for doubloons etc). It is utterly incomprehensible that they could not get from Black Flag to a decent multi-player experience in 2-3 years, except that their process must have been thoroughly dysfunctional.
You're right if they wanted to just make a good sequel to black flag with multiplayer it was extremely straightforward but live service principles (and the mythical unlimited money bucket associated with it) means they have to dilute the moment to moment experience to keep you hooked for 5000 hours and incentivize whaling .
@@bearstrike The type of live service you're discussing is a content issue. They absolutely could have tried to turn what I described into a money printer. I'd have done it with a larger map on a region of a globe (not a rectangle) with new regions unlocked over time so it could be shipped faster, but what do I know. The most important part of this is a compelling gameplay experience underpinning everything. Gameplay regressions like their ship-boarding in a market that had already seen better were never going to get a warm reception from gamers. I can guess why they fumbled this. For network gameplay during boarding you must lock your networked positional frame of reference to the ship you are boarding punting ship positional networked errors out to the world (inverse ship transform). You can even grapple hook nearby ships to a common frame first (not that you really need to). This can all be done without a transition screen, it's a minor technical challenge but solvable with sound technical leadership. A lot of the claims swirling around about why they had to take an entirely new approach and throw out the Black Flag engine are vague and make no sense.
@@SadBoysCollectiveCirca96I don't like seeing people lose their jobs but then I don't like mediocre games being rewarded either. Because then we will just get more of them
I will never understand how Ubisoft missed this so badly. Everyone literally just wants Black Flag without the Assassin’s Creed parts and make it online play. 10/10 legendary game EZ
They had the ability to make AC4 CO-OP like AC Unity You can have another player on your ship and you can go past other ships while they jump on clearing the deck, you then anchor next to the ship, fire the cannons once then board the ship for resources, then you can do the same thing for them on their ship, You could easily have hours of fun doing that Then you can have sea battles, if you lose the battle you lose 10% of your resources if they successfully board you, if they sink you instead of boarding you lose 5% of your resources
Beyond and evil good 2 also got the same treatment and no one one knows if it's even being worked on or not. Ubisoft completely stopped telling any info about it
BGaE2 is hopeless imo. They promised too much and their recent games proved they have neither the skill nor technology to even pretend to fulfill them.
@@bryce4724 Here in Brazil, the minimum wage is R$1,412 per month. Some new games, like Call of Duty or FIFA, cost around R$339, which is about 22% of the monthly minimum wage. It’s a significant expense, especially since earning the minimum wage is very common. I don’t live in a big city where everything tends to be more expensive. Regarding food expenses, it depends on the family size. In my case, for a family of four, we spend approximately R$1,400 per month.
Yeah, games are a luxury not a necessity. A food company could charge a 100 dollars for food if there were no competitors because people need food. People don’t need video games so making them so ludicrously priced isn’t going to work as we’ve started to see already.
@@bryce4724 Here in Brazil, the minimum wage is R$1,412 per month. Some new games, like Call of Duty or FIFA, cost around R$339, which is about 22% of the monthly minimum wage. It’s a significant expense, especially since earning the minimum wage is very common. I don’t live in a big city where everything tends to be more expensive. Regarding food expenses, it depends on the family size. In my case, for a family of four, we spend approximately R$1,300 per month.
I am a IT project manager. This is a classic "feature Creep" situation. What this means is that when you have a Project like Skull and Bones features are constantly being proposed and added to the project AFTER the design has already been decided. This constant adding of new features, redesigns, re-thinks, second-guessing results in delays, cost overruns, and generally a inferior result. Which is precisely what happened here. They should have stuck to the original design -single player version of Black flag, which focused only on the naval stuff. When they added "live services" and "narrative driven" and multiplayer and a whole host of unnecessary features they killed their own project.
Nope not feature creep they cut out the fun part. Esp the sea battle from black flag part. And the resource gathering/ crafting part are designed with micro transaction in mind. They are also planning for skin/ship/weapon ingame purchase. Making the game a live service husk.
It's actually depressing how many games are pumped with millions of $'s... Built for the shareholder and not the gamer, then they scratch their heads why the games tank?! When will they figure it out?
The talented people will start new studios, make great games and sell to big developers. The big companies will eventually ruin the franchise while the they chase the talent away. Repeat
That Blackflag gameplay reminded me how stunning Ubisoft games were when they came out. Industry leading graphics, incredible storylines, and not afraid to push boundaries with bold contents like in Farcry3. Now Ubisoft games are repetitive gameplay on bloated maps. It’s sad to see how much they fell
Hell, look at Far Cry 2. Whether or not you like the gameplay and story, it did a lot of technical things well. Its graphics were amazing when it released and it had amazing flame physics that I have yet to see topped to this day, not to mention little details like being able to shoot individual branches off of trees.
To be fair, I work at a very corpo business (at least from the perspective of our customers) and we had nerf guns in the office. That and lots of foam balls we'd toss to get people's attention that eventually all ended up getting stuck on the cable rack in the ceiling. We even pulled a large table into the middle of the dev cubicles so we can set up a board game and take a turn every time someone stood up. Management doesn't care what the devs are doing so long as the job gets done on time. The problem is when the devs play around outside of break time or normal downtime (i.e. compiling or waiting for deployment) and fall behind schedule.
This game shouldve been most straightforward release ever, or at least as starightforward as game development can get. Take AC black flag, remove the assassins creed aspects from it and replace it with a strictly pirate centered story and updated graphics. The gameplay was already there, the crafting system was already there, the ship combat and traversal was already there. And they fucked it up beyond all comprehension and turned it into a pirate skinned World of Warships. Its honestly impressive really how greed and mismanagement can fuck up so badly on what shouldve been a license to print money. Unbelievable
There's probably Skyrim modders out there that would be able to do that, and more, and it wouldn't take them 10 years. It would be Skyrim though, not AC: Black Flag, but maybe you get the point
When typing or writing about money, you're supposed to use either the "$" or the word "dollars", not both. You're welcome. Schools have really just given up, eh?
Loyal and true gamers who catapulted Ubisoft into Fortune 500 were taken for granted or abandoned. People who once called us 'losers' cuz we were gamers or loved comic books, now use our tech to make sick money and destroy self-esteem of others. I recently made a video of X360 as the last great generation, hope I'm wrong....
yeah they hate gamers now, because now Ubisoft is full of activists, who are woke and actually hate us gamers, because we want fun, not a crazy, woke ideology
Great games release every single year without exception. Just don't focus at games with big marketing budgets and look at the games developed by people that funnel all their cents into making the best experience possible to their tools and expertise. Cuphead's top notch for example. I don't play many FPS titles so i'm not really sure what's the general consensus over the current games, but at this time there are so many great and free FPS titles i don't think they are living in the worst timeline. Though PvE-FPS fans might be fucked (how's Helldivers doing).
@@miltongp01 ps4/xbox one generation was atrocious. if anything, we have much better critically received games at the halfway point in the ps5 generation than that of the ps4 generation
37:10 Even NMS and CP2077 pretty much irreparably damaged their respective companies reputations. The fixing of those games salvaged a lot of that good will, but I guarantee you there's gonna be a lot less people pre-ordering Light No Fire, and I can pretty much guarantee there will be people on the fence about Witcher 4 despite how GOAT'd Witcher 3 is just because of the CP2077 release. I know I'll definitely be waiting for reviews whereas I pre-ordered CP2077.
