News PS5 Skull and Bones Skull And Bones Update Y1S41.3 Ubisoft

Skull And Bones Adds Improvements To The Great Shadow Mythic Vikram Event, Combat & PS5 Stability In New Update

Ubisoft has set sail with a new update for Skull and Bones this week, which comes with various improvements to key features such as the Great Shadow Mythic Vikram World Event as well as improving stability for the PS5 version of the game. For The Great Shadow, the developer has increased its amour and hull health, noted that it believes the first Mythic World Event fell short of players’ expectations based off feedback. These changes are said to result in a more engaging and strategic battle. You can read the full details in the Skull and Bones patch notes below.

Skull & Bones was released in February 2024 for PS5, PC, and Xbox Series X/S. The game was plagued by a long and tumultuous development cycle, which saw Skull & Bones hit by numerous delays following it initial announcement at E3 2017, and initially started out life as an expansion to Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, and then an MMO spinoff before finally finding its ground as a standalone title.

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Gameplay Updates

Status Effects

  • Reduced Punctured armor reduction from 500 to 300.
  • Dev note: Since the introduction of the Punctured status effect in Season 4, we have been closely monitoring player feedback and believe it has had a significant impact on the overall increase in damage dealt by players using the Garuda specifically. While we understand this has made it a very popular ship, we do want with this change to ensure other ships and other ship builds remain relevant and appealing for those who appreciate their specificities. We will continue to monitor your feedback and potentially bring more changes to ships and equipment in the future to ensure more diversity and options for all players.

“The Great Shadow” Mythic Vikram World Event

  • Increased Armour and Hull Health for “The Great Shadow” Mythic Vikram World Event.
  • Dev note (edited for additional context): With the introduction of Mythic-difficulty World Events starting in Season 4, our goal is to bring more challenging content for our most advanced and engaged players. Based on community feedback, we believe the first Mythic World Event introduced with Vikram has unfortunately fell short of players expectations in that regard. This is largely due to the introduction of Punctured as a status effect, which players were able to benefit from by significantly increasing their damage output, and skip some of the gameplay mechanics in their fight against the Mythic Difficulty version of Vikram.

With these changes, our goal isn’t just to increase the duration of the fight, but ensure players are exposed to those gameplay mechanics, which we believe in turn will result in a more engaging, enjoyable but also challenging and strategic battle overall.

Do continue to share your feedback with us on this topic as we plan to bring additional balancing changes in future updates to bring the level of difficulty and challenge some of you are eager to battle against.

  • Players will now automatically leave the server and be matchmade after 5 minutes following the conclusion of each Mythic Vikram World Event
  • Dev note: Following our introduction of Mythic-difficulty world events where players were matchmade with other players and transported to a new server for the fight, we observed various issues which made the post-event experience less than ideal. We observed that players were getting increasingly distributed across servers if they participated in Mythic World Events, which made the world feel emptier than before for many players. With this change, we hope to bring back the same player distribution across servers as before and make the world fuller with players again.

Vanderkill World Event

  • Fixed an issue where the vortex effect from the mortar attack was higher than intended.

Improvements and Bugfixes

Combat

  • Fixed an issue where players had difficulty aiming weapons, especially when navigating on tall waves. Please note that aim assistance can be adjusted in the settings.
  • Fixed an issue where the Taunt effect did not build up as effectively on enemy ships because they had unintendedly high resistance against the Taunt effect.

Weapons

  • Fixed an issue where the max range for the Nashkar long gun was incorrectly set as 600m instead of 1000m.

The Helm

  • Addressed an issue where Helm contracts at trading posts could not be accepted in succession.
  • Dev note: We’ve made significant progress addressing an issue where Helm Contracts could not be accepted, where players needed to sell or purchase an item from a vendor as a workaround. The issue should now be significantly reduced. Due to the complex nature and impact of this issue, we have made additional non-player-facing changes which allows us to gather more information regarding this bug and will continue to monitor the situation. Should you still encounter the issue, please report it through the Bug Reporter with detailed information so that we can continue looking into other causes.

Contract

  • Fixed an issue where certain contracts and investigations were being unintentionally re-added to players’ Journal without the ability to remove them, even though the contracts/investigations were already completed.
  • Dev note: This is a systematic fix which addresses multiple contracts and investigations, including the reported “Talons of Wealth” and “Deafening Verses”.
  • Fixed an issue where players were unable to complete the step of crafting a Bedar in the contract “A Seaworthy Ship”.
  • Fixed an issue where Scurlock’s Jacket was not provided while players were active on the contract “The Devil’s Gambit”.
  • Fixed an issue where the Phoenix Talon blueprint was not granted upon completing the contract “Dragon and Phoenix”.
  • Fixed an issue where players would respawn in a different ship instead of the Dhow after sinking in the transient Brig in the contract “Stolen Crescendo”.

Loot & Resources

  • Fixed an issue where the Cold Façade vanity drop rate was lower than intended from Vanderkill’s Locker.

Audio

  • Fixed an issue where the shanty ‘Home Free’ was played softer than intended.
  • Fixed an issue where the footsteps sound effects were not audible in certain Outposts.
  • Fixed an issue where the music on the main menu persisted after entering the Indian Ocean.

Other

  • Fixed an issue where players would sometimes see a black screen several minutes instead of the introductory cinematic after completing the introductory playthrough of the game.

Stability

  • Fixed a crash that would sometimes occur when tracking a blueprint.
  • [PS5] Fixed an issue which was the leading cause of CPU hangs on the PS5 platform.
  • Various crash fixes & stability improvements.

[Source – Skull And Bones Patch Notes]