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Watch the Skull & Bones trailer that explains “we’re not making Black Flag 2.0”

Skull & Bones ship classes

We’re not usually privy to which Ubisoft studio does what – so you’ll be interested to know that Ubisoft Singapore brought the ocean to Assassin’s Creed, simulating the waves and perfecting ship combat. It seems only right they get to own it now, in standalone pirate game Skull & Bones. 

Like the freedom of the high seas? Try a great sandbox game.

As a new trailer makes clear, Skull & Bones is a new twist on the systems first prototyped for Assassin’s Creed 4 – thanks to class-based multiplayer and a reactive world.

“We’re not making Black Flag 2.0,” says game director Bill Money. “We’re making our own game. But we really went to school on what we’ve done in the past.”

At the close of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag’s development, Ubisoft Singapore tried sticking a second player-controlled ship in there, just to see what it was like. It was predictably amazing.

They’ve since developed a class system they hope will be familiar from other games. Huge Frigates are tanks, while the small, long-distance Sharpshooter sounds a lot like a sniper ship.

To succeed, you’ll have to think about position, wind direction, and the ocean. But there’s always the option of hopping up to the crow’s nest to get a better FOV and assess the situation.

Although the heart of the game seems to be multiplayer, the open-world itself reacts to your actions – so the more thefts that take place, the more likely it is that pirate hunters will begin to show up during your outings. Which, again, feeds back into multiplayer, since those hunters are “something you can’t tackle by yourself.”

An intriguing proposition from a blockbuster Ubisoft show, which closed with the Beyond Good & Evil 2 trailer they told us we weren’t getting. Cheeky tykes.