Video games are like paper airplanes. At first they were exceedingly simple, but they did their job. Over time they became more refined, showing greater fly times... but then something happened. The process got too complicated, too lengthy. Until eventually they became 100+ fold messes that flew worse than the originals.
@@OrangejuiceandsandwichYou would be surprised, Diablo 4 back then cost millions over millions of dollars. They put ads on it on a global scale, changed some locations for ads, with celebrities like Megan Fox. They do that to create hype and well, it worked for Diablo 4. They bought the game like crazy.
also dont forget that they basically trashed the game multiple times & started from 0 again. the devs prob gave up. they worked for nothing over & over again, so i would done the same, just unlucky that at some point they not gonna trash it again & actually release it. but hey, at least it has more players than concord & artifact together.
It was the only way to retrospectively justify the money they shoveled onto the bonfire to create it. "Quadruple A" is a construction of MBAs who never understood their business or tech, trying to cover for a disastrous and bloated development cycle.
Imagine, game devs and journo put all their effort into painting us as the villain instead of this. A bloated market strategy and project management that will never succeed. SMH.
I was a huge CDPR fan and i still haven't changed my mind on Cyberpunk. Yes it's flashier today but the main story still sucks, the man who ruined Cyberpunk was the guy so bad at planning they had to cut the part of the game where you work your way up enough with Jackie to even be noticed by Dexter de Shawn. That was the fun part, having a time bomb in your head after the prologue in a character you have no attachment to is just stupid. You don't know Jackie long enough to care when he dies, what you learn about him at the funeral should be what you learn about him before he dies. If you think Cyberpunk 2077 is a good game today you are a cat and like shiny things like laser pointers, not story.
I remember that before cyberpunk came out, there was a lot of devs that worked on w3 created their own studios. A lot of them. Good ambitious devs left the company, they had to hire a lot of new people. Cdpr is no longer the same company that created Witcher 3, people who did create Witcher are gone doing their own things.
Black Flag was an objectively OUTSTANDING Pirate game, imo it actually did nail what a Pirate game should be. Even without the AC title backing.. that game would’ve been played and loved by a lot of us. I played it for HOURS on end. But I just don’t see myself stepping away from Warzone, Rivals, or Fortnite to play an online “Ship Shooter” I think a lot of us love the idea of it. Especially us One Piece fans, but delivering something that can compete with other Battle Royales is just tough. That being said, Ubisoft has turned to liquid shit and didn’t help the situation. But they’ve been dead to me since they ruined the AC franchise shortly after Black Flag, so I wasn’t too upset about S&B failure
My ideal pirate game is an "open sea" mmo, start off just a dude, try to join someones crew or start with a little paddle boat and set out. Island exploration, ai crew that can be found/looted that give small bonuses to ship durabilityj, speed, cannon fire, etc. Hiding loot mechanic (bury your treasure) but when you do that, it generates a map in your inventory, if you die, your map is lootable. Mutiny mechanics. Combat as a pirate would first person.
@@arthurgoonie4596 yea but the ai crew is important to me. Less focused on having to manage the ship, and focus on the fun stuff. But if you want to, remove your crew and have a player crew. My ideal “crew” mechanic would like suidoken where you recruit from a list of 100 or so crew members throughout the world that find through playing. “Finding the best crew for your purposes”. Oh and a Torguga like island for all the dirty pirates to hangout and gamble and other minigames.
@brandonmeyer2327 it wouldn't be hard for them to add that I think they'd just add some board games to sanctuaries and use Skelton ai for crew mates the only problem is sea of thieves is all open these is no safe zones so your ship would get sunk unless they add like really strong non ai skeleton ships to manage people that attack within safe zones but it defeats the point of a pirate game.
@@arthurgoonie4596 Well they could just add a "North India Trading Company" that hangs around towns. Except Tortuga where... anything goes :D. Its just crazy how skull and bones not add ANY of the fun pirate stuff.
"Skull and bones" was a failure because it was a lie from the beginning. It should have been like a mix from atlas and black flag. Ship design, a crew, a captain, with occasional ports to drop and secure loot. No base building on land. Your ship is your base and the more loot / money you have the bigger your ship and crew. Sea monsters, treasure maps, PVP, pve, and every player would have their own upgrade trees based on what role they chooses. Captain has captain buffs healing skills, cannon crew has cannon / stun / tank light dps / fighting skills, your deck hands have repair skills / long range high DPS / scouting / treasure map skills. It's not hard to envision. You can port islands for raids and treasure. You can port at pirate islands for banking and upgrades. You can sail the open sea and fight various sea monsters for reputation gains and treasures. Basically sea of thieves but larger custom ships and crews with talent trees and unique individual loot like equipment upgrades ark style. Ascendant gear being the top tier.
@16:45 I think that's the problem right there, pleasing the HQ. It was the same at Gameloft, everything was advancing nice until somebody in Paris was issuing a displeasing change of direction that many times sounded silly. And it wasn't even a direct communication channel but through assistants and other underlings on the lines of the assistant knows that would please the bigger honcho. A very feudal hierarchy structure where the goal was to please somebody in the upper echelons ....
I actually think if you swapped the publisher, the developer, the genre, the price point, the gameplay, and the overall story, this could’ve been a good game. 7/10
Fun Fact: There are curently 372 people playing Assassin's Creed 1 right now and that game came out in 2007. The only AC games that have less are the 3 Chronicles games and the 2 Standalone games Liberation, and Freedom Cry (excluding AC3 bc of AC3 Remastered). All that aside every AC game 18 in total has seen a 33% or higher increase in player count on steam in the past 30 days.
My Elective Module teacher was an assistant dev for Ubisoft Singapore. I remember he said he's not going back after he worked on AC: Revelations. It took 12 years later for me to realize the reason why. This was in 2012 FYI and he also worked on Brotherhood.
31:25 I’ve reached a point where I turn to you’re take on a game before I even consider buying it. Access media isn’t a good indicator but a trusted bald dude always speaks the truth.
5:15 This is the direct result of Diversity Inclusion and Equity doctrine. The best programmers and game devs were pushed out and replaced with yes men and women.
Endymion reported that his sources said it actually cost between $650m and $800m. Considering it was billed as AAAA and other AAA games are over $200m, I tend to believe that. Also, IGN gave it a 7/10 lol.
@@Ozzystrayroo well look at concord that spent $400m. Concord was in development for 8 years while Skull and Bones was 11 years. Let's say that 100 people worked on this and their average salary was 100k per year. Over 11 years that alone is $110m. Now what would happen if it was actually 500 people or 1000?
@@jasonyankovec8541 well it could be, it's just suspicious as heck. And not to mention that the Singaporean government is subsidizing this game. And here is the thing, i would not be surprised if they probed this one out and find out if UBISOFT redirect some of those fund into their other projects. Because it seems that they only released this bare game just because the Singaporean government threaten to sue them if they did not release the game
I think the actual loss is closer to 500.000.000 USD, and due to ESG kickback's and goverment financial aid's, it might be only 200 million... So, 500.000.000 USD makes sense to why it was called a "Quad A game".
