Ubisoft has finally re-revealed Skull and Bones during a recent showcase, showing the gritter take on a pirate world. It’s inspired by the Golden Age of Piracy, even though it doesn’t take directly from it, and pits players into a realistic world. Game Rant recently spoke with game director Ryan Barnard about a variety of topics, including how many ships will be in Skull and Bones at launch.
Players will eventually be able to craft 12 unique ships at launch, potentially amassing a fleet of 40 ships (for backup). Combined with multiplayer elements, pirate dens, and other noteworthy locations, it sounded like Skulls and Bones would be a huge game. Game Rant inquired about this, asking how it compared in size to Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, from which the initial idea of Skull and Bones sprang.
Size-wise, Barnard would instead compare it to Valhalla. As many know, it’s the latest game in the Assassin's Creed franchise and one of the biggest. The size of Skull and Bones completely eclipses it. In Barnard’s own words,
“Valhalla, a great big open world Assassins game, is 95 square kilometers of gameplay space. At launch, we are 625 square kilometers.”
This means Skull and Bones is about 241 miles of in-gameplay space, while Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is about 36 square miles. All in all, Skull and Bones is about 6.7x the size of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, but there is justification for this. Valhalla is a big open-world game, but it is a strictly single-player game.
Meanwhile, Skull and Bones can be beaten solo, but it is a multiplayer-first game. Packing in space for ships to maneuver, for players to group up, to fill the pirate dens and world, and more intrinsically requires a ton of space.
“Now, of course, we're a vehicle game. It's a ship game. So you need a bigger space to be able to accommodate. We’re also a multiplayer first game, so we want players to pirate up and group up with other players. And you need good amount of space for that to make sense for gameplay, right. But there's a huge world for you to explore and to discover the different factions, the two different dens which are kind of our two pirate villages that you'll discover through your progression of the game.”
It'll be interesting to see how the Ubisoft community responds to this information, but perhaps what’s more important than the size of the world is how it is filled. Skull and Bones features multiple factions, pirate dens, mysteries to discover, treasure to find, and more, and filling that world but leaving enough space for naval combat is no doubt a balancing act.
Skull and Bones releases November 8 for PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.