Skull and Bones has extended its first season by a week, re-enabled chat, and added opt-in open world PvP, a major community request.
05.03.2024 - 03:21 / videogameschronicle.com / Yves Guillemot / Ubisoft Singapore / Tom Ivan
Ubisoft’s second $70 game, Skull and Bones, has seen its price reduced significantly less than three weeks after its release.
Following a troubled development that saw the game delayed on a number of occasions and rebooted in 2020, Skull and Bones was finally released on February 16, priced $69.99 / £69.99.
But it hasn’t taken long for retailers to slash its price, with Best Buy currently offering the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions for $44.99, and UK retailer Hit pricing them at £49.85.
During an earnings call the week before its release, Ubisoft was asked why it had chosen to charge $70 for Skull and Bones and potentially limit the size of its player base, despite its live service leanings.
In response, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot asserted that Skull and Bones deserved to be a full-price game because of its scale.
“You will see that Skull and Bones is a fully-fledged game,” he said. “It’s a very big game, and we feel that people will really see how vast and complete that game is. It’s a really full, triple… quadruple-A game, that will deliver in the long run.”
Ubisoft released Skull and Bones alongside a free eight-hour trial, which is available on all platforms and lets players carry over their progress to the full game should they choose to purchase it.
While Skull and Bones was originally planned to be Ubisoft’s first $70 game, its delays meant the publisher’s first game to be released at the increased price point was last December’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.
It was also heavily discounted quickly, with its price falling to $49.99 / £43.85 within two weeks of its release.
Skull and Bones has extended its first season by a week, re-enabled chat, and added opt-in open world PvP, a major community request.
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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.
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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.
After many years of development and countless delays, Skull and Bones has finally arrived. While exploring in Skull and Bones is usually fairly laid back, things will get less chill if your hostility with the game’s various factions gets raised too high. This may result in you being attacked on sight, which really puts a crimp in your resource collection and delivery missions. So, how does hostility work and how can you lower it? Scroll on to find out…