I miss Altair. Side note, I live near Singapore. And I always wanted to join a game company. Dodged a bullet since it turned out to be a toxic workplace. Turns out, the locals are turned into gophers while the "experts" were not willing to share their experience. So yeah, mismanagement since day 1
One day someone will realize that they can just make Sid Meyer's Pirates but in 3rd person with black flags controls and we will have the best pirate game possible
We can only dream. I really wanted rockstar to get off their lazy arses and being experimental again to make such game. A rockstar Pirate age game would be godly
A Friend who worked for Quantic Dream (Also in France as Ubisoft), told me about this game : 1) Skull and Bones was a running joke among the teams.... the game was abandoned many times... the joke was >. Redoing from scratch again and again 2) Everybody knew this is not a AAAA games. But the actionners wanted make the most money they could out of it... so they call it this way. But everybody knew it was trash from the beginning. 3) The Head master of Quantic Dream put his Wife as Manager.... My friend who work on motion capture told me she tell them : >... then 1 year later >... and just couldn't understand a sh.t...
2:00 isnt that hypocrisy? They didnt want to use an already established franchise to do something new, yet they are doing it right now with every other franchise! Tom Clancy with Xdefiant, even assassins creed in a way. Clearly Ubi has no direction at all
An old game called voyage century nailed pirates, ships building and exploration in an mmo style but their concept was never used again for some reason. They had resource gathering, pvp, ship battles, land combat, social hierarchy titles and functions, manor management, fishing, selling, buying, etc.
A giant building could be built for $200,000,000. This is like building that skyscraper and then having it collapse before you are able to get insurance on the building because there is no such thing as insurance for a failed game. Concord was double that. Crazy.
The upsetting thing about this whole thing is literally all they had to do was copy paste black flag, make it multiplayer and touch up the graphics, how could you drop the ball on such an ez win?
It's weird because ubisoft is known for making massive open worlds and they new everyone wanted another black flag but they gave us an empty ocean world with loading screens and limited land exploration? All they had to do was make black flag 2 and we would've been ok with it. They should've combined AC-3 with black flag but only remove the assassin's creed lore from the world.. not remove entire mechanics and features from their game like parkour and the ability to get out of your ship wherever you want.. so dumb they did that.
Too bad all the employees that were known for making those good games are long gone. Like if they suddenly hired you at ubisoft 5 minutes from now you wouldnt be known for making amazing open world games. Company names dont do anything, its the people working at those companies.
I never got the pirate hype tbh. Didn't think Black Flag was all that amazing when it came out either. In many ways it felt like yet another AC sequel that did little to change up the formular and even took some steps back compared to AC3
Ubisoft has such a hardon for Fortnite, 12 concurrent live service battle royals in development at same time They would make more money by putting every last penny, stock, loan, illegally obtained funds, all on black and letting it ride
Im gonna say something wild: i wish we had a modern day assassins creed 1 remake/sequel in the holy lands again. 1980s lebanon-syrian civil wars + palestine intifada era, with the same cities as ac1 but 1000 years later and you could even keep the same storyline.
"That's like half a Concord!" I love the idea of Concord being used as a unit of measurement in regard to video game failures like it's a form of currency or something.
concord was past the level of human comprehension clearly as it wasnt even alive for a day before we had to strip it off the market it was just too good
Developers need to step back and get back to basics. Such as developing an actual good story line and stop these live service cash grabs. It’s embarrassing
"hiring trash young developers" It's not trash young developers, it's that sociopolitical identity and DEI based hiring is not ideal for quality production. I guarantee there are plenty of young developers (or aspiring to be) who are plenty talented enough to professionally compete but are forced to work in an environment that is also trying to be your social environment to which if you don't fit in or prefer a work environment to be strictly professional (most people) then you'll likely be fired or pressured into quitting. There's a reason why every time a developer says something bafflingly out of touch it always turns out to be the sentiments of the entire developing team, it's because the hiring practices does a better job creating a social group rather than a work force.
@@Zan_Jayna So Asmon taking 3 minutes to respond to a comment which isn't even close to the same thing in this comment that has nothing to do with the rest of the 39 minute video is the entire point of the video? Did you even watch it?
To put into context; during 15th and 16th century, Singapore or Temasik as it was called during that era is one of the most important ports in the world, seconds only to it's Malacca (which it used to be part of). Of being one of the two ports that connects the western world to the far East, you'll have a lot of porate attacks and obviously keeping track on the historical records
The only way to even salvage skull and bones is to fix the glaring issues. Lack of features the players wants. Add ship boarding and land combat. Put it on gamepass, and it’ll be somewhat salvageable.
The only thing that can fix this problem: AAAAA games!!
Penta A games baby!
You will literally need devil magic to make the game work.
one A for how much pain it is to play
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
If skull and bones is quadruple A then concord is octuple A
if we be real for a sec, lower budget will make the creators develop the game in more creative ways usually to achieve certain tasks.
unlike today, slap that UE5 engine and raytracing and call it a day.
oh my god HES RIGHT
I have a cousin who worked in the Singapore office. This game single-handedly turn his dream of working in game dev to agreeing with his mother when she said decades ago that working in video games would bring him neither happiness nor wealth.
to be brutally honest if you apply / work at ubisoft and call yourself a game dev after ...2015, you need immediate psychiatric help
but in general that sucks for your cousin
😲😲😲
@@leonhardablethey don't call themselves devs they call themselves activists I call them sped
I’m Singaporean, and when old Ubi was good I was thinking to work there and now I’m lucky I didn’t
Time for indie games!
If you guys feel bad for the Ubisoft staff that used to make the good games in past, dont. Since they were fired long ago, clearly shown by decline in game quality.
I think there was a previous video from asmongold where either veilguard or the assassin's creed game had half of its developers were fresh outta water.
If only they delivered games that players actually want. Anyone remember Beyond Good and Evil 2?
Too many DEI employees were hired to replace the talented devs
They needed to let them go for DEI hires, have to fill out those checkboxes for Blackrock to get better interest rates and massive grants.
This is true. Patrice Désilets, the original creator of AssCreed has made exactly one game since AC:Brotherhood in 2010, and it was garbage. Michel Ancel, the creator of Beyond Good & Evil is a literal scammer. BG&E2 has been in development for 15 years.
The senior devs that made Black Flag have left the SIngapore studio from 2016-2019. The ones who ship S&B are the new guys who don't make AC Black Flag.
Ah so that was hype lie.
This is so common amongst studios that, in previous eras, you’d consider reliably capable of delivering good/great games. Bioware/EA, the many studios acquired by MS, CDPR*.
Big companies ->more draconian HR departments ->more crusty old men ousted = brain drain. Replaced, evidently, by creatively and ethically bankrupt “talent” who subscribe to modern propaganda.
If I’m being optimistic, I feel like we’ll have to suffer maybe 5 more years of this nonsense, as a lot of the long developed games get flushed out and fail miserably. Then maybe activist shareholders can do us all a favour for once and go after the board for failing in their fiduciary responsibility by targeting the non existent modern audience. Then again, the shareholders will probably vote for more loot boxes.
A big part of me is indifferent to all this, I’ve got most of my enjoyment from indies and eastern developed games in recent years anyway. Let big western devs burn themselves to the ground.
*The jury is out on CDPR for me personally, but as they’re a Canadian studio now I’m not optimistic.
