Skull and Bones, the open world pirate game Ubisoft unveiled at E3 2017, has suffered another pushback. The company said in its full-year 2018-19 earnings statement that the game, which was delayed last year into the 2019-20 fiscal year, has now been pushed to sometime after that. 

There's nothing more specific to go on—"The release of Skull and Bones has been postponed to after 2019-20" is the full statement—and that far-off open-endedness (Ubi's 2019-20 fiscal year will conclude at the end of March 2020) is worrying for a project that was showing off gameplay two years ago. The Skull and Bones Twitter account wasn't much more helpful, although it did confirm in various tweets that there are currently no target dates for beta testing or release. 

"Our first goal is to make Skull and Bones awesome for our players. We believe in our vision for the game, while also making sure the voice of our community is being heard," Ubisoft tweeted. "As soon as we're ready to share more, we'll do so."

Chris took Skull and Bones for a spin at E3 last year and found it far more combat-focused than Sea of Thieves, his then-and-still seadog sim of choice, but also very promising: There were still a lot of blanks to be filled in, particularly about non-combat activities, but the naval combat "is just as much fun as it was in Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed games." (And in case it's not clear, he thinks naval combat in Black Flag and Origins is a lot of fun.)

Ubisoft also said that Skull and Bones will not appear at E3 this year. 

Most of my recent pirate adventures are the result of teaming up with Tyler and James in Sea of Thieves, and having a leisurely but enjoyable freeform sail across its open world waters. It can take long minutes, even a half-hour sometimes, to spot another ship, and often quite some time to reach them and engage in combat.

Ubisoft's Skull & Bones, due out in 2019, appears to be a pirate game of another feather. I played a fifteen-minute work-in-progress demo at E3, and that fifteen minutes was comprised almost entirely of non-stop naval combat. My fights were all with NPC ships, because although there were other human players sailing around during the demo, I simply never had the chance to find them and engage them. I was too busy hunting down and sinking the numerous AI ships, and using more than just cannons to do it.

There were three ships to choose from in the demo, each with various attributes plus its own special ability that functions like an ult, a dreadfully powerful attack that requires a cooldown period before it can be used again. 

The first ship is the Royal Fortune, which is basically a floating tank: not that fast or maneuverable, but plenty of firepower and an ability that lets it quickly anchor in place while rapidly blasting and reloading its cannons. Then there's the Jaeger, a fast and nimble ship that sacrifices firepower for extra speed, though it has a devastating forward cannon attack as its special ability.

I chose the Black Horn, though, because frankly there's nothing better when you're a pirate than ramming another ship, and Black Horn's ult is a high-speed ramming move that rockets your ship through the water and causes extra damage if you hit someone else. I found it useful on more than one occasion, and for more than just dealing damage.

The weapons aboard your ship aren't just broadside cannons but forward-facing guns, chain-shots for wrecking masts, and even rapid-fire rockets. If you're played Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag or the handful of ship combat sections of Assassin's Creed Origins, much of the sailing and combat will feel familiar. It's slick and speedy, with ships capable of making sharp turns, reaching full speed within a few seconds, raising and lowering sails in an instant, and the arc of your projectiles displayed on your screen while aiming. During incoming barrages you can take cover by ducking down, lessening the damage you'll take, and if you've damaged another ship badly enough you can pull close and board, quickly ending the battle and hauling away whatever loot the ship had.

After trading cannon fire with an NPC ship of about the same level as me, I finally tried out my ramming ult. It sent my ship blazing across the waves, like a charge attack, until I rammed the side of the other ship. The enemy took a huge amount of damage and I was able to board a moment later, ending the battle.

From then on, I used my ult as an opener to battle, ducking to take cover from cannon fire until I was close, then blasting across the waves and slamming into my enemy's hull. A couple times, facing a ship a few levels lower than mine, one ramming ult was all it took. I didn't even have to stop to board, I just tore lesser ships in half without breaking stride. I even found it useful when a red circle appeared around my ship, indicating I was about to be bombarded. The steering is nimble enough that you can turn and escape an incoming attack, but I found it easier to just employ my ult. Just because I wasn't using it to ram someone didn't mean I couldn't use it to escape.

The Skull & Bones demo was fast and furious, with so much combat and so many ships crammed into the small patch of sea I explored it was a bit ridiculous. I enjoyed what I played of Skull & Bones, which isn't a surprise since I really liked the naval combat of Black Flag and Origins, too. And if you're wondering, your pirates in Skull & Bones do sing sea shanties while you're sailing, though there were so many ships to battle I don't think they got through more than a few bars before we were dodging cannons (and rockets) and getting ready to ram our way to victory.

