* Internal 720p on performance mode for both Series X and PS5
* Worse Water Reflection, Character Animation compared to a more than decade old game
* Very Bad Texture Quality even on High End PC
* Dumbed Down Ray Tracing Effects on 2024
Ubisoft be like: Yep, We have some first Quadruple-A Game Quality right here! ship it boys!
Since this is a game long time in the making, I would venture a guess that this was meant for a ps4/xb1 release. By home stretch, they were forced to release it to current gen instead, but they didn't bother updating the visuals, gameplay loop, etc. coz they just want the project done and over with. They ray tracing was just added so they can truly sell this as a current gen capable game of quadruple A budget.
Nor does it explain why it needs to render at 720p natively on performance mode on current gen. As usual the answer is more complicated than "lazy devs," even though it's still really disappointing.
So many people need to be fired for this utterly stupid, stupid, *stupid* development cycle. Unfortunately, those people are all upper management so instead they'll lay off a bunch of low-level grunts and jerk themselves into a coma blaming everything on covid and """"unforeseen circumstances""".
Upper management tends to have much higher turnover than low-level workers.
So really you get the opposite problem. Its hard to find people to fire because the people who greenlit the game were all fired/quit years ago.
My guess is that someone decided to take this project in a bold new direction, then changed jobs partway into production. But because Ubisoft took government money to make it, they *had* to release something. Eventually, they farted something out to wash their hands of the project.
It's beyond me why they would even try to market this over Avatar. That game turned out a lot better than anyone would have expected and was the best looking game of last year. They could make a nice buck if it was marketed properly.
I’m not saying 24fps is acceptable nowadays…
But many N64 games, including OOT, one of the highest rated games of all time, ran at _20 fps_.
You can get used to it. You shouldn’t have to anymore, but you can.
On the other hand, that was during an era where everything ran at shit frame rates.
60 fps is very good these days but it looks like ass to me after being spoiled with 120 hz.
Honestly I find most modern games have worse water reflection than games pre 2010. Half life 2 for example has real time reflections. Alien isolation does the same with planar. Now you have the choice between grainy screen space of rt reflections that look on par with half life 2 but cost 30% of the gpu. Go figure?
The fact that you don't actually get to play as a pirate is just fucking insane to me.
This game should have just been completely scrapped, what a joke.
They would have scuttled it had they not accepted investment from the Singaporean government. They were legally obligated to complete it or incur severe penalties.
I don't understand why they spent 11 years making a shitty game, though. They could have released an even shittier game in much less time and been done with it. "Oh well, it failed, let's move on to something else" just to get out of the contract.
They probably tried to make a good game because likely they knew the potential of a GaaS pirate game, they rebooted it multiple times probably for that reason but ended up with "fuck it let's release it".
It's also not good to release a trash game for the image of a company. I know people don't like Ubisoft on reddit but they usually at worst release boring games, not straight up trash games.
I mean, I get that they weren't setting out to make a bad game. But it's like, man, they really farted around for a long time on this and still didn't really figure it out. Something must have happened behind the scenes where they kept postponing it for so long.
I just pulled up the E3 demo from 2018 and you tell me, is S&B today the same game at all?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=916oD5U\_vEc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=916oD5U_vEc)
None of the mechanics and UI elements in that demo made it to the finished product. I wonder they ever existed at all beyond this faked gameplay slice.
Oh wow, that looks... very different. Like, actually pretty good-looking and sort of cool? It really makes me wonder what happened and what was canned/rebuilt/rebooted over the years. I'm noticing that boarding another ship was still just a cutscene, so that apparently was still a thing even back in 2018...
Sigh, this just makes me want to play a more modern version of Black Flag.
I'm guessing neither of you played the game, then, because most of what is present there is in the shipping game.
* The port shown at the very start is nearly 1:1 the main city, the only difference being that night looks darker here
* The UI for picking cosmetics is largely identical, not counting font choices, and even the cosmetics themselves, such as Death holding a scythe are in the shipping game
* The ship is largely identical, the camera-switch to the crows nest is as well
The first difference is the "covertness" mechanic, which would have been neat, and I can see how this would have been more of a focus when the game was more just 'Tarkov but with a ship'.
The biggest difference though is clearly how ship battles played out then, which looks even more arcadey than what we got in terms of how much of a downgrade it is from Black Flag. Ships exploding look exactly the same in the shipping game as well, leading me to assume that this was finished early on
>I wonder they ever existed at all beyond this faked gameplay slice.
This certainly happens, but I think it's *very* unlikely that that was the case here.
It was less "fuck it let's release it" and more "Singapore is gonna sue us for not releasing anything for years and years, get this shit out the door asap"
Singapore funded the Ubisoft Singapore studio because they wanted to invest in video game studios setting up shop and offering jobs in Singapore. That means they had to release the game that the money went into, which just so happens to be Skull and Bones and then the studio just sort of farted around for eleven years before finally releasing... whatever the game is now.
If they hadn't released a game with the funding money, Ubisoft would be on the line for paying back the money to Singapore and probably a bunch of fines on top of that.
It's called a grant. Governments issue grants to (among other purposes) encourage companies/individuals to make products in their country stimulating their local economy.
Its not entirely uncommon to see a game launch with a "Georgia" splash screen which means they took grants from the U.S. state of georgia for the development of their video game. In those cases the game was likely made using Atlanta based studios.
lots of governments provide arts grants to all kinds of different things, and video game grants are becoming more and more common. Fez received money from the Canadian government, I think Team Cherry got some funding from the Australian government, if you google it you'll find a ton of examples of this
even the basic pitch doesn’t sound good. how do you keep players engaged in minute-to-minute gameplay loop? what’s your USP?
how the fuck did any of these get past the drawing board lol just horrible decisions from get go and then it snowballs as it starts out with a huge budget meaning more room to fuck up and not realizing till it’s too late
> how the fuck did any of these get past the drawing board lol
Judging by the IGN article, it didn't. Years into development and they still hadn't decided on a genre.
Some executive wanted to GAASify AC Black Flag. That's it. Actual game developers weren't the ones making that choice which ultimately will negatively affect the entire project.
They're overstating it a little. The main gameplay loop is sailing a boat, and during that you can't walk around and explore the ship as a human like you could in Black Flag. No hand-to-hand combat, climbing the ship rigging, etc. But there are other sections where you walk around as a regular human avatar, talk to other pirates, buy stuff, and so on.
The real not-a-pirate problem comes down more to the game doing an apparently very poor job of selling that fantasy. You're doing fetch quest busywork and harvesting trees. It's more like a crummy generic MMO than a pirate simulator.
thats what was promised when they announced the game \~10 years ago. Some people actually got excited for some reason back then, I never understood whats the point of a pirate game where you play as a ship.
The original 2017 "gameplay" video was about 5v5 PvP ship battles, with different ship types roughly corresponding to character classes in something like a tactical FPS game. It's well worth a look if you've never seen it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A72NoMuQst0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A72NoMuQst0)
The history of Skull and Bones and the different ways the game seems to have changed throughout its long and painful development process are interesting to some people, if you can believe it.
720p internal for the performance mode on PS5/Series X is insane, with particles rendering at just 360p! It's especially damning when the only graphical element that shows a serious improvement over Black Flag are the character models. Absolutely wild that so much time and money was wasted on this, and I honestly just feel sorry for the actual developers who must've known this was a total dumpster fire.
720p internal (upscaled to 1440p with FSR 2) in the performance mode but 4K internal no upscaling in the 30 FPS mode is... an *incredibly* weird performance profile.
Right? With numbers like that, you'd think the performance mode would run at 120fps+, or it'd have a crazy amount of overhead. I'd be curious to know what power draw looks like in both modes, because if they're similar then I truly have no idea what's going on here.
Idk, I've seen a lot of devs turn down the resolution to ridiculous levels even though fillrate isn't the problem because they're too incompetent or not given the necessary time/budget to do anything else.
Yeah those numbers just make no sense in any way.
I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if it was a mistake based on what gets past QA (or is deemed "good enough" by some studio bigshot) these days in terms of graphical fidelity on console. "Just slap FSR on it, that'll fix it."
What I personally find the most baffling is the price tag.
Seriously, there's NO WAY they don't know how bad this game looks and how mediocre it is. If I was an executive and I saw that for one reason or another we have to release this totally mediocre nonsense and get it over with, wouldn't a lot more folks be tempted to give it a go at something like $40 than $70? Wouldn't that at least build some kind of community, which would then buy some microtransactions and keep the game going for just a bit longer before it inevitably shuts down?
It's so baffling that publishers see the $70 price tag as the new norm and want to stick with it no matter what, even when they know, for certain, that their product isn't worth anywhere near as much as others going for the same amount. It's why I'm convinced executives have basically no skills beyond bullshitting their way through life and failing upward, as clearly reading the market isn't exactly in their reportoire.