That’s why it’s always “from the studio….” and not “from the people…”
When you are ideologically inclined to push out the "old guard"(mostly talented vets and normal talented people), you will eventually have 150% of the worst talent and junior devs that need heavily babysat to make up for it. I'm surprised half of these games even boot up. Lol
there is no way the people who own the studios not know this. They just don't care, to them it's either money or no money. There should be a global wipe of all characters that think that way. Reduce the player base on Earth y'know
@dabartos4713 your right, it's about money, the fact is, the more experience and skill you have, the more valuable you are. The more valuable you are the more the company has to pay you for your work. Why do that when I can fire you and hire 10 18-22 year olds to replace you for half the cost!.
It sounds smart. If you lobotomize yourself first.
They outsource it to predominantly white boomer developers to carry the dei hires and inexperienced ppl they shoved into higher management roles.
@@dabartos4713 they make their money from investors, stickmarkets, and backdoor deals etc.... game sales dont matter as much anymore like they used to thats why they release compmete SLOPFEST across the industry regardless of what we buy or dont buy
@@dabartos4713they make their money from investors, stickmarkets, and backdoor deals etc.... game sales dont matter as much anymore like they used to thats why they release compmete SLOPFEST across the industry regardless of what we buy or dont buy
"Quadruple A" - One A for every player.
All four players must be very mad about this
💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀
I gotta give credit to them, at least they didn’t explicitly said it had Star Wars potential *(looking at concord)*
How it is even A? I thought it would be F
29:00 .......
Fun fact: Quake 2, released in 1997, has about the same number of daily players.
Also a year ago, they released a remastered version of it with full co-op, graphic update, all the mission packs and some extra and modern system control/ settings options. If you already owned the game before, it was a just free patch.
I remember playing quake 3 arena on the Dreamcast .
@@jonathonmenth3901Quake 3 is my favorite team arena shooter
I am one of those players.
I still play bf4 and there must be a few thousand still on there. The newest 'sequel' flopped immediately too.
> Skull and Bones (2024) 229 players In-Game
> Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag (2013) 2,587 players In-Game
REKT by their own game . Double REKT.
and thats all time stable since 10(!!!!) years
@@rinkurikara but what doi they even do?
Dayum
@@YaToGamiKuro it's not the same people lmao that's why it's good, people are still experiencing or coming back from years of not playing it and they finish it because it's a good game.
They've had 4 games absolutely flop this year, and AC Shadows will flop next year. They're done for.
I’ve been in the insider program for skull and bones since the announcement of the game and I can 100% confirm they sunk the ship because of the bad leadership decision making. They have redone the game and its concept multiple times, they even removed finished ship models from the game that you see in the E3 Trailer. The game in the current state is the least user friendly game. Like the game actively tries to make you quit the game and play something else. The E3 2017 version had a lot of meat on it and its pvp modes, its such a shame they have thrown that version away. It basically outperforms the current version in every way: All Ship classes, PVP modes, pve open world, settlement raids, realistic sailing, customization and more. It was an already finished game comparably to For honor but with much more content to start with.
In 2024 almost 2025 they started to add pvp elements and that’s it. They try to steal your money with an insane amount of microtransactions and they don’t even have their map expansion or big ship classes yet. They just add random cosmetics and reskinned ships every season. Really I am serious, the new ships are basically remodeled ships that already exist. They just change stats and slightly the appearance.
Skull and bones deserves the worst managed game of the year award
200,000,000 development cost divided by the peak players of 2,600 means at the peak they paid 76k per active player.
Still better than Concord.
thats only steam, they have "more" players on there own launcher + console players
Absolute cinema
If you account for outsourcing and the whole decade of development, sources say it's actually 650 to 850 millions not 200. Concord was around 400 millions (200 millions before the alpha, 200 millions after)
@@Lograh Lets assume they have 4 times the amount on all other platforms. Its still £20000 per player just for dev cost... Not sure that's really better.
A quick look at Ac: Black Flag will tell you everything about why Skull and Bones failed.
The gameplay, graphics, art style, everything was BETTER in a game 10 years older than skull and bones.
No one liked ACBF when it released. Stop lying to yourself
Ubisoft wanted to cancel it long ago, but Singaporean goverment didnt let them because they had a partnership, and Singapore wanted to produce a AAA game to promote their country and public image of it
@@SadBoysCollectiveCirca96 what are you talking about it was literally one of the best selling games in 2013 XD
@@SadBoysCollectiveCirca96Nah man, I lost a friend to AC BF. He was gone for like a whole year. Old school AC fans might not have liked it but it was a massive hit
@@SadBoysCollectiveCirca96It's my fav one they made but ok
Ubisoft's new strategy to combat piracy is to have people disinterested in pirating their games.
Jokes on you it's working!
Big Brain CEO move
The fact that it's a game about pirates adds another layer of irony to this.
yeah just make it too bad, so people won't even pirate it. Ubisoft has to pay people to play the game. F.e. Asmongold. That's how bad it is.
Underrated comment
They really could have just "remastered" AC 4 and added "skull and bones" as a game mode.
It would have been received better
I would probably be playing it if they did. LMAO
Between digital distribution being way cheaper, and having a larger audience to sell to, AAA devs should be making more than ever. They're inflating their costs through the roof for no reason, and making moves like this where a game is delayed 6 times, looks like shit, and still gets launched.
it's because 90% of the employees at these companies produce nothing
The funniest thing I remember seeing about Skull n' Bones was when, if you're starting a new game, it gives you this spiel about how you need to not cheat, and be kind to any & all players you are with... in a game about _pirates,_ mind you.
Thats actually needed, cause you kids get carried away with video games
Sea of thieves have a similar thing but its more like dont hurl abuse settle it on the seas
generic woke game. in any case sea of thieves ended like that. criers wanted a game made for pvp as a pve xd.
@borsho9889 you seriously think people play safer seas? There's litterally no incentive other than doing tall tales.
@@markoquizzes1143 Maybe you're entering a space that isn't meant for you.
It's crazy when you think about it, AC black flag is probably the best Ubisoft pirate game adaptation. They really spent 8 years. Building a new pirate game with inspiration drawn from AC Black flag, but it was actually worse and less than its inspiration. How do you make less when you had more to start with?
The mordern Ubi magic.
Created the game inspiring AC black flag, into making the game solely for money.
Easy, drop a good vase and try to put it back together. You will usually miss a few tiny pieces. it will usually look ok, unless you're Ubisoft and kept dropping it for eight years in a row, there was no way they were gonna put this Fabergé back together.😂
Never understimate the french
Exactly, all they had to do was copy their own homework
Many publishers/developers have failed to maintain their game engine. The talent who made it possible are rarely at the companies anymore, so you have a bunch of people coming in to try to understand and work around something that they often have little or no understanding of.
Brain drain: the death of towns, countries, and companies.
EVE online has basically collapsed because of this. At one point they tried to turn off the billboards in the game and it broke the entire game for a week 😂
@@OkieDokieSmokie Spaghetti code with poor documentation strikes again!
So they hired incompetent people and fired the actual talent to save money. Go bankrupt already Ubisoft.
is why so many companies are switching to UE 5, and then you still end up with slop that looks like Concord.
Sid Meier made a compelling and addictive pirate game on an 8bit computer with 42kb of ram. Design vision is everything.
