This week, a high-quality leak of a Skull and Bones tutorial describing the full essence of the upcoming Ubisoft game went online and is still available in a few places if you know where to look. The game has been delayed and reworked by Ubisoft a number of times, but after watching these footage, I shake my head.
They really went and missed the whole point, after all this time.
The main problem here is that this is not Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag 2, because there is no battle outside the ship, on foot. The footage reveals that while you able to walk around on foot as a pirate captain, it’s only in hub worlds and settlements so you can buy resources and cook.
Instead of actual fights in situations like ship tables or crew mutiny, there are rather rendered intermediate sequences. The game shows a ship performing a “boarding maneuver”, which shows a cutting scene of chaos without actually letting the player fight it aboard the enemy ship, which was half as fun of piracy in the Black Flag way back in 2013.
The game’s relentless focus on being locked inside your ship also feels silly in other ways. There are clips of a ship that “mines” by firing cannonballs like a rock surface, or just park next to a tree and watch it separate into timber for upgrades. It seems like you can not even walk around freely on the deck of your own ship.
In the past, I already do not like the idea of survival-like mechanics of constantly having to supply your crew with food and water to keep morale up, so they do not mutiny, which just seems like busy work and again, not something you should bother with black flag.
Yes, it’s true that the ship battle that was introduced in the Black Flag and then used in half a dozen other Assassin’s Creed games is fun, but it’s just half the fun (or maybe not even that much). Not allowing you to play pirate on foot in actual combat is a really absurd decision which will lower this game from the start. No matter how many delays there are, or how long this stays in production, is a game quite ship-based just won’t appeal to most gamers who literally just wanted Ubisoft to make yet another Black Flag game, minus all of Assassin’s Creed nonsense. The plan has been there all along and it’s just amazing that after all this we are still arriving at a place that does not take into account the reasons why people liked Black Flag to begin with.
Since this leak happened, Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones’ Twitter account seemed to indicate that actual information would be coming soon, but the official tutorial video really puts it all out, and I’m not sure what else to know if you see it. This may appeal to some, but it feels like a half game at best, and it’s hard to see this doing well in this form.
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