Skull and Bones' identity crisis is immediately felt at the onset of the game – and its troubled development history is noticeable throughout our entire experience with Skull and Bones – one hour of onboarding, another hour of end-game multiplayer, and a few hours of open beta gameplay when the servers opened today. The effort and passion of the development team are felt in how the final product is presented, but the overarching design philosophy that ties everything together makes the game feel like a bundle of sticks loosely held together by a piece of tape. Let us explain more in this Skull and Bones hands-on first impressions.

Skull and Bones Tries Too Hard not to be Black Flag

While we did our best to judge Skull and Bones on its own merits – it's hard not to compare it to Black Flag – and to some degree, Sea of Thieves. After all, that's the demographic you're trying to hit with Skull and Bones, and it's supposed to be the game for those who are not satisfied with the pirate simulation of the two aforementioned games. Perhaps Ubisoft was overly conscious of being compared to these games that it went out of its way – to the game's detriment – to be as different from Black Flag as possible. Ubisoft never overtly said that the game was designed this way – but how Skull and Bones' full package came to be makes you think this way.

For example, the game focuses too much on the ship and very little on the people on board. The only named character in your entire crew is your First Mate – your character isn't named even, and none of your companions matter in the larger scheme of things. Yes, you can customize your character's avatar, but it's all window dressing for a hollow shell of a character. In many ways, the main character is a representation of the game itself – devoid of personality and is just a vehicle for microtransactions.

Skull and Bones misses a lot of items in the “Essential Pirate Game Features” checklist, and that's probably because of trying to feel different from its competitors. There's no swashbuckling, no crew management, a very shallow trading economy, no capturing of enemy ships or managing a fleet. The essential feature of walking the deck of your ship is even absent in this game – something that you'd imagine Ubisoft's higher-ups would want them to prioritize to sell more cosmetics. Pillaging settlements spend more time on the sea than on the ground, when in theory pillaging is when most land action should occur. You can't get marooned, you can't get captured, you can't get imprisoned. The game has no stakes, no direction, and no personality.

Heck, playing Skull and Bones made me miss Sid Meier's Pirates!, a game that came out twenty years ago. And you have to wonder – there are already a lot of pirate games out there that did it right – what made Ubisoft off the target way too much?

Unnecessarily Live-Service

Another aspect of Skull and Bones that we didn't like is its live service nature. I don't understand why this game has to be an always-online live-service game as opposed to a streamlined single-player experience with multiplayer game modes or multiplayer world events. How come I have to share the world with other players who come and ruin my naval fights by joining in randomly and getting the loot I worked hard for? Having to sail across the sea to a random island for a resource I need to harvest only to find it already shaved by another player is frustrating.

Much worse, a lot of the game's cooler features – battling enormous sea creatures and fighting against legendary pirate ships – are soft-gated behind multiplayer. They're too grindy to take on your own, and the time limit for completing these quests is too short for you to grind it with a hefty number of healing items. It forces you to play with others and oddly makes it hard for you to do so, as the game has no matchmaking feature.

No, for you to get the help of others, you'll either have to be in a party with them, or to call for help in the open world and hope that someone is free enough to come by and help you. Otherwise, tough luck, but you'll spend the next thirty minutes nicking away the armor of a large ship, only for you to run out of time with just a sliver of health left for the ship.

Why Ubisoft didn't invest in an engaging solo campaign to get you addicted to the experience is baffling. It feels like the developers had to make the game with multiplayer in mind, no matter what, to the detriment of the entire package. Even if the promise is in the end-game content, the slow grind to it will make sure you never get there.

What Skull and Bones needs to get back on course

At the risk of sounding like a know-it-all who mansplains to the developers what they have to do to make the game good, I will be listing some ideas on how to make Skull and Bones more fun to play. I've waited for the game for so long and the disappointment I feel is immense, but I am too invested in the game to give up on it without even trying to contribute, at the very least sharing what I think Skull and Bones need to make things right.

  • Rework the solo campaign – Make me care about my character so that I could get invested in their story and their rise to the rank of Kingpin.
  • Crew Management and Skills System – Regardless of the several ship options in the game, they all sadly feel too similar. If the player can customize how their ship fights by choosing different kinds of pirates as part of their crew that gives them access to skills would be a nice addition. Getting to recruit your crew in different ports and losing your men in battles would also be a nice way to up the stakes of battles, balance ramming, and balance boarding enemy ships.
  • Matchmaking Mode – Remember Monster Hunter? I would like the multiplayer-gated events out of my single-player map and have them all accessible only through a matchmaking mode. I'd very much like to hunt giant sea creatures on my own, but if the game will force me to play with others, I want the game to make it easier for me to find others to play with.
  • Rebalance the Trade Economy – Trading loses a lot of meaning when you can just collect commodities until you fill your cargo, go to any port, and sell all of your loot, rinse, and repeat. It doesn't matter if the port pays less for the commodity. There's no way for you to know about the supply and demand of the commodities without going to the port first. And all ports have infinite silver to pay for your loot, anyway. The game rarely punishes you for selling low and gives you very little reason to play the speculative economy game by buying low and selling high. Just loot, loot, loot, and sell. That's all you need to do.

Skull and Bones will need a lot of work before it stands toe to toe with Black Flag, Sea of Thieves, and even Sid Meier's Pirates! But for what it's worth, Ubisoft has proven itself to be capable of delivering satisfying post-launch content in such a way that years later, their games become unrecognizable, in a good way. Hopefully, Ubisoft earns enough to incentivize them to keep on improving Skull and Bones. But I won't hold my breath – with a decade's worth of work down the drain and with a game that will probably not sell millions at launch – it just makes more business sense to release the game and move on. Ubisoft can definitely jettison this game and chart a new course forward – and sometimes, starting over is the best course of action toward improvement.

Skull and Bones is coming out on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X on February 16, 2024. Open Beta is currently ongoing until February 11, 2024.