Ubisofts vision:
1- pirates
2- make money
And you can still buy for Xbox for like 4 bucks.
I bought it the other day. It's a gem of a game, childish but fun.
I still play it now and then 😂
From now on the number 400,000,000 should be known as a Concord
"Three hundred ninety nine million, concord, four hundred one million..."
1 concordian
Black flag was such an easy lay up for this game, they could have extended the tech to make this amazing but they fumbled badly. It's truly staggering incompetence and Sea of Thieves came along and beat them to it starting from scratch. They could have taken Black Flag, network the ocean using shared RNG seeds and clock sync, network the vessels, finessed the wave LODs mesh generation for improved inter-ship vis (really the only semi-expensive part). Keep the combat system and construct whatever game mechanics you choose around that core (treasure farming, sea monster raids, and ship upgrades for doubloons etc). It is utterly incomprehensible that they could not get from Black Flag to a decent multi-player experience in 2-3 years, except that their process must have been thoroughly dysfunctional.
You're hired
@@enterpassword3313no shot. He is over-qualified
You're right if they wanted to just make a good sequel to black flag with multiplayer it was extremely straightforward but live service principles (and the mythical unlimited money bucket associated with it) means they have to dilute the moment to moment experience to keep you hooked for 5000 hours and incentivize whaling .
This guy knows his shit ^
@@bearstrike The type of live service you're discussing is a content issue. They absolutely could have tried to turn what I described into a money printer. I'd have done it with a larger map on a region of a globe (not a rectangle) with new regions unlocked over time so it could be shipped faster, but what do I know. The most important part of this is a compelling gameplay experience underpinning everything. Gameplay regressions like their ship-boarding in a market that had already seen better were never going to get a warm reception from gamers. I can guess why they fumbled this. For network gameplay during boarding you must lock your networked positional frame of reference to the ship you are boarding punting ship positional networked errors out to the world (inverse ship transform). You can even grapple hook nearby ships to a common frame first (not that you really need to). This can all be done without a transition screen, it's a minor technical challenge but solvable with sound technical leadership. A lot of the claims swirling around about why they had to take an entirely new approach and throw out the Black Flag engine are vague and make no sense.
It’s going to beautiful to watch Ubisoft go under after the inevitable failure of AC Shadows.
Taking pride, or having enthusiasm for people losing their livelihoods is weird. Get off the internet and go outside.
@@SadBoysCollectiveCirca96I don't like seeing people lose their jobs but then I don't like mediocre games being rewarded either. Because then we will just get more of them
It cant be a failure if it never comes out
@@SadBoysCollectiveCirca96”those poor scammer lose their livelihoods”
@@SadBoysCollectiveCirca96 Survival of the fittest, nature is beautiful we should appreciate it.
AAAA stands for the sound that gamers make before uninstalling this POS forever.
Lol, nice one
yeah shame on Ubisoft!
😂😂😂😂😂
I will never understand how Ubisoft missed this so badly. Everyone literally just wants Black Flag without the Assassin’s Creed parts and make it online play. 10/10 legendary game EZ
They had the ability to make AC4 CO-OP like AC Unity
You can have another player on your ship and you can go past other ships while they jump on clearing the deck, you then anchor next to the ship, fire the cannons once then board the ship for resources, then you can do the same thing for them on their ship, You could easily have hours of fun doing that
Then you can have sea battles, if you lose the battle you lose 10% of your resources if they successfully board you, if they sink you instead of boarding you lose 5% of your resources
Beyond and evil good 2 also got the same treatment and no one one knows if it's even being worked on or not. Ubisoft completely stopped telling any info about it
BGaE2 is hopeless imo. They promised too much and their recent games proved they have neither the skill nor technology to even pretend to fulfill them.
Problem with the 50 bucks to 70 bucks argument is games in my country went from 40 to 100 bucks and food is more important then games
in my country: 120 -> 240
@zGeTeX what's that equate to in terms of buying other stuff?
Eg $100 for me is ⅔ of a food bill or a full tank of fuel for the work week
@@bryce4724 Here in Brazil, the minimum wage is R$1,412 per month. Some new games, like Call of Duty or FIFA, cost around R$339, which is about 22% of the monthly minimum wage. It’s a significant expense, especially since earning the minimum wage is very common. I don’t live in a big city where everything tends to be more expensive. Regarding food expenses, it depends on the family size. In my case, for a family of four, we spend approximately R$1,400 per month.
Yeah, games are a luxury not a necessity. A food company could charge a 100 dollars for food if there were no competitors because people need food. People don’t need video games so making them so ludicrously priced isn’t going to work as we’ve started to see already.
@@bryce4724 Here in Brazil, the minimum wage is R$1,412 per month. Some new games, like Call of Duty or FIFA, cost around R$339, which is about 22% of the monthly minimum wage. It’s a significant expense, especially since earning the minimum wage is very common. I don’t live in a big city where everything tends to be more expensive. Regarding food expenses, it depends on the family size. In my case, for a family of four, we spend approximately R$1,300 per month.
I am a IT project manager. This is a classic "feature Creep" situation. What this means is that when you have a Project like Skull and Bones features are constantly being proposed and added to the project AFTER the design has already been decided. This constant adding of new features, redesigns, re-thinks, second-guessing results in delays, cost overruns, and generally a inferior result. Which is precisely what happened here.
They should have stuck to the original design -single player version of Black flag, which focused only on the naval stuff. When they added "live services" and "narrative driven" and multiplayer and a whole host of unnecessary features they killed their own project.
Hi, what are your thoughts about star citizen? Should I get the game.
Except this project isn't dead and it's still getting better
Nope not feature creep they cut out the fun part. Esp the sea battle from black flag part. And the resource gathering/ crafting part are designed with micro transaction in mind. They are also planning for skin/ship/weapon ingame purchase. Making the game a live service husk.
@@Dabergytvia microtransaction.
@@wp2746its a scam, go play elite dangerous
It's actually depressing how many games are pumped with millions of $'s... Built for the shareholder and not the gamer, then they scratch their heads why the games tank?! When will they figure it out?
When Indy companies and companies overseas outshines them in every way
Yep it's sad :(
@@A-TALKING-TOASTERthey pretty much do a lot of the time lol
The talented people will start new studios, make great games and sell to big developers. The big companies will eventually ruin the franchise while the they chase the talent away. Repeat
@@Apophis1010Like some former Witcher 3 devs working on "The Blood of Dawnwalker" now.
That Blackflag gameplay reminded me how stunning Ubisoft games were when they came out. Industry leading graphics, incredible storylines, and not afraid to push boundaries with bold contents like in Farcry3. Now Ubisoft games are repetitive gameplay on bloated maps. It’s sad to see how much they fell
Hell, look at Far Cry 2. Whether or not you like the gameplay and story, it did a lot of technical things well. Its graphics were amazing when it released and it had amazing flame physics that I have yet to see topped to this day, not to mention little details like being able to shoot individual branches off of trees.
To be fair, I work at a very corpo business (at least from the perspective of our customers) and we had nerf guns in the office. That and lots of foam balls we'd toss to get people's attention that eventually all ended up getting stuck on the cable rack in the ceiling.
We even pulled a large table into the middle of the dev cubicles so we can set up a board game and take a turn every time someone stood up.