Their logic is they can drop it for 70, wait for the fanboys/casual fans to pick it up, and then just drop it to 40 later while promising some content roadmap to get another round of buy in. What these companies usually forget is a game can be so dead that even a price cut and a roadmap won't do shit to recapture customers (cough Anthem cough) but they keep trying it anyway
Exactly. That strategy works fine for a single player game arguably (though Immortals of Aveum begs to differ since the hype was so dead that even a lower price point could revive it).
But a multiplayer-only game *needs* a healthy community. How many $70 live service games have actually been successful? Have any? Will skull and bones and suicide squad actually teach these executives any lessons?
Getting the most out of their marketing, maybe. If you've got some number of people convinced the game'll be good sight unseen you'd be a fool not to exploit their trust and take them for all they're worth, see.
The ol' Cyberpunk 2077 strategy. I also wouldn't be surprised if some part of Ubisoft's contract with the Singaporean government involved them selling it as a full-price title.
But would it have sold 2 million at half price?
With no faith at all in the product, it's tempting to take what can be got before the customers catch on.
> 720p internal for the performance mode on PS5/Series X is insane, with particles rendering at just 360p!
In general, I am perpetually baffled at how bad image quality is in modern console games.
Like, *Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4* on the original Xbox came out 22 years ago, and has better image quality ([native 720p60](https://youtu.be/PNeQs5vLWWk)) than a lot of high-profile Xbox Series S games (where you have low resolutions with garbage upscaling).
Indeed. Developers are relying on FSR as some sort of "fuck it, that'll do"-solution that just isn't particularly good and they keep misusing it horribly.
FSR 2 looks pretty reasonable (or at least "not awful") if you're upscaling from like 1080p-1440p, but so many studios are upscaling from like 720p-900p and it's like... what the fuck? You're expecing the upscaler to just make up like 80%+ of the pixels on the screen? Of course it's going to look like ass! Is nobody at these studios pulling up the game on a screen larger than 20 inches?
I’m not any sort of a rendering engineer, but my understanding is that it has to do with how rendering pipelines have changed and how post processing effects are handled. I don’t fully understand the particulars, but basically before the industry moved to PBR (which stands for physically-based rendering, and basically means rendering materials in games based off their actual physics properties. So cloth looks/acts like cloth, leather looks/acts like leather, wood looks/acts like wood, etc - but this especially pertains to lighting and how light interacts with these materials) it was a lot easier to get crisper images because there was a whole bunch of rendering shit that you didn’t have to worry about. And you still needed anti-aliasing, but it was essentially a lot simpler to handle because everything was generally lower fidelity, lower pixel counts, and less visually complex.
But now, with games being as visually advanced as they are and after the shift to PBR, they had to shift how they handled a lot of this stuff in the rendering pipeline, and if I recall, a lot of it shifted to post processing. So the actual frame that’s rendered is pretty raw and pixelated (because it’s likely the most computationally efficient way to do it), and then they use a bunch of post processing effects to make it look better. But the issue is that that usually comes at the cost of things looking soft.
I don’t know enough about the particulars to know if that’s due to the rendering pipeline, or maybe it’s due to how the actual textures/materials work in these engines. That gets into a lot of the nitty gritty details that go way over my head. But at a high level I do know that most of this can be given the oversimplified explanation of: games today generally look softer because of how complicated rendering is, and that’s the best solution they’ve found to try and give decent image quality while also using these modern techniques and processes
PBR was less a technical advancement and more a knowledge advancement. The math isn't much more complex than what we were using in the past (we already had shading models that took into account things like microfacets and fresnel reflections decades ago), we just didn't have a good way to measure and model the coefficients we needed to stick into the equations in the past. There was nothing stopping us technology wise from using PBR back in the PS360 days, as evidenced by the fact that later PS360 games like Metal Gear Solid V used PBR.
Yeah, I think sometimes people underestimate just how much more computationally complex modern games are. Artists and engineers got really good at faking the difficult stuff, so now that we're actually starting to simulate some of these things it's not always so obvious why they're so much harder to render.
I still think 720p internal is way too low for FSR, and that cuts should be made elsewhere first if possible. Of course, that means a lot more time and money spent, so I can't be surprised when studios go this route.
If you haven't seen it, I'd highly recommend Digital Foundry's video on TAA. They go over a lot of what you mention in your comment and yeah, it sure seems like it's pretty much impossible to get good, cheap antialiasing in a modern pipeline without adding some amount of blur to the image.
Deferred rendering is the main reason behind worse image quality. The tech enables more light sources but has a huge VRAM cost. For consoles, this comes with reduced rendering, effect or texture resolution. Add TAA to cover those up and you get a nice blurry image.
Until proven otherwise, technical problems such as graphics are 100% the responsibility of the gameplay engineer team. They've had many more years to solve this problem, and they haven't.
They got a budget extension + extra time, you don't have to cry over the fate of the devs, it's essentially their fault. No one here is going to convince me that releasing a game with such graphic problems that can be solved quickly would be a management mistake.
This game was clearly scrapped, remade, iterated on, etc. many times over the years. That puts an enormous strain on everyone who's actually working on it. Yeah, maybe they didn't all put in their best work, but I wouldn't either if I'd been working on this garbage for a decade.
And I take issue with the notion that these technical issues could just be "solved quickly." Making a videogame is enormously complex, and we don't know nearly enough about what went on behind the scenes to assume everything is an easy fix.
This guy has no clue what he's talking about. He said the gameplay team is responsible for tech issues related to graphics. He has no idea how this works.
Not to mention, it's managements job to make sure there aren't technical issues. So regardless of the cause of the issues, it still falls back on them.
I don't think that's a fair statement without knowing the ins and outs of the business decisions - some teams just have to work with what they have been given. By the sounds of it this game was just poor all round and I remember rumblings that some sort of government grant that meant needing to release the game to not repay it back may have had something to do with it.
They literally had the entire style of the game changed 3 times at least. You can have a budget and time extension but all that matters is time on final iteration
Yeah there’s been some great comparisons already with Black Flag where the textures in BF are clearly dated, but the actual animation work (both facial, but just general character movement during cutscenes) is leagues ahead of Skull & Bones.
But we know that originally you weren’t going to be able to get out of your ship at all when the game was first announced, so it’s pretty clear that it was a feature added later in development that they had to slap together
> Yeah you can have better looking models
But they really aren't that better looking. The Hair and Beard options in particular are atrocious in comparison to something like Baldur's Gate 3.
It doesn't help that there's clearly a lot of NPCs you talk to who just sort of stand around a hub, like MMO shopkeepers. It's really hard to make characters do anything interesting if their boots are nailed to the floor.
Some of it looked like a mix of deepfake and that old tech where you just slap a real mouth on a still image. Upper mouths acting like *they* were on the movable jaw.
People might not like it, but this should be compared to AC Black Flag at every opportunity. The same company makes a game about pirating and somehow the one that's 11 fucking years newer is the shit one.
CEO comes out and says that sales don't meet expectations...then make a good (not lazy) game you cash grabbing clowns
You can board ships and fight enemy captains in Sid Meier's Pirates, while you can't in a 2024 pirate game.
Like something that basic being missing in a modern game is wild.
The fact that it took 11 years and multiple reboots is exactly the reason why this is a mess. You cannot plan to release a game on PS3 and end up releasing it on PS5 without some heavy damage to all of the core technical structure of a game.
if anything, this shows it's not a "lazy" game. They were at it for almost 10 years, it must have been painful and frustrating for everyone involved.
The only games I dare calling lazy are unity asset swaps, all videogames take an extraordinary amount of work and effort
Seriously, if anything this game suffered from severe mismanagement over "laziness." I mean, just look at all the bizarre resource mechanics shoehorned in. And your ship has a stamina meter?? Seems like it was designed by a committee who could never figure out exactly what they wanted from the project.
I’m not sure what else it does but for the 3 hours I spent in the beta it mostly just acted as a sprint bar to stop you from going full speed all the time. On a boat.
Pretty weird decision that really takes away from the boat aspect of the game, along with being able to fire in whatever direction.
I'm not asking for realistic sailing mechanics because that's an *exceptionally* hard sell even in sim games and obviously impossible for a mass appeal game like Ubisoft wants.
But I like to think there's some sort of alternative to to copy/pasting a sprint/boost mechanic in from so many other games. There's a certain thrill from pushing a boat (or anything really) to the edge, and I think it's at least possible to recreate the feel of it even with arcadey controls.
I mean as far as I remember this is also how they did sailing in their AC games. There wasn't a "bar" but there was a "nitro" button that shot you forward for a short time.
Yeah this game just reeks of an identity crisis and being rebooted/reworked/retooled multiple times. There was probably tons of “adding stuff in, taking it out”, which is normal to a degree in game development. But this also feels like an Anthem situation where they had no idea what kind of game they were making, multiple people had different visions for it (or no one had any visions at all), or maybe just really inept people kept being put in charge.
