I finally played the 'AAAA' Game

The world's first "AAAA" game. Skull and Bones recently dropped its Year 3 update and went on sale on Steam for an absolutely laughable £2.50. I thought I might as well give it a go with a mate. Let me confirm right now that every single meme about this game is completely true. Make no mistake, the game is absolute garbage for the most part.

A tangled mess of conflicting designs:

It truly feels like several isolated teams worked on this project in complete darkness and just slapped their work on top of each other. You have one team making a console naval combat game, another building some of the most time-wasting, piss-taking mobile UI designs imaginable, and a third team shoving in seasonal FOMO live-service crap. A final team just glued the whole mess together and prayed it would boot.

It is without a doubt the most tangled web of conflicting design choices I have ever experienced. If you are in the third year of your live-service cycle and your big roadmap highlight is "reworking the UI", what on earth have you been doing for the last two years? Oh right, making the exact same recycled timed seasonal content.

Hostile UI and banner popup hell:

I cannot stress enough how aggressively awful the UI and UX designs are. The clunky console-based menus are bad enough on their own. Ubisoft then decided to pack the screen with intrusive rubbish that literally takes away your controls.

If you accept five quests consecutively, the game forces you to sit there watching a "Quest Accepted" banner and listening to the sound effect for every single one before it hands control back to you. Loot and reward indicators lag constantly.

The cargo management loop is genuinely hostile to the player. When you loot cargo and return to your warehouse, you cannot just dump it all. You have to manually select and mark each of the 80+ individual pieces of cargo in your ship before you can move them over. You have to do this every single time you get loot, all while fighting those atrocious console controls. It takes multiple clicks to do the simplest actions. It is an absolute joke.

Hollow gameplay and broken combat scaling:

I will not bother roasting the entire core game since the internet has already done that for years. By Year 3, Skull and Bones has basically devolved into a "pimp your ship" simulator because the actual content is so severely lacking in direction.

Sailing your customised ship around and shooting things is indeed quite fun in short bursts. There just isn't anything fun to shoot at. Most of the older content is entirely obsolete. Half of the main systems and mechanics have been abandoned. The narrative is bottom-of-the-barrel gunk with zero imagination and zero player agency. You do not get to be a pirate king. You just do whatever the generic quest giver demands.

The combat balance is equally trash. Ramming is marketed as a main combat feature, yet they capped the damage and completely forgot to scale it for higher difficulties. There are dozens of items and skills explicitly meant for ramming builds, but they are totally useless in the endgame. High-tier content essentially forces everyone to just build a massive Galleon and ignore all the niche playstyles.

Live-service delusion and the AMA disaster:

Despite the core game having minimal content, the developers decided it was a brilliant idea to lock older gear behind 10 different types of currencies. The live-service brainrot is completely delusional. They are still pushing premium passes and microtransaction bundles for a game that was averaging hundreds of players on Steam before the £2.50 fire sale.

If you want proof that this game has zero future, just look at their recent Year 3 AMA. It was hilariously revealing. When directly asked if they still had a sizable team working on the game, the developers dodged the question entirely. They absolutely refused to confirm numbers while rushing to assure people the Black Flag remake team was separate. They also admitted PvP is basically dead and that they are cancelling map expansions because it is too "labour-intensive". When a developer says their Year 3 goal is "revisiting the core loop" instead of adding regions, you know the budget has been completely slashed.