Management doesn't care what the devs are doing so long as the job gets done on time. The problem is when the devs play around outside of break time or normal downtime (i.e. compiling or waiting for deployment) and fall behind schedule.
This game shouldve been most straightforward release ever, or at least as starightforward as game development can get.
Take AC black flag, remove the assassins creed aspects from it and replace it with a strictly pirate centered story and updated graphics. The gameplay was already there, the crafting system was already there, the ship combat and traversal was already there.
And they fucked it up beyond all comprehension and turned it into a pirate skinned World of Warships. Its honestly impressive really how greed and mismanagement can fuck up so badly on what shouldve been a license to print money. Unbelievable
There's probably Skyrim modders out there that would be able to do that, and more, and it wouldn't take them 10 years. It would be Skyrim though, not AC: Black Flag, but maybe you get the point
At least with world governments the elites get money in their pockets. With modern AAA game development everyone loses 🤦
@@olafthebear2327 Skyrim already HAS a multiplayer mod, so yes, they absolutely would be able to do it.
In 10 years, a studio is going to release Ms. Pacman. It will have cost them $400 million dollars to make it.
But it’ll play in 4k at 210 fps!!!
@@louievito5701 Best they can do is 30 fps 1080p after upscaling.
Prices estimate are off "Ms." Pacman will off course have skins for the "modern audience" so double the price to 800m for the extra bloat 😊
@@vytah because making video games is hard!!
When typing or writing about money, you're supposed to use either the "$" or the word "dollars", not both. You're welcome. Schools have really just given up, eh?
Loyal and true gamers who catapulted Ubisoft into Fortune 500 were taken for granted or abandoned. People who once called us 'losers' cuz we were gamers or loved comic books, now use our tech to make sick money and destroy self-esteem of others. I recently made a video of X360 as the last great generation, hope I'm wrong....
I still think ps4 generation was good, we had great games, but we had a lot of bad things too…
yeah they hate gamers now, because now Ubisoft is full of activists, who are woke and actually hate us gamers, because we want fun, not a crazy, woke ideology
You look like roco magnota
Great games release every single year without exception. Just don't focus at games with big marketing budgets and look at the games developed by people that funnel all their cents into making the best experience possible to their tools and expertise. Cuphead's top notch for example.
I don't play many FPS titles so i'm not really sure what's the general consensus over the current games, but at this time there are so many great and free FPS titles i don't think they are living in the worst timeline. Though PvE-FPS fans might be fucked (how's Helldivers doing).
@@miltongp01 ps4/xbox one generation was atrocious. if anything, we have much better critically received games at the halfway point in the ps5 generation than that of the ps4 generation
37:10 Even NMS and CP2077 pretty much irreparably damaged their respective companies reputations. The fixing of those games salvaged a lot of that good will, but I guarantee you there's gonna be a lot less people pre-ordering Light No Fire, and I can pretty much guarantee there will be people on the fence about Witcher 4 despite how GOAT'd Witcher 3 is just because of the CP2077 release. I know I'll definitely be waiting for reviews whereas I pre-ordered CP2077.
Since 2012 (Mass Effect 3 release), I never pre-ordered any game except for one: CP2077. Let's just say I won't be making that mistake again.
Video games are like paper airplanes.
At first they were exceedingly simple, but they did their job. Over time they became more refined, showing greater fly times... but then something happened. The process got too complicated, too lengthy. Until eventually they became 100+ fold messes that flew worse than the originals.
Ubisoft lost 200mil$
-190mil$=exec salary
-10mil$=actual game budget
Dont forget the absolutely *USELESS* marketing department. (I mean, do franchises like cod, gta, and ac even need advertising??)
@@OrangejuiceandsandwichYou would be surprised, Diablo 4 back then cost millions over millions of dollars. They put ads on it on a global scale, changed some locations for ads, with celebrities like Megan Fox. They do that to create hype and well, it worked for Diablo 4. They bought the game like crazy.
Not all exec salaries. The grunt workers are probably getting six figures to do half passed work for 8 years lol it adds up quick
also dont forget that they basically trashed the game multiple times & started from 0 again. the devs prob gave up. they worked for nothing over & over again, so i would done the same, just unlucky that at some point they not gonna trash it again & actually release it. but hey, at least it has more players than concord & artifact together.
I don't know how they can even call these games 'quadruple A' if they are of lesser quality.
it's about budget mostly
"It’s evolving, just backwards" - Pewdiepie
Depends on how many hands are in the pot
Well audacity is at an all time high. They’ll call it anything that might possibly trick you into buying it for $70-100
It was the only way to retrospectively justify the money they shoveled onto the bonfire to create it. "Quadruple A" is a construction of MBAs who never understood their business or tech, trying to cover for a disastrous and bloated development cycle.
Skull and Bone We chased Trends for 8yrs and didnt get a single trend correct
The problem is Sea of Thieves already scratched that itch and did it better overall. Skull and Bones was DOA.
1:00 black flag will always be the best Assassins creed game i have ever played...
Imagine, game devs and journo put all their effort into painting us as the villain instead of this.
A bloated market strategy and project management that will never succeed. SMH.
Using concord as a unit of measurement is diabolical
like one Raditz
@@sirken2 Imagine if DBZA had this level of funding
Americans will use anything other than the Metric system.
I was a huge CDPR fan and i still haven't changed my mind on Cyberpunk.
Yes it's flashier today but the main story still sucks, the man who ruined Cyberpunk was the guy so bad at planning they had to cut the part of the game where you work your way up enough with Jackie to even be noticed by Dexter de Shawn. That was the fun part, having a time bomb in your head after the prologue in a character you have no attachment to is just stupid.
You don't know Jackie long enough to care when he dies, what you learn about him at the funeral should be what you learn about him before he dies.
If you think Cyberpunk 2077 is a good game today you are a cat and like shiny things like laser pointers, not story.
Too many people has already forgotten how disastrous CP77 launch.
Even the dlc imo still did not make me care much about V or Johnny
I compleatly agree with you. It would be a miracle if Witcher 4 will be even half as good as Witcher 3. I lost all trust in them.
I remember that before cyberpunk came out, there was a lot of devs that worked on w3 created their own studios. A lot of them.
Good ambitious devs left the company, they had to hire a lot of new people. Cdpr is no longer the same company that created Witcher 3, people who did create Witcher are gone doing their own things.
Based
I can smell the Witcher 4 will be another veil guard for mile away 😂
Black Flag was an objectively OUTSTANDING Pirate game, imo it actually did nail what a Pirate game should be. Even without the AC title backing.. that game would’ve been played and loved by a lot of us. I played it for HOURS on end. But I just don’t see myself stepping away from Warzone, Rivals, or Fortnite to play an online “Ship Shooter” I think a lot of us love the idea of it. Especially us One Piece fans, but delivering something that can compete with other Battle Royales is just tough. That being said, Ubisoft has turned to liquid shit and didn’t help the situation. But they’ve been dead to me since they ruined the AC franchise shortly after Black Flag, so I wasn’t too upset about S&B failure
a ship with a "stamina bar" 😂😂😂
A pirate who can't swim or use sword
My ideal pirate game is an "open sea" mmo, start off just a dude, try to join someones crew or start with a little paddle boat and set out. Island exploration, ai crew that can be found/looted that give small bonuses to ship durabilityj, speed, cannon fire, etc. Hiding loot mechanic (bury your treasure) but when you do that, it generates a map in your inventory, if you die, your map is lootable. Mutiny mechanics. Combat as a pirate would first person.
