So You Want To Know More About Immersion in Skull & Bones?
So You Want To Know More About Immersion in Skull & Bones?
Hey everyone Sam here (also known as MrStainless) If like me you've been itching to get more information on Skull & Bones, scratching around the poop deck looking for scraps of info that might quench your thirst for the tasty rum-soaked nuggets of info that will satisfy your needs. Well look no further, if you don't want to read this long article feel free to check out the video, the same information will be in both 
So this is all coming from an interview by Matthew Kumar of Gamasutra, I’ll leave a link to the article at the bottom of this article but the first person Matthew sat down with was Marlo Flor, he’s the Senior Art Director on Skull & Bones and has worked on previous titles like Ghost Recon Phantoms and Assassins Creed Syndicate and Assassins Creed Origins. Matthew asked; For an art director, what’s exciting about Skull & Bones?
Marlo said this: "The biggest breakthrough that we have would be the ocean tech that we have. It started with*Assassin’s Creed 3, and you’ll see some of it in*Assassin’s Creed Origins*as well…Of course both games have very different requirements; in our case we focus more on how the ocean moves and how it’s rendered.
The ocean is physical; it reacts to lighting pretty much how you would expect water to react. So we have a lot of parameters that contribute to the colour and transparency of the water. We don’t simply think how transparent it should be, we have several types where we can create muddy or clear water or replicate how the ocean, Indian ocean, actually, looks in terms of the colour and how it changes colour through depth as well. So that creates a really convincing look for the ocean. Whatever time of day you see it in."
Matthew, the interviewer, then goes on to ask: I saw on the*Origins*team they have a sandbox where they’re working with different types of water; seeing how muddy water flows into clear water, and so on. That’s the kind of thing you collaborate on?
Marlo replies: "Yeah, we get parts of that. For example, if we look at the game,*Origins, a lot of it is lakes and rivers and we do a lot with ocean, which is more of a flowing type of water. So in terms of collecting sediments and so on, we don’t focus too much on that, but we focus a lot on how it moves and how it creates translucency.
Also the game*Skull and Bones*focuses on the fantasy of being the helm of a ship, so everything that we do in terms of how we realize the visuals from that point of view. So in terms of the effects, you see the spray, how the wind blows through your sail and a lot of these little details really add up the to the experience that we want to build."
Now we know from previous interviews that the wind is going to play an integral part in the immersive experience of Skull & Bones and it should be possible, while playing the game, to be able to interpret how you should sail your ship as well as the wind speed and direction simply based on visual and audio cues from the game. Marlo went into a little more depth regarding this:
"That’s one thing that we really focused on, how do we create that feedback? Can you physically see wind when you play? That one is a pretty complex effect to achieve, because we use a lot of ingredients, for example, we have this ocean spray, that when it sprays and it hits in the wind, it actually follows the direction of the wind. You can see it on the sails, on the ship they actually turn based on the wind.
Even droplets on the screen will actually drift towards the direction of the wind, so it’s a lot of these things that we use because for example when we see the screen, almost 80% of that will be your ship. We needed to find ways on how we can communicate to the player the wind direction at any point when you’re playing since it’s an integral part of our gameplay.*
For that we needed to basically merge the art direction with gameplay; there’s a very fine line where feedback can become cartoony in a way. For example if you create wind trails that are visible to the player that does the job feedback-wise, but it doesn’t necessarily fit the art direction in a grounded game. So we’ve focused a lot on immersion. From there you need to really find a good balance between something that’s readable and something that’s believable from a player’s standpoint."
I think its there’s one thing that we can take away from Marlo’s answers in this interview it’s that there is a real focus in the Skull & Bones team towards immersion. It’s something equally that we’re seeing a real push for in other Ubisoft franchises like Assassins Creed and Ghost Recon. The amount of time, effort and resources Ubisoft is putting into making sure that their games portray not only a realistic but authentic and immersive experience is really interesting and pretty cool! I’m going to be bringing you all more Skull & Bones info once I get my hands on it so if you want to be kept up to date feel free to subscribe my YouTube channel by clicking through to the video, in the meantime let me know what you think of this game, is it one you think you’ll be picking up next year? But until next time folks, have a great week and I’ll speak to you all soon.
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