Skull and Bones interview: how Ubisoft plans to turn its ship around in season 4

Skull and Bones' creators talk to GLHF about its latest season

Skull and Bones Season 4 gets a new villain in Vikram Rajan. / Ubisoft

Skull and Bones has had a difficult year. The game launched with a measly score of 59 on Metacritic, including a negative review from us, leading to players jumping ship as soon as it docked. Ubisoft, however, has committed to delivering post-launch content for at least a year, with seasonal content and a release on Steam. With its fourth season finally here, the question remains: how long will Ubisoft keep this game alive? According to the game’s director and senior producer, the plan is to keep the lights on and hope for a fruitful future.

The fourth season of Skull and Bones, called Shadows of the Deep, takes players to the Indian Ocean with a new sea lord, Vikram Rajan, at its forefront. Ubisoft has extensive experience dealing with content originating in India, with two development studios located in Mumbai and Pune. Both studios were integral in asset generation, QA, and even research for the season set near Indian shores.

“I think the approach we’ve taken is that we really want all of our teams to be invested in every aspect of game creation,” Neven Dravinski, senior producer on Skull and Bones, Ubisoft Singapore, explains. “And so the teams here in India are involved in every major vertical of the game, be it the combat, the weapons, ship, content creation, all the great art." 

“It was really inspiring for me personally to see the reaction and the high fives given when some of these characters we introduced came to life. It was a great opportunity to see these stories come to life in this video game. And this is really the first step in telling some of these stories of this region.”

The big challenge of any live service game is balancing the experience for new players and veterans alike. With this being the fourth season, Ubisoft had a lot of work to convince newcomers to experience all the updates it has shipped for the game.

“In this season we have Vikram who's the key antagonist, and he comes with an amazing, very complicated sequence of fights that the player will get to experience,” Dravinski says. “There's a bunch of new events that we've created for being in this time period, the winter period. We have a winter solstice event, a lunar New Year event.”

“We are also buffing up how the fights pan out,” adds Juen Yeow Mak, game director on Skull and Bones. “So the team has spent quite a lot of effort to create that level of difficulty for players who are very well advanced in terms of gear and weapons.”

Dravinski tells us that Ubisoft Singapore “embraces the philosophical stance of being a live game”, so the team is always looking to add new quality-of-life features by assessing community feedback.

Skull and Bones / Ubisoft

While it may seem the game is a lost cause, Dravinski assures us that the company plans for it to stick around “for the long term.” 

“There are new factions, there's new activities, new world events, and I think that's what's really exciting about this product is that it is additive,” Dravinski says.

“I can tell you from a production standpoint, we always start the game in a new season and see, ‘okay, how does a player at the base level experience this world? What are they inundated with? What are the challenges that they're being faced with? Are they ready for this challenge? Is it too early to expose them to this challenge?’ And so to the point about balancing and ensuring that that player journey is as amazing as it can be, that's always a focus for us. It's the first six hours as well as the last three hundred.”

Skull and Bones will keep getting new content for the foreseeable future, but what about new experiences beyond the expected content like ships, bosses, and gear? Will we get to leave a ship and jump into the waters like Edward Kenway? Ubisoft doesn’t rule that out.

“I think a lot of these priorities come with a production impact and a long-term impact,” Dravinski replies. “And we've had many of these discussions about large ships, ships in rivers, et cetera, and so the goal for this team and this game was [to create the] best naval combat experience. We've spent the better part of this last year refining that formula and creating what we believe is a very compelling naval RPG experience. And a lot of these new features [are] in our backlog and we have many, many discussions with the community.”

Skull and Bones / Ubisoft

Any time a new console or PC hardware launches, developers can use the momentum to put their games back in the public spotlight. Following the recent release of the PS5 Pro, Ubisoft has updated games like Assassin’s Creed Syndicate and Mirage to tap into the power of the new hardware. But there has been no word on any PS5 Pro-enhanced patch for Skull and Bones.

Unfortunately, we aren’t told about any concrete plans for such an update, though the developer has “a lot of things that are that are under the hood.” The team is also open to suggestions for new types of experiences that promote healthy cross-platform play or even bring back old features like second-screen apps.

So how about outside of the game itself? Like most franchises, there is a lot of focus on building them out through transmedia initiatives. Skull and Bones is more than just a game, as established by the Dark Horse Comics series Skull and Bones: Savage Storm.

“We try to make this transmedia bridge, [so when] Jonas Vanderkill shows up in the seas, players that are familiar and have invested in the lore will recognize that as this connection,” Dravinski says. “So we are making this effort to flesh out a lot of the narrative, and in various avenues, whether it's trailers that give an inspiring backstory and then the gameplay that you experience. 

“I think there's really an importance to setting this narrative out to sea, and then going on this journey with the community. Because now playing in season four, you're experiencing in parallel season one content, season two, season three [content] and how are all these characters now interacting with one another? What's this world that we're building that we're sequencing and parallelizing at the same time? I think it's a very interesting opportunity.”

Skull and Bones is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S consoles.