Yakuza Hawaii pirate game is going to be fun but it is not going to be an open sea MMO. There is also a pirate game MMO(old one)
You litterally just described sea of thieves except sea of thieves isnt an mmo
@@arthurgoonie4596 yea but the ai crew is important to me. Less focused on having to manage the ship, and focus on the fun stuff. But if you want to, remove your crew and have a player crew. My ideal “crew” mechanic would like suidoken where you recruit from a list of 100 or so crew members throughout the world that find through playing. “Finding the best crew for your purposes”. Oh and a Torguga like island for all the dirty pirates to hangout and gamble and other minigames.
@brandonmeyer2327 it wouldn't be hard for them to add that I think they'd just add some board games to sanctuaries and use Skelton ai for crew mates the only problem is sea of thieves is all open these is no safe zones so your ship would get sunk unless they add like really strong non ai skeleton ships to manage people that attack within safe zones but it defeats the point of a pirate game.
@@arthurgoonie4596 Well they could just add a "North India Trading Company" that hangs around towns. Except Tortuga where... anything goes :D. Its just crazy how skull and bones not add ANY of the fun pirate stuff.
Maybe Quadruple-A is like 4-D and its just so insane we cant comprehend it.
You're right it's just too insane, INSANELY BAD
Time is the fourth dimension...this game took like over a decade to create....Holy Shite!
….they actually had it, the perfect pirate game formula, in AC Black Flag. And they still screwed it up! Ubisoft is on another level of screwing up…
"Skull and bones" was a failure because it was a lie from the beginning. It should have been like a mix from atlas and black flag. Ship design, a crew, a captain, with occasional ports to drop and secure loot. No base building on land. Your ship is your base and the more loot / money you have the bigger your ship and crew. Sea monsters, treasure maps, PVP, pve, and every player would have their own upgrade trees based on what role they chooses. Captain has captain buffs healing skills, cannon crew has cannon / stun / tank light dps / fighting skills, your deck hands have repair skills / long range high DPS / scouting / treasure map skills. It's not hard to envision. You can port islands for raids and treasure. You can port at pirate islands for banking and upgrades. You can sail the open sea and fight various sea monsters for reputation gains and treasures. Basically sea of thieves but larger custom ships and crews with talent trees and unique individual loot like equipment upgrades ark style. Ascendant gear being the top tier.
Or a CO-OP AC4 update with the graphics from the trailer
@16:45 I think that's the problem right there, pleasing the HQ. It was the same at Gameloft, everything was advancing nice until somebody in Paris was issuing a displeasing change of direction that many times sounded silly. And it wasn't even a direct communication channel but through assistants and other underlings on the lines of the assistant knows that would please the bigger honcho. A very feudal hierarchy structure where the goal was to please somebody in the upper echelons ....
I actually think if you swapped the publisher, the developer, the genre, the price point, the gameplay, and the overall story, this could’ve been a good game.
7/10
IGN secret troll?
Thick of it ahh comment
Nah I don't think so. All they had to do was make black flag 2
Good one :/
I guess they’re just in the thick of it, huh…. But like, everybody knows.
Fun Fact: There are curently 372 people playing Assassin's Creed 1 right now and that game came out in 2007. The only AC games that have less are the 3 Chronicles games and the 2 Standalone games Liberation, and Freedom Cry (excluding AC3 bc of AC3 Remastered). All that aside every AC game 18 in total has seen a 33% or higher increase in player count on steam in the past 30 days.
steam sales
200 players, that's a $1 million customer acquisition cost.
So that means every player is literally a king? They paid more than a mil to draw each one 😂💀
Too bad each player didn't get a million dollars worth of gameplay
So in other words im worth 1 million usdollares
Peak was 2,600 not 200
People think the lowest number on steam is equal to the average number on all platforms. Get a grip. It's a good game. Stay mad 😂
My Elective Module teacher was an assistant dev for Ubisoft Singapore. I remember he said he's not going back after he worked on AC: Revelations. It took 12 years later for me to realize the reason why.
This was in 2012 FYI and he also worked on Brotherhood.
31:25 I’ve reached a point where I turn to you’re take on a game before I even consider buying it. Access media isn’t a good indicator but a trusted bald dude always speaks the truth.
5:15 This is the direct result of Diversity Inclusion and Equity doctrine. The best programmers and game devs were pushed out and replaced with yes men and women.
Endymion reported that his sources said it actually cost between $650m and $800m. Considering it was billed as AAAA and other AAA games are over $200m, I tend to believe that. Also, IGN gave it a 7/10 lol.
Where the heck did all those money go?? Better game has been made with less money
@@Ozzystrayroo well look at concord that spent $400m. Concord was in development for 8 years while Skull and Bones was 11 years. Let's say that 100 people worked on this and their average salary was 100k per year. Over 11 years that alone is $110m. Now what would happen if it was actually 500 people or 1000?
@@jasonyankovec8541 well it could be, it's just suspicious as heck. And not to mention that the Singaporean government is subsidizing this game.
And here is the thing, i would not be surprised if they probed this one out and find out if UBISOFT redirect some of those fund into their other projects. Because it seems that they only released this bare game just because the Singaporean government threaten to sue them if they did not release the game
@@Ozzystrayroo The game was in development 3 years longer, saw HUGE employer turnover, and was restarted twice. Complete and utter mismanagement.
Is IGN really relevant enough for us to care how they score games?
I think the actual loss is closer to 500.000.000 USD, and due to ESG kickback's and goverment financial aid's, it might be only 200 million...
So, 500.000.000 USD makes sense to why it was called a "Quad A game".
Add marketing into it, they lost around 600 million.
@@RobGM2 then u might also add server(hardware)/traffic / ongoing support costs. 650-700m
11 years for something that was slapped into a single world of Kingdom Hearts 3 is wild
I miss Altair.
Side note, I live near Singapore. And I always wanted to join a game company.
Dodged a bullet since it turned out to be a toxic workplace. Turns out, the locals are turned into gophers while the "experts" were not willing to share their experience.
So yeah, mismanagement since day 1
One day someone will realize that they can just make Sid Meyer's Pirates but in 3rd person with black flags controls and we will have the best pirate game possible
We can only dream. I really wanted rockstar to get off their lazy arses and being experimental again to make such game.
A rockstar Pirate age game would be godly
I don't believe in god but I'm praying for this tonight
I wasn't a fan of Sid Meyer's Pirates.
I felt AC4 did everything better.
Except for the lack of romance because Ubisoft is allergic to romance.
A Friend who worked for Quantic Dream (Also in France as Ubisoft), told me about this game :
1) Skull and Bones was a running joke among the teams.... the game was abandoned many times... the joke was >. Redoing from scratch again and again
2) Everybody knew this is not a AAAA games. But the actionners wanted make the most money they could out of it... so they call it this way. But everybody knew it was trash from the beginning.
3) The Head master of Quantic Dream put his Wife as Manager.... My friend who work on motion capture told me she tell them : >... then 1 year later >... and just couldn't understand a sh.t...