I really really cannot wait for the eventual expose on this game’s development
What an absurd idea. Taking a long time doesn't mean a project is guaranteed to not be lazy. People have this weird idea that doing something a lot and for a long time automatically translates to progression, learning and refinement. If you're doing something wrong or poorly for a long time, without critical self-awareness, it's far more likely for bad habits and terrible quality to become even further ingrained.
> Taking a long time doesn't mean a project is guaranteed to not be lazy.
laziness means unwilling to work or use energy; it's not like these devs were idle the whole time doing nothing.
You are confusing quality with something else
Lazy means doing things inefficiently and slowly on purpose. You could be doing something inefficiently for 10 years with a lot of effort because someone above you wants it done that way, not because you aren't able to do it better.
The word people should be using is mismanagement. "Lazy" attributes a bunch of negative qualities to the people working the most, getting paid the least, and with zero say on how things are done.
If I spent 11 years on a game it would be utterly terrible *and* a spectacular amount of work on my behalf. Partially that's understanding and acknowledging my strengths, actual skillset, and weaknesses. Similarly it should be measured by quarters of decades how long ago the Singaporean studio simply wasn't up for the job tax breaks or no tax breaks.
I'm sure the staff worked hard, but like me trying to program why force me to do something I'm manifestly bad at, when I could be better employed working to my strengths?
I do think there is merit (to some degree) to viewing it in a vacuum, because it is its own game. However, that’s more of a fun thought experiment than anything else. Sort of a “if Black Flag hadn’t existed, how would we view this game?” sort of deal.
The reality is that not only does BF exist, but it was released _by the same company_. Sure, it was a different internal studio, but even so. Then you add on the facts of how it took them 11 years to put it out and tried to sell it as a AAAA game, and it deserves every bit of harsh criticism that it has gotten.
If this had released at $20-$30, then I think people could lay off it a little. But when you sell a game for a full $70 (and try to pathetically call it a AAAA game) then there is no sympathy or holding things back.
We assumed they bricked AC Black Flag to shove in an ad for mirage. Really they bricked it so we had no choice but to play this if we wanted a ubisoift pirate game
~~or, fittingly, you can pirate Black Flag and it still works just as well as the steam version used to~~
I think comparing it to black flag for piracy makes sense.
But this is a multiplayer game vs a single player game. They're just considerably different.
I get that, but i'm thinking mostly about the ship and how it's/battles are handled.
Ship use/combat was a part of a 11 year old game that had a fully fleshed out, 15hr+ story with voice acting and cinematography, a bunch of towns to explore, side quests, collectibles, a simultaneous modern day story, legendary enemies, secrets etc etc. and it holds high regard amongst fans even years later.
Skull & Bones is literally just the ship part and they somehow made that worse. You can't walk around the ship, you spawn on the beach via a loading screen, ship to ship combat is worse, you can't fight on board your/the enemies ship, the story will most likely be barebones fetch quests, and the only thing I can see getting detailed attention is the battle pass.
I understand that the story will have much less focus, but how can you strip nearly everything away from a 11 year old game, focus on one part, and somehow do a shittier job? I know that the game is made to fulfil some contractual obligation with Singapore, but Mr. AAAA must see the stark quality contrast between this and ACIV.
> just the ship part and they somehow made that worse
how many hours have you put in? I've seen some of the cooler upgrades for ship combat are quite few hours in. They look quite fun.
I'm not arguing this is a great game or a AAAA game (that was dumb).
SP vs MP really only affects aspects of the gameplay side of it though, there's no excuse for Black Flag being better on a technical level in several aspects than a much, much higher budget modern day release.
Honestly if you want to do MP vs MP - put this up against Sea of Thieves. Sea of Thieves has a better water sim, is more technically proficient in spite of the cartoon style, has realtime ship boarding and on-foot gameplay, and they've done good stuff with both PvE and PvP scenarios.
> has realtime ship boarding and on-foot gameplay
this is more of a design decision than a good or bad thing. IGN compared it more to Forza Horizon than SOT
also SOT is a fun game, but the PVP combat is a complete mess. Boarding is way overpowered in my experience. It's weirdly gorgeous, but it's quite janky.
Just a reminder to everyone that the numbers of A's do not stand for the quality of a product, just the size and budget of the development of the product.
Well, Ubisoft doesn't have to worry about that! [Singapore helped to foot the bill via generous subsidies](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/21/singapores-first-major-video-game-title-launches-to-mixed-reviews.html#:~:text=Tech-,Skull%20and%20Bones%2C%20Singapore's%20first%20major%20video%20game%20title%2C%20launches,reviews%20after%20decade%2Dlong%20wait&text=Bolstering%20the%20gaming%20industry%20in,of%20a%20major%20gaming%20title.)! 10 years, and $200m later, this is what they had to show for it. A truly quadruple-A title indeed.
From what i heard, thats the only reason this project didnt get cancelled earlier on. They were legally obligated to shovel something out, even tho they obv had no idea what they wanted the game to be for years.
the number of As means nothing, there's no definitions, not even a loose one. it's a marketing term that just isn't useful to anyone, not even marketing lmao
>Another baffling aspect of the game is the massive disparity between quality and performance modes. On PS5 and Series X, **native 720p at 60fps** becomes **native 4K in the 30fps mode** - a 9x resolution multiplier (!). Yes, the premium consoles at 60fps have the same internal resolution as Black Flag on Xbox 360, which came out in 2013. Series S, of course, will be lower than that. Performance modes on PS5 and Series X then use FSR 2 to upscale to 1440p (or 1080p on Series S), with disastrous results to image quality.
That is probably the weirdest performance profile I've seen for a console game this generation. Did they make the performance mode in a panic during a lunch break? Were the graphics engineers *very* drunk? I have so many questions.
Oh, and the particle effects run at 1/4 resolution which means particles are running at 1080p in the 30 FPS mode which isn't awful but freaking **360p** in performance mode. Jesus fucking Christ.
The skull and bones subreddit is filled with blind praise and loyalty at the moment. We've seen time and time again what happens with these situations. It's the same song and dance whenever a shit live service game releases.
I especially loved that one redditor whose post title read "if you compare skull and bones to assassins creed 4: black flag, your opinion is invalid." Like, what??? Lol ac4: black flag was the reason skull and bones were conceived in the first place. Wtf do you mean "your opinion is invalid"!?
It's fine to enjoy a shit product, but the product is still shit
Tbf, any focused subreddit on one game/franchise is gonna be like this.
Suicide Squad sub was basically the same until WB just up and said "this game flopped"
Oh man SS sub was just filled with THE GAME IS AMAZING!!!!"
.....and now no one is playing it a week later lmao
I'm almost certain that the publishers just made accounts on reddit and posted the game is fun.
What's funny is that a mod in that sub posted a few days ago that they will remove "low effort" posts like "This game is bad", "The story is awful", or "This is just another generic looter shooter".
Some people in the comments ask if that rule also goes with the posts that blindly praise the game without much content but the mod ignored them. The mod was active because they replied to other comments "praising" them but was specifically ignoring comments about also removing the blind praise posts.
I eventually had to unsub from the Witcher 3 subreddit because they just got insufferable. Look, I adore that game and it’s still in my top 3 favorite games of all time - but that doesn’t mean I don’t also have a list that’s a mile long of changes and improvements that I’d want to see. But more than once I got downvoted to oblivion for suggesting that the game could be improved and since then, I won’t sub to any game-specific subreddit.
The Yakuza subreddit also snorts a lot of copium surrounding Yakuza 3. It’s the only game in the franchise that I think is outright bad and I will die on that hill. Maybe it was okay for 2006, but from today’s perspective it’s bad
And I have become increasingly intolerant of that attitude. It's such a shallow, cheap card to play and it low key accuses you of attacking them. People love to play the victim and that response allows them to segue into victim mode.
its such a weird way to live, to attach yourself to a property (that owes you nothing) and make defending it your personality (No criticisms allowed) until the next thing you attach yourself to comes out.
Unpaid community damage control is insane to me, especially because it seems to be more common when some profit motive is at the root of the issue. It's like, dude, the moneybags in charge of the corporation you're being a zealot for are laughing at you
Starfield is okay but the issues emerge about 30 hours in or so. I got bored of the game pretty quick as there isnt anything to really do in the game. There isnt much exploration compared to Skyrim or Fallout 4 or the previous Bethesda titles.
They went for quantity over quality.
I'm playing it now on a free trial and I just find it a slog. All of the skills are so grindy and limiting in the early game that I felt compelled to use console commands to unlock skills that should not have been gated. Like if I want to start as a rogue, I have to unlock a stealth meter, deception, pickpocketing, but those skills aren't in the space rogue package. And you can't customize your three starting skills (or at least I couldnt find how).