I still have a lot of questions about Skull & Bones and hope to get some more answers during E3. I'd love to know if boarding other ships, currently shown as a brief animation, will be expanded upon in the final game. And I'd like to know more about the open world and what sort of things you can do in it besides sinking every ship you come across. The naval combat though, so far, is just as much fun as it was in Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed games, and I'm itching to raise my sails and do some more ramming.

Piracy is dead in the Caribbean, but in Skull & Bones, the pirate game from Ubisoft Singapore, it's alive and thriving in the Indian Ocean. A cinematic trailer for the game at Ubisoft's E3 press conference sets the tone, but the real meat is in the gameplay video above.

Here are the details listed on the video's page:

Dominate a Dangerous Open Ocean: A shared open world that reacts as you plunder rich trade routes.

Customize Your Pirate Experience: Choose your captain, recruit your crew and build deadly ships.

Naval Combat Redefined: Use your weapons, spyglass and even the wind to stalk and destroy your prey.

Play Solo or Coop: Raid the Hunting Grounds alone or group with other players to hunt larger prey.

Explosive Multiplayer: Enter the Disputed Waters and fight for supremacy in a variety of game modes.

The gameplay video shows off a variety of ship customizations, from different cannons and weapons to cosmetics like the figurehead of your ship. As in Assassin's Creed 4, the ocean is dotted with powerful forts you'll need to assault or avoid until you're powerful enough to take them on. There's definitely ship boarding, though the video skips past whether there's any third-person melee combat as there is in Black Flag.

There is, of course, multiplayer, given this is a "shared world" game, but it seems like this will largely be about forming co-op groups to take on tough AI ships. We'll have to wait to see what PvP looks like, and how integrated it is into the game.

It's out in 2019. You can sign up for beta access here.

Ubisoft's open-world pirate game Skull and Bones has been pushed back until at least April next year.

It was initially due to release later this year, but it will now come out in the 2019-2020 financial year, which means we'll see it in April next year at the earliest. Ubisoft said the decision was in part motivated by strong sales of its back catalog and "excellent momentum of recent releases". 

"Ubisoft has decided to give itself more time to develop Skull & Bones to offer players an even more engaging experience," the company said in its financial report, in which it also announced that The Division 2 will be out within the next year.

The game's creative director Justin A. Farren spoke in more length about the decision on the Ubisoft forums. "[We] want to make this game right in order to achieve our ambition to deliver the ultimate pirate game set to thrill players at launch and for years to come," he said.

"Our goal remains as clear as ever: build a shared systemic open ocean that captures the essence of the pirate fantasy and is full of activities."

Tim enjoyed his time with a demo version of the game—although he felt it was a tad shallow. It's primarily a multiplayer game, but it will have a single-player campaign.

When Tim took Ubisoft's Skull and Bones for a whirl at E3, he reckoned it felt like Burnout as much as it did Black Flag—which was something he was on board with. What's perhaps less inspiring is the fact the forthcoming pirate action adventure 'em up includes loot boxes. 

Speaking to Gamespot, the developer's creative director Justin Farren confirmed Skull and Bones will include paid-for personalised cosmetic items, but that enforcing a pay-to-win-like system is something it's keen to avoid. 

"Our economy emulates the real economy of the Indian Ocean, so things that are important to the people who are shipping goods, the merchants... the empires, those things are important to you," says Farren. "What I don't want to players to feel it is, that it's some abstraction from the fantasy. 

"It should feel like the things that you're hunting, using your spyglass to see the things that are on board, should directly relate to the things that you need. But you know, there's nothing more pirate-y than the treasure chest."

Farren underscores he and his team's desire to sidestep a pay-to-win structure, however expands on how microtransactions might feature in the game at launch.  

"It's early for [more info on microtransactions]," he says. "What we want to do is make sure if players want things, that we provide content for them if they want and that they don't feel like it's gated off because they didn't pay for it. So, we want to have live events, we want to have seasonal events, seasons where you're able to compete against other players to try to get to the top of the ladder and the top of the food chain. Those things will give you opportunity to get those customization elements, those cosmetics, vanity items that will allow you to personalize your experience.

"If somebody sees your ship, they should know you're a badass, or that you're really invested in cosmetics. Or that you've got all the figureheads that represent you being in the right place at the right time to take down the right enemy. That's super important to me. I play racing games, and when I see someone's car that's tricked out, I'm like, 'How'd he get that?'

"That's what I want. I've spent hundreds of dollars on Overwatch, and I can't see it. I'm only doing it so that other people see what I spend or what I buy, and that's crazy, but it's, lots of people are like that, and I'm one of them."

