If Skull and Bones has you hungry for a better pirate game, try this one

When I grappled to the roof of a building using my hook, I felt like I’d played Rise of the Ronin before. That’s not a bad thing; I’ve played many of Team Ninja’s previous games, but it felt oddly familiar, in a bloody comforting way.

Ubisoft's latest release, Skull and Bones, has seen its price reduced by $25 only three weeks after its release, though it has since returned to full price. Skull and Bones is Ubisoft's second $70 AAA title behind December 2023's first-person adventure shooter Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. As the price of video games has risen from the $60 standard over the past several years, many gamers have become more selective over which games they choose to spend money on, live service titles especially.

Ubisoft’s second $70 game, Skull and Bones, has seen its price reduced significantly less than three weeks after its release.

Meta Platforms, the maker of the Oculus Quest and its successors, has added a new feature to its Meta Quest+ subscription service: a rotating games catalog like Xbox Game Pass. The company formerly known as Facebook introduced its first generation of VR headsets back in 2019 and, since then, it's sought to build on the technology. The Oculus Quest was followed by the Meta Quest 2 and then the Meta Quest 3, and the library for all the headsets has grown over time.

Remedy Entertainment has acquired full rights to the Control series from 505 Games. The developer said it is now in the position to make better long-term decisions of Control’s franchise growth.

Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones finally launched earlier this month after years of delays and development issues, but the online pirate game was, predictably enough, met with less-than-stellar reviews upon release. On the commercial front, the full extent of how the game is performing isn’t yet clear, but at least in terms of average engagement per user, it seems to be doing well enough.

After many years of development and countless delays, Skull and Bones has finally arrived. While the main danger you’ll face in the game are other ships, the ocean itself can also send you down to Davy Jones’ locker. While exploring the open ocean area in the middle of Skull and Bones large Indian Ocean map, the seas will often get rough, and occasionally serve up a particularly large “rogue wave,” which can immediately sink your boat if you don’t handle it correctly. This can be a bit panic-inducing, and you’ll probably go down the first time you encounter one, but if you know what to do they’re not actually that dangerous. Here’s how to survive a rogue wave with your ship intact.

The next seafaring video game adventure pilots its craft into the wild blue yonder, but there are stormy skies ahead. Ubisoft’s infamously delayed has finally released, with its own unsteady abstractions on playable piracy, and much of it boils down to boats and boat accessories. It's often an admittedly unique multiplayer-oriented experience with some idiosyncratic combat, but frequently falters in terms of immersion, awash in fetch quest loops and routines which struggle to fulfill the pirate power fantasy.

While Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League falls short of WB Games’ expectations, Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones isn’t doing much better. Sources speaking to Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson report that it had around 850,000 players.

A rare contract you can accept in will pit you and your crew against a mysterious Ghost Ship whose supernatural traits make it hard to beat. The Maangodin vessel prowls the seas and has driven many a soul into Davy Jones' locker. You will have to adopt a new strategy to win by targeting a few vulnerabilities on this cursed, undead ship.

Ubisoft's ten-year-old Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag has been enjoying a boost in player count as its spiritual successor Skull and Bones has finally been released after years of delays. Having been revealed all the way back in 2017, Skull and Bones takes the lauded naval combat introduced by Assassin's Creed 4 and expands upon it as an ongoing live service experience, letting players partake in online ship battles in a shared open world.

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