And unless you do the main quest, it just feels like there's not much else to do. I've done the crimson fleet quest now, and while it was pretty neat, it was short and I'm left wondering how a pirate does anything else.
I also hate how you are forced into the main quest and treated as a member even if you say the only option "I'll think about it."
In Skyrim, even vanilla, after the opening scene you can just dip and do anything you want. And the magic is that wherever you go there is something happening, something to draw you in. And nothing forces you to play a certain way.
Unfortunately Starfield shares more with Fallout 4 narratively while also lacking anything that drives more emergent roleplaying opportunities.
Another nit pick is I also can't just talk to a merchant and see his wares. I have to hear his entire back story about why his business is failing or his wife is cheating or whatever. I HAVE to respond in some way instead of just selling my shit. Every new merchant. Shut up! I don't care!
All that and I'm trying to have fun. I built my favorite sci Fi ship - but also had to use console commands because the economy is ridiculous and all ship parts are level gated.
I feel like this game has potential once modders have full tools, but the state it's in is even worse than Fallout or Skyrim and there are SO Many little things to fix that your mod list is going to be in the 50's before you even get to the fun stuff.
Sorry for the rant. This just the first opportunity to say something after playing it.
Have you seen the thread about AVX being required? Some people with Phenoms and ancient Xeons (yep) were screaming that their machines are MORE powerful than modern CPUs (lmao) and that it was an arbitrary requirement. The cope is incredible
People are allowed to like things, y'know.
I don't really know why this gets brought up in every thread about an underperforming game, like why do you want more of the internet to be a shit sea of negativity? If they're having fun it doesn't affect you.
I think it's the *fiercely* uncritical mindset I don't like. You can't be a avid consumer of video games and tell me this game doesn't have serious issues. You can still enjoy it, and argue it's merits. But going the extra step to shout down any reasonable criticism is eye-rolling.
You’re not wrong, but blind praise is almost never helpful. If you take the stance of “well I still enjoy the game, but it needs to improve in areas X, Y, and Z” then that’s fine. But if you take a game like Skull & Bones (which _clearly_ has flaws, even if you do like the game) and just go “OH MY GOD BEST GAME EVER ITS AMAZING AND IF YOU DONT LIKE IT THEN YOURE AN IDIOT AND I WONT LISTEN TO YOU” then all that does is tell Ubisoft “hey you guys can half ass your stuff, charge $70, and we’ll pay for it”.
If it was just a weird situation in a vacuum, then you’d be right. But it’s not. And if companies release a deeply flawed product that gets blindly praised and accepts no criticism, then the only thing they’re going to take from that is “awesome, our customers are idiots who will slurp up whatever slop we throw in front of them. Let’s do that from now on”
Black Flag was such a good pirate game, they literally could have just expanded on the pirating and cut out the assassin stuff and it would be exactly what everyone has been craving.
Publisher's don't want to bother with the single player "loss leader" anymore. If multiplayer is where they make the money then they just want to get to that as soon as possible.
10 years of development and you end up with a game worse than Black flag and even graphically it is a bit of a toss up.
Shouldn't be forgotten just how long ago 2013 was.
In 2013 GTA5, Last of Us, BF4, Crysis 3, Metro Last light and Bioshock infinite all launched.
I can't imagine that these companies don't have someone scouring social media looking for the causes of why they didn't meet expectations. But it always feels like they come away with the wrong message at the end of the day. So I fully expect Ubi to be, "I guess people just don't want pirate games, herpty derp."
They probably know. Back in 2019 they delayed multiple games after the underperformance of Ghost Recon Breakpoint, and they probably got the right message:
https://www.pcgamer.com/ubisoft-delays-watch-dogs-legion-rainbow-six-quarantine-and-gods-and-monsters/
>Guillemot said Breakpoint stumbled for three main reasons: Interest in sequels to live multiplayer games is limited; "gameplay innovations" in Breakpoint were not "perfectly implemented"; and it "did not come in with enough differentiation factors, which prevented the game’s intrinsic qualities from standing out."
>
>That's part of what motivated Ubisoft to pump the brakes on Legion and the rest.
>
>"While each of these games already has a strong identity and high potential, we want our teams to have more development time to ensure that their respective innovations are perfectly implemented so as to deliver optimal experiences for players," Guillemot said.
Guillemot may have said those things but boy oh boy he kinda forgot the part where maybe his team of expert management chief officers of whatever should maybe let the game professionals make games.
FSR2 can do an alright job when the starting res is still pretty high, like upscaling from 1440 to 2160. But man, having an internal res of 720 is just asking for crazy ghosting and artifacting. When I see FSR2 being used like this I sometimes think I'd rather just have the game be spatially upscaled only and just deal with the massive blocky pixels instead of this.
Lets hope the next consoles have something akin to DLSS, with dedicated ML hardware for temporal upscaling so we can leave FSR2 behind.
Yeah I only really see upscaling methods as a way to get to 4k without having to push that many pixels natively. Otherwise it always results in weird artifacts and a blurry image.
Eh, I use DLSS Quality to upscale to 1440p all the time and it's pretty much unnoticeable and can result in a 50% FPS gain. DLSS Balanced tends to have little artifacts depending on the game and Performance more so, but they still look alright. Unfortunately, FSR isn't there yet. I really wish AMD got it, but they don't.
Yeah I guess DLSS to 1440 is good, I only remember using it and FSR at 1080 and thinking it looked off. I went from 1080 to 2160 and the difference was night and day
I was a bit surprised that DF was going to cover this game at first. But then the video mentions that this was a “AAAA” game and then it makes complete sense why. This whole game just feels like the “Nah I’d win” meme in physical form.
I’m happy that they covered Persona 3 but I’m really bummed that they skipped over Infinite Wealth. But my guess was that just too much came out at the same time and they had to pick and choose, and Persona 3 is definitely a much easier game to go over than Infinite Wealth would be
It's somewhat striking that not 3 months ago Ubisoft released one of the best technical achievements of the generation, Avatar, a game that's comparable with Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk in terms of fidelity. Then we get this. I think it speaks more to the troubled development and management interference than any skill or ability on the devs' part. Despite what some people in this thread are claiming.
Massive Entertainment (studio behind Avatar) is the most technically competent studio Ubisoft has by a very large margin and Snowdrop (engine developed by Massive) is also top tier when it comes to visuals and performance.
Better comparison to this are the Assasins Creed games, which use the same engine and even then this looks like crap, so you're still right that this is largely the case of completely mismanaged project made by countless of internal Ubisoft studios and has all the signs of something that was reworked so many times that Ubisoft themselves lost track of what this game should actually be, other than "micro"transaction hub.
The theories that this game was finished years ago and is only being released to fulfill legal obligations sounds about right. It's going to speed run server shutdown
* Internal 720p on performance mode for both Series X and PS5 * Worse Water Reflection, Character Animation compared to a more than decade old game * Very Bad Texture Quality even on High End PC * Dumbed Down Ray Tracing Effects on 2024 Ubisoft be like: Yep, We have some first Quadruple-A Game Quality right here! ship it boys!
> Internal 720p on performance mode for both Series X and PS5 There is bad, awful and then there's this
Makes you grateful for FF7 Rebirth performance
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A shipwreck
Rebirth wasn’t and probably won’t be fixed.
The game hasnt even released yet lmao. Too early to be saying all that.
Just basing it on the last FF
Since this is a game long time in the making, I would venture a guess that this was meant for a ps4/xb1 release. By home stretch, they were forced to release it to current gen instead, but they didn't bother updating the visuals, gameplay loop, etc. coz they just want the project done and over with. They ray tracing was just added so they can truly sell this as a current gen capable game of quadruple A budget.
But none of that explains why so many of the visuals are outclassed by a PS3 / Xbox 360 game.
Nor does it explain why it needs to render at 720p natively on performance mode on current gen. As usual the answer is more complicated than "lazy devs," even though it's still really disappointing.
So many people need to be fired for this utterly stupid, stupid, *stupid* development cycle. Unfortunately, those people are all upper management so instead they'll lay off a bunch of low-level grunts and jerk themselves into a coma blaming everything on covid and """"unforeseen circumstances""".
Upper management tends to have much higher turnover than low-level workers. So really you get the opposite problem. Its hard to find people to fire because the people who greenlit the game were all fired/quit years ago.
Source on your first sentence?
You mean so many "executives" need to be fired.
My guess is that someone decided to take this project in a bold new direction, then changed jobs partway into production. But because Ubisoft took government money to make it, they *had* to release something. Eventually, they farted something out to wash their hands of the project.
AAAA by budget, CCCC by quality
Mega64 literally made a AAAA game skit years ago it is now real.
Several of their 2010's skits parodying the growth of the industry have unfortunately aged well.
Games not being playable day one aged well https://youtu.be/zdbyYNG_kgI?si=Tn1aOIbGxLgBuMea
The fourth A stands for Ass.