Skull and Bones is due at some point during the latter half of 2018 and will come with a single player "narrative campaign". Whether or not any of the above ties into that segment of the game remains to be seen.

Ubisoft said when it announced the high-seas swashbuckling sim Skull and Bones that the game will support both solo and co-op play—"Raid the Hunting Grounds alone or group with other players to hunt larger prey," to be precise—but the focus was clearly on the multiplayer side of things. For those of you who don't like to share the booty, or get ganked by tricked-out frigates, there will be a proper single-player campaign included as well. 

"[Skull and Bones] will offer a narrative campaign which will be integrated into the game and will not be something aside of the multiplayer experience. In this campaign, players will encounter iconic characters and memorable rival pirates. More details will be shared at a later date," a rep said. 

As for the E3 demo, "We only showed Loot Hunt, one of our PvP modes in Disputed Waters," the rep continued. "We like to say that this is just the tip of the iceberg of what we have to show for Skull & Bones." 

Skull and Bones sounds like it could be a lot of fun: Tim described that demo as "charging around the sea, swinging your ship about to deliver spectacular volleys of cannon fire, and using your ram like an enraged narwhal" in his E3 preview, and that absolutely sounds like my kind of nautical videogame. But gamers cannot live on multiplayer alone, and since Sid Meier doesn't seem likely to return to this particular sub-genre anytime soon, I'm glad that Ubisoft is picking up the slack. Skull and Bones is due to set sail in the fall of 2018. 

As someone who will go to his watery grave loving a shanty and still being delighted by the term ‘poop deck’, I thought Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag was easily the best game in the series. As did seemingly everyone else. The following games, Unity and Syndicate, were shorn of all the pirate stuff, and felt pale and dull in comparison. So much so that the Assassin’s series took a year off, only re-emerging at this year’s E3 in the form of the Egyptian-flavoured Origins.

But given that Assassin's' whole thing is time hopping from one evocative historical era to the next, I guess Ubisoft thinks it can’t just say “Yo, ho, ho, we’re heading back to the same setting” yet. Which means no Black Flag 2. Instead we get Skull & Bones, which was also announced at E3 this week. Developed by Ubisoft Singapore, the game is a multiplayer spin-off of the ship-to-ship combat from Black Flag, and I got to play a couple of rounds on PC at the Ubisoft booth.

The game type shown at E3 is a loot hunt which pitches four ‘Cutthroat’ ships against four ‘Raiders’. But before that, we got a tutorial which included how to trim sails correctly (Skull & Bones’ ships effectively have two speeds: full for closing on a target fast, or trimmed for turning slowly but tightly), and basic cannon aiming (rotate the camera to port or starboard, ADS, unleash a broadside). With those basics mastered, battle began. 

As the round starts your team has to sink as many merchant vessels as possible in order to collect gold from their wreckage. Before long the two teams come into contact and the real action starts. I’d chosen a ‘Bruiser’ class ship with a powerful ram and nimble maneuverability, encouraging an aggressive play style. The other options were ‘Marksman’, which gets bonus damage when anchored but has a fragile hull, or the Enforcer, which is slow and tanky, or whatever passes for a tank on water. (Two of my colleagues have actually already called this game World of Tanks on Water.)

Rather than any great simulation of naval strategy, Skull & Bones (at least as played by people as inexperienced as my teammates and I), seems more about charging around the sea, swinging your ship about to deliver spectacular volleys of cannon fire, and using your ram like an enraged narwhal. I was reminded, perhaps oddly, of playing Burnout 3: Takedown—only rather than nudging rival cars into concrete bollards, here you’re slamming hulls and letting rip with munitions. Either way, a successful kill is grin inducing. 

The Burnout comparison also gets slightly ridiculous when you consider that manipulating wind is more of a thing in Skull & Bones than it was in Black Flag. With the wind perfectly at your back the ship’s top speed will be boosted substantially. It’s not quite ye olden NOx, but it does promise to provide an element of skill to manouevering—as I discovered when I tried to head straight into the wind and found myself ‘in irons’, or sailor speak for stalled.

Board stiff

Something of a shame is the lack of actual boarding actions. Ships have two health bars, one for each side of the hull, and depleting either of those at close proximity will bring up a boarding prompt. But unlike Black Flag, you don’t get to swing across as the skipper and start putting yourself about with a cutlass. Instead a quick cutscene plays and the ship is sunk. It’s essentially an execution move, but with a boat. Bah! 

