Assassin’s Creed is one of the franchises that Ubisoft is investing more in. One of the more fondly recalled installments of the franchise, Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag, is being remade as part of the current approach, according to Kotaku. Every time a new trailer for Skull & Bones, Ubisoft’s other pirate game that has spent a lengthy time in development hell, fans have pleaded for it.
A remake of the 2013 cross-gen PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game is still in its early phases and won’t be finished for at least a few years, according to two persons familiar with the plans who wanted to remain anonymous because they weren’t permitted to discuss them. The Assassin’s Creed franchise’s growing ocean technology has been developed by a team at Ubisoft Singapore, one of the studios, and they will play a significant role in modernizing the Caribbean-based sailing game.
Ubisoft’s representative declined to comment.
It’s unclear at this point how much of the gameplay and supporting systems will change to conform to the more expansive open-world RPG style of recent high-profile Assassin’s Creed games like Odyssey and Valhalla. However, given that ship-to-ship combat is one of Black Flag’s most well-liked features, there is plenty of space to make a new edition of the game into something more dramatic than a straightforward “next-gen” remaster on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
Meanwhile, Ubisoft has yet to release Skull & Bones, the very popular live-service pirate game that was first revealed in 2017. It began as an outgrowth of a Black Flag extension, as Kotaku previously reported, but it spent years morphing due to internal politics, uncertainty, and bureaucracy within Ubisoft Singapore and the broader firm. It was first scheduled to debut last fall but was postponed twice more before a new release date was announced.
Outside of a live on-stage sea shanty performance, Skull and Bones was absent from Ubisoft’s major summer showcase. The team is currently working tirelessly to improve the game in preparation for a closed beta scheduled for late August.
The management of the Singapore studio is currently requiring all game creators to work in-person rather than remotely, according to an internal email that was obtained with Kotaku. It’s also providing onsite breakfast and dinner as a way of “thanking you for your unwavering commitment to our shared vision,” though it will also seemingly encourage staff to stay later and work more hours to ship the closed beta on time for a game that was due out years ago.
The fact that some Skull and Bones developers had previously discussed, at least in private, the possibility of changing the game’s direction to resemble Black Flag, possibly with a focus on cooperative exploration and hand-to-hand combat rather than just resource gathering or player-versus-player naval battles, is one of the biggest ironies of the current situation. Although it’s unclear if it would have taken any longer than Skull & Bones now does, it would have taken longer.
Source : Kotaku