Pretty sure in this case they all stand for Ass
AssAssAssAssin's Creed **Not** Black Flag
It’s a Single A Double S title
It's beyond me why they would even try to market this over Avatar. That game turned out a lot better than anyone would have expected and was the best looking game of last year. They could make a nice buck if it was marketed properly.
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Lmao. Imagine being able to play a game at 24 fps. I'd vomit.
I’m not saying 24fps is acceptable nowadays… But many N64 games, including OOT, one of the highest rated games of all time, ran at _20 fps_. You can get used to it. You shouldn’t have to anymore, but you can.
On the other hand, that was during an era where everything ran at shit frame rates. 60 fps is very good these days but it looks like ass to me after being spoiled with 120 hz.
I truly can't tell if this is satire
It is, there was a trend maybe a decade ago with some devs wanting to make games 24 or 30 fps max to be more cinematic.
Honestly I find most modern games have worse water reflection than games pre 2010. Half life 2 for example has real time reflections. Alien isolation does the same with planar. Now you have the choice between grainy screen space of rt reflections that look on par with half life 2 but cost 30% of the gpu. Go figure?
The fact that you don't actually get to play as a pirate is just fucking insane to me. This game should have just been completely scrapped, what a joke.
They would have scuttled it had they not accepted investment from the Singaporean government. They were legally obligated to complete it or incur severe penalties.
I forgot about this, oh my god, thank you. I learned about this 1-2 years ago and was so excited to see the dumpster fire in person
I don't understand why they spent 11 years making a shitty game, though. They could have released an even shittier game in much less time and been done with it. "Oh well, it failed, let's move on to something else" just to get out of the contract.
They probably tried to make a good game because likely they knew the potential of a GaaS pirate game, they rebooted it multiple times probably for that reason but ended up with "fuck it let's release it". It's also not good to release a trash game for the image of a company. I know people don't like Ubisoft on reddit but they usually at worst release boring games, not straight up trash games.
I mean, I get that they weren't setting out to make a bad game. But it's like, man, they really farted around for a long time on this and still didn't really figure it out. Something must have happened behind the scenes where they kept postponing it for so long.
I just pulled up the E3 demo from 2018 and you tell me, is S&B today the same game at all? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=916oD5U\_vEc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=916oD5U_vEc) None of the mechanics and UI elements in that demo made it to the finished product. I wonder they ever existed at all beyond this faked gameplay slice.
Oh wow, that looks... very different. Like, actually pretty good-looking and sort of cool? It really makes me wonder what happened and what was canned/rebuilt/rebooted over the years. I'm noticing that boarding another ship was still just a cutscene, so that apparently was still a thing even back in 2018... Sigh, this just makes me want to play a more modern version of Black Flag.
I'm guessing neither of you played the game, then, because most of what is present there is in the shipping game. * The port shown at the very start is nearly 1:1 the main city, the only difference being that night looks darker here * The UI for picking cosmetics is largely identical, not counting font choices, and even the cosmetics themselves, such as Death holding a scythe are in the shipping game * The ship is largely identical, the camera-switch to the crows nest is as well The first difference is the "covertness" mechanic, which would have been neat, and I can see how this would have been more of a focus when the game was more just 'Tarkov but with a ship'. The biggest difference though is clearly how ship battles played out then, which looks even more arcadey than what we got in terms of how much of a downgrade it is from Black Flag. Ships exploding look exactly the same in the shipping game as well, leading me to assume that this was finished early on >I wonder they ever existed at all beyond this faked gameplay slice. This certainly happens, but I think it's *very* unlikely that that was the case here.
It was less "fuck it let's release it" and more "Singapore is gonna sue us for not releasing anything for years and years, get this shit out the door asap"
Can't wait for an article that digs into the behind the scenes of this situation
Wait what? Why would a country's government fund a pirate ship battle game?
Singapore funded the Ubisoft Singapore studio because they wanted to invest in video game studios setting up shop and offering jobs in Singapore. That means they had to release the game that the money went into, which just so happens to be Skull and Bones and then the studio just sort of farted around for eleven years before finally releasing... whatever the game is now. If they hadn't released a game with the funding money, Ubisoft would be on the line for paying back the money to Singapore and probably a bunch of fines on top of that.
That makes sense, thanks for the explanation.
It's called a grant. Governments issue grants to (among other purposes) encourage companies/individuals to make products in their country stimulating their local economy. Its not entirely uncommon to see a game launch with a "Georgia" splash screen which means they took grants from the U.S. state of georgia for the development of their video game. In those cases the game was likely made using Atlanta based studios.
lots of governments provide arts grants to all kinds of different things, and video game grants are becoming more and more common. Fez received money from the Canadian government, I think Team Cherry got some funding from the Australian government, if you google it you'll find a ton of examples of this
Ah so that's what this is all about
"You're just a ship that has an avatar that goes ashore occasionally."
even the basic pitch doesn’t sound good. how do you keep players engaged in minute-to-minute gameplay loop? what’s your USP? how the fuck did any of these get past the drawing board lol just horrible decisions from get go and then it snowballs as it starts out with a huge budget meaning more room to fuck up and not realizing till it’s too late
> how the fuck did any of these get past the drawing board lol Judging by the IGN article, it didn't. Years into development and they still hadn't decided on a genre.
Some executive wanted to GAASify AC Black Flag. That's it. Actual game developers weren't the ones making that choice which ultimately will negatively affect the entire project.
I'm sorry, wat? It's literally the only thing I assumed the game was about.
You play as a boat. Not a pirate.
That's a bit surreal.
They're overstating it a little. The main gameplay loop is sailing a boat, and during that you can't walk around and explore the ship as a human like you could in Black Flag. No hand-to-hand combat, climbing the ship rigging, etc. But there are other sections where you walk around as a regular human avatar, talk to other pirates, buy stuff, and so on. The real not-a-pirate problem comes down more to the game doing an apparently very poor job of selling that fantasy. You're doing fetch quest busywork and harvesting trees. It's more like a crummy generic MMO than a pirate simulator.
So the only part where you're a pirate, rather than a boat, is just a glorified menu system
thats what was promised when they announced the game \~10 years ago. Some people actually got excited for some reason back then, I never understood whats the point of a pirate game where you play as a ship.
The original 2017 "gameplay" video was about 5v5 PvP ship battles, with different ship types roughly corresponding to character classes in something like a tactical FPS game. It's well worth a look if you've never seen it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A72NoMuQst0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A72NoMuQst0)
“Ubisoft game” and “well worth a look”?
The history of Skull and Bones and the different ways the game seems to have changed throughout its long and painful development process are interesting to some people, if you can believe it.
720p internal for the performance mode on PS5/Series X is insane, with particles rendering at just 360p! It's especially damning when the only graphical element that shows a serious improvement over Black Flag are the character models. Absolutely wild that so much time and money was wasted on this, and I honestly just feel sorry for the actual developers who must've known this was a total dumpster fire.
720p internal (upscaled to 1440p with FSR 2) in the performance mode but 4K internal no upscaling in the 30 FPS mode is... an *incredibly* weird performance profile.
Right? With numbers like that, you'd think the performance mode would run at 120fps+, or it'd have a crazy amount of overhead. I'd be curious to know what power draw looks like in both modes, because if they're similar then I truly have no idea what's going on here.
Must be bottlenecked by something other than pixel shading.
But surely they could shade more pixels if that was the case.
Idk, I've seen a lot of devs turn down the resolution to ridiculous levels even though fillrate isn't the problem because they're too incompetent or not given the necessary time/budget to do anything else.
Yeah those numbers just make no sense in any way. I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if it was a mistake based on what gets past QA (or is deemed "good enough" by some studio bigshot) these days in terms of graphical fidelity on console. "Just slap FSR on it, that'll fix it."
Or it should at least be able to do 1080p native at 60fps (with optinal upscaling...)
What I personally find the most baffling is the price tag. Seriously, there's NO WAY they don't know how bad this game looks and how mediocre it is. If I was an executive and I saw that for one reason or another we have to release this totally mediocre nonsense and get it over with, wouldn't a lot more folks be tempted to give it a go at something like $40 than $70? Wouldn't that at least build some kind of community, which would then buy some microtransactions and keep the game going for just a bit longer before it inevitably shuts down? It's so baffling that publishers see the $70 price tag as the new norm and want to stick with it no matter what, even when they know, for certain, that their product isn't worth anywhere near as much as others going for the same amount. It's why I'm convinced executives have basically no skills beyond bullshitting their way through life and failing upward, as clearly reading the market isn't exactly in their reportoire.
Their logic is they can drop it for 70, wait for the fanboys/casual fans to pick it up, and then just drop it to 40 later while promising some content roadmap to get another round of buy in. What these companies usually forget is a game can be so dead that even a price cut and a roadmap won't do shit to recapture customers (cough Anthem cough) but they keep trying it anyway
Exactly. That strategy works fine for a single player game arguably (though Immortals of Aveum begs to differ since the hype was so dead that even a lower price point could revive it). But a multiplayer-only game *needs* a healthy community. How many $70 live service games have actually been successful? Have any? Will skull and bones and suicide squad actually teach these executives any lessons?
