Ubisoft’s gameplay presentations are boring AF. There, I said it.
To be fair, it’s not like the bar is otherwise all that high. Most game studios seem to be susceptible to either not knowing or just misunderstanding the best way to introduce their games to the world. But Ubisoft seems to have made this an artform unto themselves (Far Cry 6, I’m looking at you). With the recent Skull and Bones: Worldwide Gameplay Reveal video, it seems Ubisoft is up to their same old tired tricks:
- Highly polished CG cutscenes more than likely not indicative of what the player can expect from the actual moment to moment gameplay
- Scripted “casual” Q&A interview involving members of the development team and a smarmy host where the developers get to run down the back of the box bullet points without any real dissection or context about what most of this means
- Buzzwords galore
- The promise of years’ worth of vague post-release content
- An emotionless narrator blandly rambling on about what the player can expect to do on a macro level
- Boring AF gameplay slathered in a soggy self-seriousness
And the kicker? This friggin video is over an hour long, and it even includes a 15-minute-long, highly polished video intro of a person carving wood. Ubisoft couldn’t have been more on the nose with this if they showed us grass growing in real time.
At this point, after years of gestation, I think it’s possibly safe to assume that the incredibly online portion of the gaming audience is familiar with Skull and Bones, even if just in passing. But even if there is a large group of perspective customers who aren’t yet familiar with this game, all of this could be summed up in a snappy three-to-four-minute gameplay trailer that showed what players can expect instead of telling them.
When you hear it from the mouths of the creators, everything they make is the best thing ever. But when you then see these systems or features in action, you realize that a lot of them are the activities we’ve been doing for ages — especially in other Ubisoft games.
Look, I was actually kind of interested in Skull and Bones before this trailer; I’m less so now. Who actually believes this is the best way to reveal a game that has, up to this point, just been a myth at best and a meme factory at worst? We don’t need over-inflated hype or over-polished verisimilitude, but instead, to paraphrase Joe Friday (which I’m sure will go over the heads of anyone under the age of 35), “All we need are the facts, ma’am.”
Contrast this with the gameplay reveal trailer for Skull and Bones‘ obvious competition in the pirating genre, Sea of Thieves, from E3 2017.
Sure, Skull and bones has a darker and grimmer tone, with more emphasis on realistic violence compared to Sea of Thieves, so it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison here. But the Sea of Thieves reveal is only a fraction of the running time of the Skull and Bones reveal, yet it manages to start out with gameplay, continue with gameplay, and end with gameplay. It also lets potential players know what to expect without extrapolating on the finer details you will have the joy of discovering when you actually play it. Novel, huh?
And yes, there is a narrator running down the laundry list of game mechanics for Sea of Thieves, but he’s in character and it helps sell the overall narrative; it is in service of the product and not a distraction from it.
In fact, I think if Sea of Thieves offered a more simpler, streamlined approach to solo pirating, I would probably still be playing it to this day.
And this is what excites me the most about Skull and Bones: it does seem to offer this avenue to players who don’t wish to team up with others. I also prefer the more realistic take on this genre with less of an emphasis on cartoony action, not that there’s anything wrong with that. So Skull and Bones could be up my alley. But boy howdy, did Ubisoft manage to bore the ever living crap out of me and leave a bad taste in my mouth with this gameplay presentation.
Going forward, I will more than likely keep an eye on Skull and Bones as we approach its November launch date (if it actually manages to make that date), but will probably steer clear of any future Ubisoft-produced marketing material from now on.
You can check out the gameplay reveal trailer for Skull and Bones below, or you could just search Youtube for a video where you literally watch paint dry in real time, which would probably be a bit more exciting.
