Skull and Bones Review (Yoreki)
I actually like Skull and Bones, but i can't recommend it. First things first: the reviews here are relatively useless. A majority of negative reviews read like toddlers throwing a temper tantrum because they got S&B for christmas, but really, really wanted AC Black Flag 2 instead. S&B is not that. It's also not GTA VI. Tough luck, really. S&B is a Coop PvE naval-combat looter-shooter with a pirate theme. And, in theory, that's awesome! The issue is that this type of game attracts a certain type of audience: people who enjoy grinding, building, theorycrafting, min-maxing and so on. They care about gameplay and conveniences, but Ubisoft delivered a game full of unnecessary animations, horribly inefficient interactions and infuriating restrictions. Such as..
Limited Rerolls:
You can add 3 perks to a weapon. Each one is random and can be rolled, but the weapon can only be rolled a total of 60 times. If you do not get what you want, let alone good values for those rolls, you throw the entire weapon into the garbage bin and restart from scratch. For reference, you sometimes use up all 60 rolls without even getting the first perk. And rolls aren't free either. To add insult to injury, after rolling for thousands of times, i'm confident they artificially made desirable perks less common. I would love to grind for tens of hours, min-maxing my build just to get 2% more DPS.. but this grind is some of the most unrewarding, most frustrating nonsense i was ever forced into. Especially considering..
Exclusive Gear:
Some weapons and ship accessories can only be acquired in events that were in the game once, and never reappeared since. For all we know they may never come back. Some of these are trash, others are required to min-max your builds, yet others have unique effects you might want to build around. Not having access to skins from previous events is one thing, not having access to equipment is unacceptable for this type of game. But combine this with the 60 reroll limit causing 80% of weapons to turn out garbage, and you are forced to stockpile huge amounts of weapons from all sources, since you fear they may never show up again aswell. So you essentially do some huge grinding just to throw weapons into the bin in the future. Real fun. I've never seen such a badly thought out approach to theorycrafting.
Rotating Gear:
As if the above was not bad enough, a ton of gear is on a weekly rotation aswell. This does include weapons, but worse yet: ship blueprints. You want to play a healer? Tough luck, i hope the ship is on rotation within the next month or so, before you lose interrest. The system just feels horrible, no matter what you need from it.
Complete Lack of Conveniences:
The ship only has 50 inventory slots. You will regularly stop by an outpost to transfer it to the warehouse. There is no way to lock items in your inventory and transfer the rest - instead you individually select each and every item you want to transfer and then transfer them. Each and every time. If you play a lot, this can happen 20 times a day. There is no loot filters to mitigate the issue. Misclicks and server lag also regularly cause you to accidentally transfer items you did not mean to, like cannonballs. And worse yet, the warehouse also has limited capacity. It will slowly fill up with weapons, which you will eventually want to salvage for upgrade parts. How do you do this? You guessed it, one by one, confirming each one individually. Oh and, by the way, there is of course no way to lock items, so dont accidentally confirm scrapping the weapon you spent days min-maxing while spamming confirm 300 times. Another thing that accumulates over time is chests. Some can be opened in bulk, like silver, but others you need to right click, open, confirm.. each one.. and stacks of like 50 are not uncommon. This is just such horrible, stupid, out of touch design. I expect better from indie companies, really. I wish this was one.
Land Content:
Anything to do with land content in this game sucks. Walking is outright painful in this game. The character walks slow, slows down arbitrarily, stumbles over things, and literally randomly stops in place due to invisible colliders.. on straight paths. And no, i'm not exaggerating. I wish i was. The game would be so much better if they removed the entire land content, focussed on ship content, and made cities easy to navigate menus.. but instead they want to introduce land based combat. I'm scared for the future. Their likely attempt to milk the pirate hype after AC BF Remaster releases may ruin this game for the few of us who enjoyed it as is.
Information:
Horrible. Online? Forget about it. But there is a codex ingame, which could be amazing.. if it was not outdated or outright wrong more often than not. The codex usually tells you 'You can get this item from Blackwood' (the weekly rotation NPC). Frustrating, but ok, at least you now know that that's the only source, right? Except then you eventually randomly find this item as a drop from a boss.. and feel scammed for wasting your time - or resources, if you bought it. There is also a lot of information missing. Secondary damage builds up status effects on enemies. What do they do? Who knows - better find the patch notes that introduced them years ago. Fixing the codex would be the simplest solution, but even indie games manage to show tooltips when you hover over keywords nowadays. Why cant an AAAA title? How come i literally expect a better experience from indie than multi million dollar titles? This is why i dont play AAA anymore. It's slop. Bloated in all the wrong ways, lacking what's necessary.
Animations & Visual Helpers:
They take forever (cumulatively). And are everywhere. Who in their right mind thought it was a good idea to show you a small cutscene every single time you set sails from a port? But at least these can be disabled in the settings, right? Right..? Nope. NPCs will always annoy you with chitchat when you talk to them, and interacting with stuff always has a animation you really dont want to see for the 100th time. They treat this like their typical game directed at their casual AAA audience, but it's not, and the people who would enjoy this type of game dont want to waste time with animations and dialog. Heck. You open a chest and there is more than 6 items in there? It will painfully slowly scroll down for you. Depending on the item count, this can take the better part of a minute or so, and you cant scroll on your own. Can anybody tell Ubisoft that modern mouses have this thing called a mouse wheel? You also cant make loot easier visible, cant display distances to allies and enemies, debuffs on non-boss enemies, and so on and so forth. What can you do? Guess and hope for the best.
Bugs:
It's really not like the game is unplayable, but there is lots of them. Little things. And it quickly adds up. Not being able to dock, event timers showing 71 million minutes (max integer), or being stuck in combat with no enemy in sight are too frequent for a game that's been out for a year. Heck, even outside of the game the bugs are hilarious. The last server maintenance told us it will last for approximately the next 364 days. We commonly joked how it's fine since it's an early access title made by a small indie company.. but of course it's not.
PvP & Nerfs:
The game went without meaningul nerfs since release. But now they introduced PvP. And of course they did not go through the effort of separating PvE equipment from PvP equipment. You know.. because PvP players love to be forced to grind PvE content to compete, and PvE players just love it when their gear gets nerfed because people cry about balance in PvP. Which is exactly what happened. All ships, across the board, now shoot slower and deal less damage.