Skull and Bones throws players into the Golden Age of Piracy, starting in the Indian Ocean. You plunder forts and disrupt imperial corporate supply chains from the Dutch, British, and French, and you do it all with friends. A co-op pirate adventure in an open world, Skull and Bones allows you to explore with a friend immediately. With a maximum group size of three, this Ubisoft Singapore-developed title is an always-online experience that serves 20 people.
The shining star of this pirate co-op is the stellar naval battles. From taking on merchant ships that pose no danger to being hunted by Rogues or fighting a company’s supply line only to be ambushed by reinforcements, it all works. Every bit of the naval combat has been perfected. The sea is beautiful and filled with sealife like whales, dolphins, and sharks. But the seas are as dangerous as they’re gorgeously created.
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Once in the Open Waters, storms roll in and change the entire landscape of naval combat. The ship’s movement mechanics, delayed weapon reload times, and effective ramming buffs with the right ship all impact how you choose to engage enemy ships. Knowing how each of the different ships handles in a calm ocean can help you pick your fights wisely and inform you if you need to retreat. But everything you know changes when the storms come, and the sea begins to swell.
The unpredictability of the waves makes paying attention to your heading and your speed extremely important. This is increased when the dangerous rogue waves come into the picture. They can break your boat and deal severe damage or sink you all together if the battle has damaged you enough. Staying aware of your position is not easy when you take into account that you can’t see your ship’s surroundings while you’re aiming your weapons from the deck. The shifting perspectives can make it difficult to maintain position, and running into your co-op partners is a hurdle. By scaling up the difficulty and number of enemies you encounter when adventuring in a party, Skull and Bones co-op always maintains an edge. Well, so long as you progress to areas that match or are slightly higher than your ship’s level.
Choosing weapons that complement each other isn’t completely necessary, and choosing different ships doesn’t make a large difference. Ships on the lawless seas are broken into three types with unique perks: DPS, Tank, and Support. Their speeds, turning ease, and capacity for weapons and loot vary as well. The odds are mostly in your favor as you take on the bulk of the vast open world, meaning that you don’t need much balance. The fact that there is no high-end support ship like there is for DPS makes it a nonviable option. The disparity between the three ship classes makes DPS the focus for success.
With difficult world events that sometimes occur in unpredictable weather and even some riskier contracts, it’s easy to question why the party size limit is three. With 20 people on a server at any given time, a three-person party feels too small and can make many obstacles insurmountable. Yes, even when you lean into your own personal playstyle from the three-boat classes offered.
That said, dynamic world events are the biggest multiplayer feature that pushes the Skull and Bones choice to limit co-op to three per party. Most of the larger events and hunt contracts can be difficult to compete, especially when they involve plundering a military outpost. Nothing was impossible without more than the three-party limit, but they did take an exhausting amount of time to complete. Pushing what was once a fun naval battle into something more annoying.
Additionally, Skull and Bones co-op doesn’t feature a way to create a stable group beyond friend invites. You can search for groups in the game and even request help for events. That said, there is no formal process to make a crew. Clans and guilds are the backbone of many live-service multiplayer games. They provide a sense of community but also allow you to keep track of those you play with. The lack of them also leads some players to spam for help, causing a large pop-up to take up the majority of the left corner of your screen every few minutes. While the inclusion of crossplay is fantastic, adding in a group system is one of the staple co-op features that Skull and Bones is missing.
One of the other core features of any co-op or multiplayer game is to have an indicator somewhere in the HUD that allows you to find the other players in your party. This works well when at sea. Like most of the game, the refinement comes when you’re in your boat, with a clear marker of your other group members displayed in the top compass bar of the screen.
However, that doesn’t exist when you’re on land. Instead, you have a small written distance in meters in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen that shows how close you are getting to your co-op partner. This makes finding buried treasure and collectible notes difficult in a pair because you can’t drop pings to a detailed location on land like you can in the sea. And of course, you have no idea where your group is actually located on land.
Skull and Bones, for better or worse, has ample space to build a roadmap that adds in new Dens with infamous pirate kingpins and even more supernatural threats like deadly sea monsters and expanded ghost ships. Gaining infamy, as much as it’s fun to build your empire from Outcast to Kingpin, isn’t the most important part of the game so far as co-op is concerned. So limiting group size and even forming stable groups makes the future seasons of the game, which will reset empire-building progress made with Helm smuggling quests, feel almost listless.
One of the core ways the Skull and Bones’ live-service foundation comes into play is through The Helm contracts. The Helm represents rum runners, opium dealers, and all of the illicit smuggling operations essential to pirating. Upon completing Helm contracts, you also stand to gain the biggest loot by changing black market currency for unique items like cosmetics and blueprints to craft a multitude of powerful weapons. As you take more Helm contracts to deliver, plunder, hunt, and buy illicit goods, you build up your reputation and gain more of the special currency. While you can use the currency on cosmetics or blueprints and resources, and you can also invest it in building larger refining processes to build your Pirate Empire.
The Helm Contracts also carry the most risk of any of the contracts you can pick up. They cause enemy ships to hunt you as you deliver, limit your ability to fast travel, and force you into sailing the seas. They’re also some of the most fun you’ll have, thanks to the large investment and refinement of the naval combat system.
Outside of Helm contracts, the rest of the sharable contracts are most par for the course. Fetch this thing, explore this area, find this person. With a story that is lacking, despite the obvious investment in both beautiful environments and interesting character designs, the contacts are what keep you moving forward in your journey. Complete them, and you earn silver, infamy, and resources.
While you can progress the main story together, the meat of the co-op experience is the contracts you pick up outside the main mission. This is due in large part to the fact that progress for quests is kept with the host player. This means that while you both may complete the mission, only the host can submit it.
In the case of moments where you need to leave the game, like when the menu freezes, this means that you may lose your progress if you’re not the leader. Shareable quests are good, but how they’re implemented in Skull and Bones co-op needs to be refined. Most of the lost quests or the missing quests picked up by the party leader seem to happen in the East Indies section of the game. It could be a coincidence it happened in this zone and not in the Red Isle or Coast of Africa, but it’s where most of our progress issues happened. The good part at least, is that none of this plagues the main story quest.
It’s clear that there are certain elements of co-op play missing in Skull and Bones, particularly on land. That said, the substantial innovation of naval combat and dedication to bringing the seas to life provide a fun group experience. While you may not get the experience of hoisting the sails and working together to make a ship move as you do in Sea of Thieves, there is a different, equally satisfying look of conquering the Indian Ocean and battling as many ships as you can with someone else by your side.
Skull and Bones is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