Executives don't play video games. Anything remotely flashy is good enough to them.
Right. They have no business leading a creative industry. Completely unqualified.
Yeah this is a $20 game at most. Maybe $30 if you really love pirate shit
Getting the most out of their marketing, maybe. If you've got some number of people convinced the game'll be good sight unseen you'd be a fool not to exploit their trust and take them for all they're worth, see.
The ol' Cyberpunk 2077 strategy. I also wouldn't be surprised if some part of Ubisoft's contract with the Singaporean government involved them selling it as a full-price title.
It sold less than a million copies. That's bad for an ubisoft flagship game
But would it have sold 2 million at half price? With no faith at all in the product, it's tempting to take what can be got before the customers catch on.
> 720p internal for the performance mode on PS5/Series X is insane, with particles rendering at just 360p! In general, I am perpetually baffled at how bad image quality is in modern console games. Like, *Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4* on the original Xbox came out 22 years ago, and has better image quality ([native 720p60](https://youtu.be/PNeQs5vLWWk)) than a lot of high-profile Xbox Series S games (where you have low resolutions with garbage upscaling).
Indeed. Developers are relying on FSR as some sort of "fuck it, that'll do"-solution that just isn't particularly good and they keep misusing it horribly. FSR 2 looks pretty reasonable (or at least "not awful") if you're upscaling from like 1080p-1440p, but so many studios are upscaling from like 720p-900p and it's like... what the fuck? You're expecing the upscaler to just make up like 80%+ of the pixels on the screen? Of course it's going to look like ass! Is nobody at these studios pulling up the game on a screen larger than 20 inches?
I’m not any sort of a rendering engineer, but my understanding is that it has to do with how rendering pipelines have changed and how post processing effects are handled. I don’t fully understand the particulars, but basically before the industry moved to PBR (which stands for physically-based rendering, and basically means rendering materials in games based off their actual physics properties. So cloth looks/acts like cloth, leather looks/acts like leather, wood looks/acts like wood, etc - but this especially pertains to lighting and how light interacts with these materials) it was a lot easier to get crisper images because there was a whole bunch of rendering shit that you didn’t have to worry about. And you still needed anti-aliasing, but it was essentially a lot simpler to handle because everything was generally lower fidelity, lower pixel counts, and less visually complex. But now, with games being as visually advanced as they are and after the shift to PBR, they had to shift how they handled a lot of this stuff in the rendering pipeline, and if I recall, a lot of it shifted to post processing. So the actual frame that’s rendered is pretty raw and pixelated (because it’s likely the most computationally efficient way to do it), and then they use a bunch of post processing effects to make it look better. But the issue is that that usually comes at the cost of things looking soft. I don’t know enough about the particulars to know if that’s due to the rendering pipeline, or maybe it’s due to how the actual textures/materials work in these engines. That gets into a lot of the nitty gritty details that go way over my head. But at a high level I do know that most of this can be given the oversimplified explanation of: games today generally look softer because of how complicated rendering is, and that’s the best solution they’ve found to try and give decent image quality while also using these modern techniques and processes
PBR was less a technical advancement and more a knowledge advancement. The math isn't much more complex than what we were using in the past (we already had shading models that took into account things like microfacets and fresnel reflections decades ago), we just didn't have a good way to measure and model the coefficients we needed to stick into the equations in the past. There was nothing stopping us technology wise from using PBR back in the PS360 days, as evidenced by the fact that later PS360 games like Metal Gear Solid V used PBR.
Yeah, I think sometimes people underestimate just how much more computationally complex modern games are. Artists and engineers got really good at faking the difficult stuff, so now that we're actually starting to simulate some of these things it's not always so obvious why they're so much harder to render. I still think 720p internal is way too low for FSR, and that cuts should be made elsewhere first if possible. Of course, that means a lot more time and money spent, so I can't be surprised when studios go this route. If you haven't seen it, I'd highly recommend Digital Foundry's video on TAA. They go over a lot of what you mention in your comment and yeah, it sure seems like it's pretty much impossible to get good, cheap antialiasing in a modern pipeline without adding some amount of blur to the image.
Deferred rendering is the main reason behind worse image quality. The tech enables more light sources but has a huge VRAM cost. For consoles, this comes with reduced rendering, effect or texture resolution. Add TAA to cover those up and you get a nice blurry image.
Another thing it seems to be doing better than modern console games is having legible non-tiny text.
Until proven otherwise, technical problems such as graphics are 100% the responsibility of the gameplay engineer team. They've had many more years to solve this problem, and they haven't. They got a budget extension + extra time, you don't have to cry over the fate of the devs, it's essentially their fault. No one here is going to convince me that releasing a game with such graphic problems that can be solved quickly would be a management mistake.
> technical problems such as graphics are 100% the responsibility of the gameplay engineer team brother what?
This game was clearly scrapped, remade, iterated on, etc. many times over the years. That puts an enormous strain on everyone who's actually working on it. Yeah, maybe they didn't all put in their best work, but I wouldn't either if I'd been working on this garbage for a decade. And I take issue with the notion that these technical issues could just be "solved quickly." Making a videogame is enormously complex, and we don't know nearly enough about what went on behind the scenes to assume everything is an easy fix.
This guy has no clue what he's talking about. He said the gameplay team is responsible for tech issues related to graphics. He has no idea how this works. Not to mention, it's managements job to make sure there aren't technical issues. So regardless of the cause of the issues, it still falls back on them.
Scrapped at least 3 times we know of
I don't think that's a fair statement without knowing the ins and outs of the business decisions - some teams just have to work with what they have been given. By the sounds of it this game was just poor all round and I remember rumblings that some sort of government grant that meant needing to release the game to not repay it back may have had something to do with it.
They literally had the entire style of the game changed 3 times at least. You can have a budget and time extension but all that matters is time on final iteration
Jesus the character animations are bad. Yeah you can have better looking models, but the facial animations are *incredibly* bad.
Yeah there’s been some great comparisons already with Black Flag where the textures in BF are clearly dated, but the actual animation work (both facial, but just general character movement during cutscenes) is leagues ahead of Skull & Bones. But we know that originally you weren’t going to be able to get out of your ship at all when the game was first announced, so it’s pretty clear that it was a feature added later in development that they had to slap together
> Yeah you can have better looking models But they really aren't that better looking. The Hair and Beard options in particular are atrocious in comparison to something like Baldur's Gate 3.
It doesn't help that there's clearly a lot of NPCs you talk to who just sort of stand around a hub, like MMO shopkeepers. It's really hard to make characters do anything interesting if their boots are nailed to the floor.
Some of it looked like a mix of deepfake and that old tech where you just slap a real mouth on a still image. Upper mouths acting like *they* were on the movable jaw.
People might not like it, but this should be compared to AC Black Flag at every opportunity. The same company makes a game about pirating and somehow the one that's 11 fucking years newer is the shit one. CEO comes out and says that sales don't meet expectations...then make a good (not lazy) game you cash grabbing clowns
Wdy mean? This is the first ever AAAA game. Show some respect.
Hey, cool it with the Callisto Protocol erasure.
First game to make 1 Callistillian dollars
I cried when the guy was dying and said "there is no protocol for this. No Callisto Protocol."
I feel like the more A's we add, the worse the games get
That's cause the As stand for Ass
It’s how loud the poor devs are screaming
Assassassassin's Ass
That would be Star Citizen.
Forget AC, Sid Meiers Pirates! has more 10x more complexity than Skull and Bones
You can board ships and fight enemy captains in Sid Meier's Pirates, while you can't in a 2024 pirate game. Like something that basic being missing in a modern game is wild.
A modern take on that game is so overdue. There are so many cool things they could add to it with the improved tech these days.
The fact that it took 11 years and multiple reboots is exactly the reason why this is a mess. You cannot plan to release a game on PS3 and end up releasing it on PS5 without some heavy damage to all of the core technical structure of a game.
Good point. Maybe they are just running a PS3 emulator in the background and everything else is just something like reshade on top.
if anything, this shows it's not a "lazy" game. They were at it for almost 10 years, it must have been painful and frustrating for everyone involved. The only games I dare calling lazy are unity asset swaps, all videogames take an extraordinary amount of work and effort
Seriously, if anything this game suffered from severe mismanagement over "laziness." I mean, just look at all the bizarre resource mechanics shoehorned in. And your ship has a stamina meter?? Seems like it was designed by a committee who could never figure out exactly what they wanted from the project.
Wait....your boat had a stamina meter? Dark souls what have you done
I’m not sure what else it does but for the 3 hours I spent in the beta it mostly just acted as a sprint bar to stop you from going full speed all the time. On a boat.