I guess I get it. Ubisoft is trying to make Skull & Bones it’s own thing, and that means putting distance between it and Black Flag in terms of features, plus the not inconsiderable cost-saving of not having to create a second combat engine.

The match ends with the arrival of Pirate Hunter ships who, sickened by the senseless loss of life and our unquenchable avarice, set about trying to sink us all. At that point the remaining players need to head for an escape point, which if reached successfully will result in whatever gold is in your hold being added to the team’s total score. During this section respawning is no longer possible, which ups the stakes nicely. In fact I was particularly pleased that I was able to follow in the wake of one rival, shooting him in the aft as he fled.

Right now Skulls & Bones feels like a relatively amusing diversion, rather than the spiritual successor to Black Flag I really want. How much depth there is here—I know, I know—is likely going to hinge on how interesting the promised shared open world element is, and the amount of upgrading and customisation that can be done to your ships. (So help me I can already see the cosmetic microtransactions for a booby figurehead.) None of that stuff is on show at E3, but unless there’s substantial scope for player progression, it’s hard not to imagine Skulls & Bones could go the way of For Honor.

Which brings me back to Black Flag, a game that still feels like bottled lightning. It wasn’t just that adding sailing to the core Assassin’s Creed gameplay loop helped freshen the experience up, though that’s of course true. The beauty of Black Flag was how different, but still thematically compatible, those two types of gameplay were, enabling players to spend their time in the world according to how they were feeling. Sick of squatting in a long grass? Head back out to sea with your hearties for songs and sinkings. Missing the land again? Return to the rooftops for more story and throat slicing.

With Skull & Bones I can’t help but wonder if Ubisoft hasn’t slightly missed the point. Splicing those two wildly disparate genres was what made Black Flag special in the first place. Excerpting the sailing stuff to stand alone, however well done, seems unlikely to capture quite the same feeling of freedom. But that's for another day. For now it was good to feel the sun beating down on the Indian Ocean and the spray hitting the poop deck. Told you: always delightful.

Correction: this article originally stated that Rogue and Unity dropped Black Flag's pirate setting. Rogue was a second Assassin's Creed pirate swashbuckler; it was the most recent game, Syndicate, that also switched to a new setting.

Praise Poseidon, they've gone and done it. It's been four years since the best Assassin's Creed, Black Flag, gave us a taste of the pirate's life. Ubisoft's finally taken that potential and spun it out of the Assassin's Creed universe in a new game called Skull and Bones.

Ubisoft first showed off Skull and Bones with a cinematic trailer at its press conference, but the video above is a longer look at the game, which describes it as a multiplayer, open world pirate game.

Here's the trailer description: 

“It is the Golden Age of Piracy. Renegade captains command the most powerful weapons on Earth: warships. You are a pirate captain who has refused the king’s pardon and sailed from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, an untamed frontier full of lavish riches. However, these waters are also a battleground where far-reaching colonial empires, powerful trading corporations, and ruthless pirate gangs clash. In order to survive, you will have to build a lethal fleet, prey upon lucrative trade routes, and ally with other pirates in your endless struggle for supremacy.” 

"We're not making Black Flag 2.0, we're making our own game, but we really went to school on what we've done in the past," says an Ubisoft developer. You'll collect different types of ships that fill "traditional RPG archetypes," like a long-range, weakly armored ship and a heavy gun-toting frigate. Navigating with the wind is a key tactical element.

The game isn't all PvP, and sounds a bit like The Division in its open world design and challenges built around co-op play with your friends. Ubisoft talked just a bit about being able to develop your own gang with, naturally, your own pirate emblem.

And a bit more detail on the different forms of piracy in Skull and Bones:

Dominate a Dangerous Open Ocean:A shared open world that reacts as you plunder rich trade routes

Customize Your Pirate Experience:Choose your captain, recruit your crew and build deadly ships

Naval Combat Redefined:Use your weapons, spyglass and even the wind to stalk and destroy your prey

Play Solo or Coop:Raid the Hunting Grounds alone or group with other players to hunt larger prey

Explosive Multiplayer:Enter the Disputed Waters and fight for supremacy in a variety of game modes

Here are two more videos of Skull and Bones: a gameplay walkthrough and the cinematic trailer I mentioned above. Skull and Bones is due out in Fall 2018, but will have a playable beta well before that, which you can sign up for here.

This gameplay video depicts two teams of players in a 5v5 multiplayer mode called Loot Hunt, which gives us a look at a few ships. The powerful frigate, the close quarters brigantine (with a nasty battering ram), and the long-range sloop of war. While there's a lot of ship-on-ship combat, the goal here is to collect treasure scattered around the ocean play area.

And yes: sea shanties are definitely back.