Skull & Bones Post-Release Plans + New Gameplay And UI Details
Hey everyone Sam here also known as MrStainless and today I’ve got some more behind-the-scenes information about Skull & Bones the upcoming open-world Pirate game from Ubisoft. Recently Gamasutra sat down with the Dev team, asked a few questions and managed to get some new nuggets of info. In my last video we heard from Marlo Flor the Senior Art Director on the game and today we’re taking a look at some of the answers given by Bill Money the Game Director and Justin Farren the Creative Director on the game.
First off lets start with Bill, a lot of what Bill was talking about was really going over the fact that they want us as the players to be able to, after a while, begin to be able to sail our ships in-game without much need of the UI or without much handholding. Here’s what he had to say:
We want to make the act of sailing and the art of sailing. Because people try to master sailing their whole lives. This is something that people take on at a very young age and they do it their whole lives and they never feel they’re a master at it. But we want someone to feel like they mastered our game within the first fifteen minutes of play and understand how wind works and what the points of sail are and all these very complex topics of sailing.
We try to really break it down into simple, intuitive information. The telltales of the mast, the way even your captain’s coat moves in the wind, the way the spray moves. Give these little tells to the player and then give some visual clues…like the dial at the bottom of the wind gauge turns yellow when you’re going in the wrong way, it turns blue when you’re going in the right way. So just it’s like a simple sort of stop-go thing. So take these complex things, break them down into simplicity. Not make it overly complicated, but still give that feeling of mastering these big ships.*
The interviewer then asks about the mini-map and UI, he states, and I think we can all empathise with this, that in a lot of open world games we can spend a great deal of time simply staring at the mini-map looking for information on where to go, where enemies are etc. Here’s what Bill had to say:
Almost every game we put in as much UI as we think we need and then start pulling it back out and reduce to what the player actually needs. A goal would be no UI. But we believe we have great UI artists and we create just the UI that the people need to play. And of course we’ll be able to turn UIs off probably for streamers and things like that anyway that people will want those features.
And finally from Bill he talks about Gaming as a service, and I think this is really interesting:
We want to provide a longer tail for players. And I think about maybe the cost per hour. In the past people may have bought a 60 dollar game and wanted to spend 15 hours, that’s what they expected. So it was 4 dollars an hour. We want to give them a game they can play hundreds of hours. So their cost per hour becomes super low and the value becomes super high for the customer.
Games as a service allows us to constantly refresh, react to the customers, make sure that they see our offerings more consistently. They know that we have every week, every season, every patch we give them something of value and they want to come back to the game. So we want to retain our customers over a long time and let them live the fantasy that they want to live. Provide them what they want. If we see they want certain things, keep giving them those things. If they don’t like things, change them.
Again, this is a model we’re seeing in a lot of Ubisoft titles, in some cases to praise and in others…not so much. In essence what Bill is saying here, I believe, is that there will be a continual stream of new content being brought to the game post-release. We’ve seen this in Ghost Recon Wildlands with new Ghost Packs with weapons, outfits and skins. We’ve seen it in For Honor with new heroes, maps, game-modes and outfits and of course we’ve seen it in Rainbow Six Siege which was one of the first Ubi titles to really latch on to that process. It’s great to see that they’re already thinking about this, it would be great if they decided to go with the free content route but this isn’t always realistic. I think in reality we could end up seeing something similar to the Year 1, Year 2 Season Pass model that we see in Rainbow Six Siege, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Next Gamasutra chatted with Justin Farren about his goals for the project, multiplayer and more. Here’s what he had to say:
I thought a lot about what type of pirates we wanted to make and one thing that really stood out to me as I started to research the behaviour of pirates was that they behave the same way that predators do in nature. They do it without remorse, they do it with basically a sense of purpose that reflects their nature. And we wanted to create a system that really made you feel like a predator. Made you feel powerful, gave you the tools at your disposal, made visibility, distance, the weapons that you have, the wind, something that gave you power and control over your targets. And that became really easy.
We looked at things like terrain fear factor, the idea that prey will shift to a safer spot that has less opportunity just to stay alive. And we created our AI with models that behave exactly the way that prey do. Those are things that are interesting to me to see the synergies. Most prey behave four or five different ways. They will either attack back or they will group together to fight.
We’ve got lots of synergies that are easy for us to exploit that make it easy to understand what your role is in the world.*
Justin goes on to talk more about the PvP and the Hunting Grounds section of the game, now if you don’t know what Hunting Grounds is in Skull & Bones I’ll definitely be going into more depth on that in a later video. But here’s what he had to say as well as some comparisons with EVE Online:
So I played years in*EVE*and the one thing that I appreciate from games like that is the ability for players to assume the role that’s right for them. And that’s something we take very seriously.
I know that in our Hunting Grounds I want players to feel like when they engage in combat with another player it’s by choice and that when they betray the other pirates around them that that puts them in a direct and understandable alignment with or against other players. So the Hunting Grounds should feel that way and PVP should feel natural and emergent. It shouldn’t feel forced, we’re not trying to create just an area where you go in and shoot for no reason. We want players to have meaning when they engage in PVP.
The other thing that’s really tough in games is to take a PVE player and convert them to a PVP player. So we have to give players a mechanism so that they have the right tools, that the game is not different when they go to PVP and that they have the choice in how they engage other players. If they want to sail solo…and play in the Hunting Grounds and only fuel your own progression, great.
But as soon as you make the decision to sail with other players you’re going to have choices to make. Do I ally with this guy, do I betray him? Do we gang up together and terrorize other players or do we just kind of chill?*
For me I find all of that really encouraging, I know I’m definitely more of a PvE player, I like teaming up with friends or just chilling in games fighting against NPC’s and enemy AI. PvP can feel incredibly overwhelming at times, especially in more skill-based titles and for me I hope that the PvP in Skull & Bones is something that’s accessible for all. We’ll just have to wait and see but why not let me know your thoughts down in the comments below but until next time have a great week and I’ll speak to you all soon.
- MrStainless001
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