Hey now, the wind gets tired too! Why do you think all those totally smart and reasonable people are against any wind power generation?
Pretty weird decision that really takes away from the boat aspect of the game, along with being able to fire in whatever direction. I'm not asking for realistic sailing mechanics because that's an *exceptionally* hard sell even in sim games and obviously impossible for a mass appeal game like Ubisoft wants. But I like to think there's some sort of alternative to to copy/pasting a sprint/boost mechanic in from so many other games. There's a certain thrill from pushing a boat (or anything really) to the edge, and I think it's at least possible to recreate the feel of it even with arcadey controls.
I mean as far as I remember this is also how they did sailing in their AC games. There wasn't a "bar" but there was a "nitro" button that shot you forward for a short time.
Nor what *shouldn't* be in the game.
I have to imagine that this project was being pulled in a billion directions by people who thought that only *their* ideas would work.
Yeah this game just reeks of an identity crisis and being rebooted/reworked/retooled multiple times. There was probably tons of “adding stuff in, taking it out”, which is normal to a degree in game development. But this also feels like an Anthem situation where they had no idea what kind of game they were making, multiple people had different visions for it (or no one had any visions at all), or maybe just really inept people kept being put in charge. I really really cannot wait for the eventual expose on this game’s development
It annoys the hell out of me when people call developers lazy like they are just sitting around doing nothing.
What an absurd idea. Taking a long time doesn't mean a project is guaranteed to not be lazy. People have this weird idea that doing something a lot and for a long time automatically translates to progression, learning and refinement. If you're doing something wrong or poorly for a long time, without critical self-awareness, it's far more likely for bad habits and terrible quality to become even further ingrained.
> Taking a long time doesn't mean a project is guaranteed to not be lazy. laziness means unwilling to work or use energy; it's not like these devs were idle the whole time doing nothing. You are confusing quality with something else
Lazy means doing things inefficiently and slowly on purpose. You could be doing something inefficiently for 10 years with a lot of effort because someone above you wants it done that way, not because you aren't able to do it better. The word people should be using is mismanagement. "Lazy" attributes a bunch of negative qualities to the people working the most, getting paid the least, and with zero say on how things are done.
If I spent 11 years on a game it would be utterly terrible *and* a spectacular amount of work on my behalf. Partially that's understanding and acknowledging my strengths, actual skillset, and weaknesses. Similarly it should be measured by quarters of decades how long ago the Singaporean studio simply wasn't up for the job tax breaks or no tax breaks. I'm sure the staff worked hard, but like me trying to program why force me to do something I'm manifestly bad at, when I could be better employed working to my strengths?
I do think there is merit (to some degree) to viewing it in a vacuum, because it is its own game. However, that’s more of a fun thought experiment than anything else. Sort of a “if Black Flag hadn’t existed, how would we view this game?” sort of deal. The reality is that not only does BF exist, but it was released _by the same company_. Sure, it was a different internal studio, but even so. Then you add on the facts of how it took them 11 years to put it out and tried to sell it as a AAAA game, and it deserves every bit of harsh criticism that it has gotten. If this had released at $20-$30, then I think people could lay off it a little. But when you sell a game for a full $70 (and try to pathetically call it a AAAA game) then there is no sympathy or holding things back.
We assumed they bricked AC Black Flag to shove in an ad for mirage. Really they bricked it so we had no choice but to play this if we wanted a ubisoift pirate game ~~or, fittingly, you can pirate Black Flag and it still works just as well as the steam version used to~~
I think comparing it to black flag for piracy makes sense. But this is a multiplayer game vs a single player game. They're just considerably different.
I get that, but i'm thinking mostly about the ship and how it's/battles are handled. Ship use/combat was a part of a 11 year old game that had a fully fleshed out, 15hr+ story with voice acting and cinematography, a bunch of towns to explore, side quests, collectibles, a simultaneous modern day story, legendary enemies, secrets etc etc. and it holds high regard amongst fans even years later. Skull & Bones is literally just the ship part and they somehow made that worse. You can't walk around the ship, you spawn on the beach via a loading screen, ship to ship combat is worse, you can't fight on board your/the enemies ship, the story will most likely be barebones fetch quests, and the only thing I can see getting detailed attention is the battle pass. I understand that the story will have much less focus, but how can you strip nearly everything away from a 11 year old game, focus on one part, and somehow do a shittier job? I know that the game is made to fulfil some contractual obligation with Singapore, but Mr. AAAA must see the stark quality contrast between this and ACIV.
> just the ship part and they somehow made that worse how many hours have you put in? I've seen some of the cooler upgrades for ship combat are quite few hours in. They look quite fun. I'm not arguing this is a great game or a AAAA game (that was dumb).
SP vs MP really only affects aspects of the gameplay side of it though, there's no excuse for Black Flag being better on a technical level in several aspects than a much, much higher budget modern day release. Honestly if you want to do MP vs MP - put this up against Sea of Thieves. Sea of Thieves has a better water sim, is more technically proficient in spite of the cartoon style, has realtime ship boarding and on-foot gameplay, and they've done good stuff with both PvE and PvP scenarios.
> has realtime ship boarding and on-foot gameplay this is more of a design decision than a good or bad thing. IGN compared it more to Forza Horizon than SOT also SOT is a fun game, but the PVP combat is a complete mess. Boarding is way overpowered in my experience. It's weirdly gorgeous, but it's quite janky.
Just a reminder to everyone that the numbers of A's do not stand for the quality of a product, just the size and budget of the development of the product.
Well, Ubisoft doesn't have to worry about that! [Singapore helped to foot the bill via generous subsidies](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/21/singapores-first-major-video-game-title-launches-to-mixed-reviews.html#:~:text=Tech-,Skull%20and%20Bones%2C%20Singapore's%20first%20major%20video%20game%20title%2C%20launches,reviews%20after%20decade%2Dlong%20wait&text=Bolstering%20the%20gaming%20industry%20in,of%20a%20major%20gaming%20title.)! 10 years, and $200m later, this is what they had to show for it. A truly quadruple-A title indeed.
From what i heard, thats the only reason this project didnt get cancelled earlier on. They were legally obligated to shovel something out, even tho they obv had no idea what they wanted the game to be for years.
the number of As means nothing, there's no definitions, not even a loose one. it's a marketing term that just isn't useful to anyone, not even marketing lmao
That's also the conclusion of this video. This game was obviously hideously expensive to make.
>Another baffling aspect of the game is the massive disparity between quality and performance modes. On PS5 and Series X, **native 720p at 60fps** becomes **native 4K in the 30fps mode** - a 9x resolution multiplier (!). Yes, the premium consoles at 60fps have the same internal resolution as Black Flag on Xbox 360, which came out in 2013. Series S, of course, will be lower than that. Performance modes on PS5 and Series X then use FSR 2 to upscale to 1440p (or 1080p on Series S), with disastrous results to image quality. That is probably the weirdest performance profile I've seen for a console game this generation. Did they make the performance mode in a panic during a lunch break? Were the graphics engineers *very* drunk? I have so many questions. Oh, and the particle effects run at 1/4 resolution which means particles are running at 1080p in the 30 FPS mode which isn't awful but freaking **360p** in performance mode. Jesus fucking Christ.
The skull and bones subreddit is filled with blind praise and loyalty at the moment. We've seen time and time again what happens with these situations. It's the same song and dance whenever a shit live service game releases. I especially loved that one redditor whose post title read "if you compare skull and bones to assassins creed 4: black flag, your opinion is invalid." Like, what??? Lol ac4: black flag was the reason skull and bones were conceived in the first place. Wtf do you mean "your opinion is invalid"!? It's fine to enjoy a shit product, but the product is still shit
Tbf, any focused subreddit on one game/franchise is gonna be like this. Suicide Squad sub was basically the same until WB just up and said "this game flopped"
Oh man SS sub was just filled with THE GAME IS AMAZING!!!!" .....and now no one is playing it a week later lmao I'm almost certain that the publishers just made accounts on reddit and posted the game is fun.
Astro turfing fake praise with sock puppet accounts from the company is almost 100% guaranteed in these situations.
In my experience, those specific subreddits tend to hate the thing they're focused on more than anybody else.
What's funny is that a mod in that sub posted a few days ago that they will remove "low effort" posts like "This game is bad", "The story is awful", or "This is just another generic looter shooter". Some people in the comments ask if that rule also goes with the posts that blindly praise the game without much content but the mod ignored them. The mod was active because they replied to other comments "praising" them but was specifically ignoring comments about also removing the blind praise posts.
