Skull & Bones has had one incredibly difficult and long development period, one that it seems has no real end in sight, as the game has reportedly lost its third creative director, and is still without a release date.
Elisabeth Pellen has left the team in Ubisoft Singapore and moved to the Ubisoft headquarters in Paris, though according to Ubisoft Pellen wasn’t exactly intended to oversee the game all the way up to launch.
Ubisoft confirmed Pellen’s departure in a statement sent to Kotaku, who originally reported the story, but other anonymous sources Kotaku spoke to claimed that her time at Ubisoft Singapore was still cut short, and was expected to last through the end of 2023.
Skull & Bones did recently have a closed-beta for PC players, which came back with mixed results from players, and wasn’t exactly the glowing validation of the game’s current state the team might’ve hoped it would be.
Skull & Bones was first announced in 2017, though Ubisoft has been working on the title since 2013, as it originally began as an expansion for Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, before expanding into its own release.
Which means it’s been a decade of development for Ubisoft, and we’ve known about the game for six of those years. Granted, development periods are getting longer, but if the original plan had worked out, Skull & Bones would’ve already released, perhaps even initially on PS4.
After a decade of resources poured into a release that still doesn’t seem to have a release date, or sit well with players in its current state, it’ll be interesting to see if Ubisoft ultimately decides to cut its losses, or if its already in to deep.
Source – [Kotaku]