2:00 isnt that hypocrisy? They didnt want to use an already established franchise to do something new, yet they are doing it right now with every other franchise! Tom Clancy with Xdefiant, even assassins creed in a way. Clearly Ubi has no direction at all
What's really sad is I did not even know this game was released. I figured it got canceled. Well it did by the players.
An old game called voyage century nailed pirates, ships building and exploration in an mmo style but their concept was never used again for some reason. They had resource gathering, pvp, ship battles, land combat, social hierarchy titles and functions, manor management, fishing, selling, buying, etc.
9:43 not just that but people wanted it back then, over the course of 8 YEARS now to make games that people end up losing interest!
A giant building could be built for $200,000,000. This is like building that skyscraper and then having it collapse before you are able to get insurance on the building because there is no such thing as insurance for a failed game. Concord was double that. Crazy.
6:21 when that name was said my chair temporarily levitated
I think he just summoned Cthulu 😂
I laughed way too hard at this
everything about Skull and Bones is utter crap. it's like a mish mash of spare parts they stuck together.
The upsetting thing about this whole thing is literally all they had to do was copy paste black flag, make it multiplayer and touch up the graphics, how could you drop the ball on such an ez win?
It's weird because ubisoft is known for making massive open worlds and they new everyone wanted another black flag but they gave us an empty ocean world with loading screens and limited land exploration? All they had to do was make black flag 2 and we would've been ok with it. They should've combined AC-3 with black flag but only remove the assassin's creed lore from the world.. not remove entire mechanics and features from their game like parkour and the ability to get out of your ship wherever you want.. so dumb they did that.
Too bad all the employees that were known for making those good games are long gone. Like if they suddenly hired you at ubisoft 5 minutes from now you wouldnt be known for making amazing open world games. Company names dont do anything, its the people working at those companies.
@@StackingGains They should hire me, I'd point them in the right direction and make the best games ever made.
@@cybrthret i believe in you, make some great games dude
@@StackingGains I wish lol but thanks!
I’m not sure what’s funnier , them pricing that turd at $70 or just how big of a dud the game is.
Why not both? Irony is stackable debuff
How did it happen? DEI hires.
That and forcing girlboss pirates everywhere
I never got the pirate hype tbh. Didn't think Black Flag was all that amazing when it came out either. In many ways it felt like yet another AC sequel that did little to change up the formular and even took some steps back compared to AC3
Ubisoft has such a hardon for Fortnite, 12 concurrent live service battle royals in development at same time
They would make more money by putting every last penny, stock, loan, illegally obtained funds, all on black and letting it ride
Im gonna say something wild: i wish we had a modern day assassins creed 1 remake/sequel in the holy lands again. 1980s lebanon-syrian civil wars + palestine intifada era, with the same cities as ac1 but 1000 years later and you could even keep the same storyline.
"That's like half a Concord!"
I love the idea of Concord being used as a unit of measurement in regard to video game failures like it's a form of currency or something.
@@JoeKing69 I'm man of my word.
@@NoZakuBoyNoZaku lol it’s not that big of a deal dude I was just taking the p, did you delete your comment?
@@JoeKing69 I did. Long story short I was in a similar situation years ago and it got out of hand real fast. Didn't want that again lol
@ out of hand? It’s fine I’m actually surprised more people haven’t made similar comments.
"Life is hard. It's even harder if you're Ubisoft." - John Wayne
This was literally the easiest game for them to make, Just build upon what they already had with black flag and make it better.
if this was costing $200m USD and is considered a Quadruple A Game, then Concord was a Quintuple A Game
I guess Skull And Bones is all skull and bones now
💀
Wait...if Skull and Bones at $200M was AAAA then wtf was Concord?
Its an AAAaAaAaAaAaAh game
concord was past the level of human comprehension clearly as it wasnt even alive for a day before we had to strip it off the market it was just too good
@@JS06-h5d 🤣
Alleged sources within Ubisoft told RUclipsr Endymion that Skull & Bones cost between $650 to $850 million over its 10 years of production.
Ubisoft called it "AAAA", because that's the sound the CEO made when he stepped on a LEGO.
Developers need to step back and get back to basics. Such as developing an actual good story line and stop these live service cash grabs. It’s embarrassing
"Such as developing an actual good story line" - that's the job a story writer. When your story writers are wokey morons, this is the result
Only the expert game designers at Ubisoft could come up with groundbreaking mechanics like a stamina bar for your ship. True Genius.
30 years old and i don't think i've ever played a shittier game than skull and bones.
3:01 over 1 million dollars Invested per active player LOL.
Wanna know what's crazier? They're still trying to sell the game for like 60 bucks on the PS store
I wouldn't play it if it was free.
"hiring trash young developers" It's not trash young developers, it's that sociopolitical identity and DEI based hiring is not ideal for quality production. I guarantee there are plenty of young developers (or aspiring to be) who are plenty talented enough to professionally compete but are forced to work in an environment that is also trying to be your social environment to which if you don't fit in or prefer a work environment to be strictly professional (most people) then you'll likely be fired or pressured into quitting. There's a reason why every time a developer says something bafflingly out of touch it always turns out to be the sentiments of the entire developing team, it's because the hiring practices does a better job creating a social group rather than a work force.
You just explained the entire point of the video as though only you understand it, lol
@@Zan_Jayna I commented the moment someone said "hiring trash young developers" like 3 minutes in, I'm literally still watching it.
@@Zan_Jayna So Asmon taking 3 minutes to respond to a comment which isn't even close to the same thing in this comment that has nothing to do with the rest of the 39 minute video is the entire point of the video? Did you even watch it?
Skull and bones was the first beta I ever got an invite for. I didn’t buy the game after
To put into context; during 15th and 16th century, Singapore or Temasik as it was called during that era is one of the most important ports in the world, seconds only to it's Malacca (which it used to be part of). Of being one of the two ports that connects the western world to the far East, you'll have a lot of porate attacks and obviously keeping track on the historical records
The sad part is that the truly greatest pirate game up to this day is still Sid Meier's Pirates (and that also belongs to Ubisoft).
Ac black flag is the best Ubisoft game, absolutely masterpiece nothing will top this game
Only issue the game had was the amount of tailing missions. Rather than that, it was absolutely amazing. Awesome story, characters, combat.
7:17 there it is. No video game related thing with "infinite" in its title has ever turned out well.
Bioshock Infinite
Infinity Blade was good
infinite warfare did actually have a good campaign, i sware its always the robot games man
@@CopperKnight027That wasn't a good game
You must be high. It was an amazing game@@trabant3060
Admin- they gotta know it’s bad…
The devs- do I like the game? Idk, I don’t play video games.
9:05 HYPERBOREA MENTIONED
🇫🇮🇰🇷
🇬🇱
🇫🇮🇲🇳
Id give this game 1/4 of an A
Just A game then😂
AAAA - Avoid Analysis, Act Anyway.
Man the best money i put in a game will always be GTA 5, DLCs till date for free
The only way to even salvage skull and bones is to fix the glaring issues. Lack of features the players wants. Add ship boarding and land combat. Put it on gamepass, and it’ll be somewhat salvageable.
All they had to do was build on AC4, and leave the boring assassin crap out... But NOOOOOOOO-
Probably because the new devs are so incompetent that they have no clue how to just mainly copy and paste the majority of AC4 code.