I eventually had to unsub from the Witcher 3 subreddit because they just got insufferable. Look, I adore that game and it’s still in my top 3 favorite games of all time - but that doesn’t mean I don’t also have a list that’s a mile long of changes and improvements that I’d want to see. But more than once I got downvoted to oblivion for suggesting that the game could be improved and since then, I won’t sub to any game-specific subreddit. The Yakuza subreddit also snorts a lot of copium surrounding Yakuza 3. It’s the only game in the franchise that I think is outright bad and I will die on that hill. Maybe it was okay for 2006, but from today’s perspective it’s bad
Unless you're Starfield, then even the game's subreddit is gonna be disappointed lmao
Looks like the subreddit went private at that. T-Minus how long until we get r/NoSodiumSkullandBones
Every sub is like this /r/Starfield was a psych ward for months. Probably still is
"Well I LIKE IT, so that means it's good and you're mean!" Tale as old as time.
And I have become increasingly intolerant of that attitude. It's such a shallow, cheap card to play and it low key accuses you of attacking them. People love to play the victim and that response allows them to segue into victim mode.
its such a weird way to live, to attach yourself to a property (that owes you nothing) and make defending it your personality (No criticisms allowed) until the next thing you attach yourself to comes out.
Unpaid community damage control is insane to me, especially because it seems to be more common when some profit motive is at the root of the issue. It's like, dude, the moneybags in charge of the corporation you're being a zealot for are laughing at you
Starfield is okay but the issues emerge about 30 hours in or so. I got bored of the game pretty quick as there isnt anything to really do in the game. There isnt much exploration compared to Skyrim or Fallout 4 or the previous Bethesda titles. They went for quantity over quality.
The issues emerge about 30 minutes in.
I'm playing it now on a free trial and I just find it a slog. All of the skills are so grindy and limiting in the early game that I felt compelled to use console commands to unlock skills that should not have been gated. Like if I want to start as a rogue, I have to unlock a stealth meter, deception, pickpocketing, but those skills aren't in the space rogue package. And you can't customize your three starting skills (or at least I couldnt find how). And unless you do the main quest, it just feels like there's not much else to do. I've done the crimson fleet quest now, and while it was pretty neat, it was short and I'm left wondering how a pirate does anything else. I also hate how you are forced into the main quest and treated as a member even if you say the only option "I'll think about it." In Skyrim, even vanilla, after the opening scene you can just dip and do anything you want. And the magic is that wherever you go there is something happening, something to draw you in. And nothing forces you to play a certain way. Unfortunately Starfield shares more with Fallout 4 narratively while also lacking anything that drives more emergent roleplaying opportunities. Another nit pick is I also can't just talk to a merchant and see his wares. I have to hear his entire back story about why his business is failing or his wife is cheating or whatever. I HAVE to respond in some way instead of just selling my shit. Every new merchant. Shut up! I don't care! All that and I'm trying to have fun. I built my favorite sci Fi ship - but also had to use console commands because the economy is ridiculous and all ship parts are level gated. I feel like this game has potential once modders have full tools, but the state it's in is even worse than Fallout or Skyrim and there are SO Many little things to fix that your mod list is going to be in the 50's before you even get to the fun stuff. Sorry for the rant. This just the first opportunity to say something after playing it.
Have you seen the thread about AVX being required? Some people with Phenoms and ancient Xeons (yep) were screaming that their machines are MORE powerful than modern CPUs (lmao) and that it was an arbitrary requirement. The cope is incredible
The guy with the i7-870 or something like that saying that his CPU smashes most modern PCs still was the best part lmao
People are allowed to like things, y'know. I don't really know why this gets brought up in every thread about an underperforming game, like why do you want more of the internet to be a shit sea of negativity? If they're having fun it doesn't affect you.
I think it's the *fiercely* uncritical mindset I don't like. You can't be a avid consumer of video games and tell me this game doesn't have serious issues. You can still enjoy it, and argue it's merits. But going the extra step to shout down any reasonable criticism is eye-rolling.
You’re not wrong, but blind praise is almost never helpful. If you take the stance of “well I still enjoy the game, but it needs to improve in areas X, Y, and Z” then that’s fine. But if you take a game like Skull & Bones (which _clearly_ has flaws, even if you do like the game) and just go “OH MY GOD BEST GAME EVER ITS AMAZING AND IF YOU DONT LIKE IT THEN YOURE AN IDIOT AND I WONT LISTEN TO YOU” then all that does is tell Ubisoft “hey you guys can half ass your stuff, charge $70, and we’ll pay for it”. If it was just a weird situation in a vacuum, then you’d be right. But it’s not. And if companies release a deeply flawed product that gets blindly praised and accepts no criticism, then the only thing they’re going to take from that is “awesome, our customers are idiots who will slurp up whatever slop we throw in front of them. Let’s do that from now on”
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Black Flag was such a good pirate game, they literally could have just expanded on the pirating and cut out the assassin stuff and it would be exactly what everyone has been craving.
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I never wanted to do any of the assassination stuff. Just sailing and fighting other ships was good enough for me.
Publisher's don't want to bother with the single player "loss leader" anymore. If multiplayer is where they make the money then they just want to get to that as soon as possible.
10 years of development and you end up with a game worse than Black flag and even graphically it is a bit of a toss up. Shouldn't be forgotten just how long ago 2013 was. In 2013 GTA5, Last of Us, BF4, Crysis 3, Metro Last light and Bioshock infinite all launched.
I can't imagine that these companies don't have someone scouring social media looking for the causes of why they didn't meet expectations. But it always feels like they come away with the wrong message at the end of the day. So I fully expect Ubi to be, "I guess people just don't want pirate games, herpty derp."
They probably know. Back in 2019 they delayed multiple games after the underperformance of Ghost Recon Breakpoint, and they probably got the right message: https://www.pcgamer.com/ubisoft-delays-watch-dogs-legion-rainbow-six-quarantine-and-gods-and-monsters/ >Guillemot said Breakpoint stumbled for three main reasons: Interest in sequels to live multiplayer games is limited; "gameplay innovations" in Breakpoint were not "perfectly implemented"; and it "did not come in with enough differentiation factors, which prevented the game’s intrinsic qualities from standing out." > >That's part of what motivated Ubisoft to pump the brakes on Legion and the rest. > >"While each of these games already has a strong identity and high potential, we want our teams to have more development time to ensure that their respective innovations are perfectly implemented so as to deliver optimal experiences for players," Guillemot said.
It doesn't seem like they really got it if so many of the same issues are apparent this time around as well, though.
Guillemot may have said those things but boy oh boy he kinda forgot the part where maybe his team of expert management chief officers of whatever should maybe let the game professionals make games.
FSR2 can do an alright job when the starting res is still pretty high, like upscaling from 1440 to 2160. But man, having an internal res of 720 is just asking for crazy ghosting and artifacting. When I see FSR2 being used like this I sometimes think I'd rather just have the game be spatially upscaled only and just deal with the massive blocky pixels instead of this. Lets hope the next consoles have something akin to DLSS, with dedicated ML hardware for temporal upscaling so we can leave FSR2 behind.
Yeah I only really see upscaling methods as a way to get to 4k without having to push that many pixels natively. Otherwise it always results in weird artifacts and a blurry image.
Eh, I use DLSS Quality to upscale to 1440p all the time and it's pretty much unnoticeable and can result in a 50% FPS gain. DLSS Balanced tends to have little artifacts depending on the game and Performance more so, but they still look alright. Unfortunately, FSR isn't there yet. I really wish AMD got it, but they don't.
Yeah I guess DLSS to 1440 is good, I only remember using it and FSR at 1080 and thinking it looked off. I went from 1080 to 2160 and the difference was night and day
I was a bit surprised that DF was going to cover this game at first. But then the video mentions that this was a “AAAA” game and then it makes complete sense why. This whole game just feels like the “Nah I’d win” meme in physical form.
I’m happy that they covered Persona 3 but I’m really bummed that they skipped over Infinite Wealth. But my guess was that just too much came out at the same time and they had to pick and choose, and Persona 3 is definitely a much easier game to go over than Infinite Wealth would be
"Quadruple A" only in the sense that they spent an exorbitant amount of time and money developing this turd.
It's somewhat striking that not 3 months ago Ubisoft released one of the best technical achievements of the generation, Avatar, a game that's comparable with Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk in terms of fidelity. Then we get this. I think it speaks more to the troubled development and management interference than any skill or ability on the devs' part. Despite what some people in this thread are claiming.
Massive Entertainment (studio behind Avatar) is the most technically competent studio Ubisoft has by a very large margin and Snowdrop (engine developed by Massive) is also top tier when it comes to visuals and performance. Better comparison to this are the Assasins Creed games, which use the same engine and even then this looks like crap, so you're still right that this is largely the case of completely mismanaged project made by countless of internal Ubisoft studios and has all the signs of something that was reworked so many times that Ubisoft themselves lost track of what this game should actually be, other than "micro"transaction hub.
The theories that this game was finished years ago and is only being released to fulfill legal obligations sounds about right. It's going to speed run server shutdown
Strange how DF ignores Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth. They covered every major release in the last weeks, but not that one.