Skull and Bones, the oft-delayed pirate game from Ubisoft that finally arrived earlier this month following almost a decade of development, has released its first season of post-launch content on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC - introducing, among other things, new world events, new contracts and bounties, plus a battle-pass-style progression track.

Raging Tides, as Skull and Bones' first live-service season is officially titled, predominantly focuses on new antagonist Philippe La Peste (AKA the Plague King) and his Fleet of Pestilence. By defeating La Peste's advance guard, the Plaguebringers, as they spawn throughout the world, players can raise the fleet's hostility level. Once past a certain threshold, they'll face a "mighty foe", which rewards a "rare item" when sunk.

That's the core of Raging Tides' new content, then, but Season 1 also adds two elite boss Kingpin Bounties - Jaws of Retribution: Introducing Zamaharibu and Anguish from the Abyss: Rode Maangodin - which run from 5-26th March and 26th March to 16th April respectively.

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I don't think I've fully recovered from my time with Skull And Bones, having suffered tremendously as a result of the review. There might be fun in some of its slower moments, but some of the generally positive, "It's actually quite a good game!" takes that I've seen honestly baffle me. The game is a series of long, annoying journeys, during which the most fun I had was turning my head to watch Catfish on my other monitor. MTV's show about people getting duped online was the perfect sailing companion, and perhaps, one of the only reasons I survived my brush with the live service seas.

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Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot recently said Skull And Bones is a "quadruple-A game", which I think is very accurate, actually. "AAAA" is the sound that escapes my lips as I embark on yet another hour-long sail to retrieve some logs, or when I'm doing my little deliveries and a brigantine starts on me. After 11 years in development, Ubisoft's pirate game isn't necessarily a disaster, I just think its live service model has transformed piracy from a roguish lark on the waves into a tremendously dull series of shipping tasks.

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Pirates! Such an evocative word! But if it's swashbuckling tales of derring-do you're after, of sea monsters and high seas adventuring, of buried treasures on distant shores and smuggling escapades by the light of the moon, there are other, better ways to fulfil that classic pirate fantasy, because Skull and Bones' take is, regrettably, a bit of a bore.

It begins, though, as all good adventures often do, in the midst of battle, wood splintering and canons booming as your ship is pursued across the 17th century Indian Ocean by a British armada intent on delivering you to Davy Jones - a wonderfully cinematic opener slightly undone by the fact straying beyond an arbitrary boundary immediately presents you with a stroppy message to turn around. Fortune, though, is on your side, and you escape - after bobbing through shark-infested waters on a bit of flotsam - with the shirt on your back, a rickety old dhow, and a burning ambition to become the most renowned pirate in all the land.

In rather less romantic terms, it's a live-service progression track grind masquerading as a rags-to-riches story, but it's one that Skull and Bones, to its credit, tries really hard to sell. Over its near-decade of development and across countless iterations, Ubisoft's pirate adventure has doubtless taken many forms, but what I wasn't expecting to find - amid its live-service trappings and its flexible fusion of drop-in co-op and optional PvP - was quite such a lengthy, narrative-driven campaign. Granted, its story - a self-serious, by-the-numbers tale of factional warfare, populated by a cast of largely charmless characters that could have been wrenched from any number of blockbuster Ubisoft games - isn't a particularly engaging one, but it does at least give Skull and Bones' rather graceless tangle of underlying systems some narrative drive.

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Despite claims it is a "quadruple-A" live-service experience, Skull and Bones's user Metacritic score has taken a pummelling since the pirate ship game was released on Friday, 16th February.

Based on the 222 user scores recorded to date, Skull and Bones' user score is sitting at just 2.8 out of 10, making it the lowest-rated game of 2024 released thus far when ranked by user score alone.

Complaints are centred chiefly around its "underwhelming and lacklustre" gameplay, a "poorly designed" end game, and claims that it is "boring", with many players comparing it unfavourably to Sea of Thieves and even Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, the latter of which is now 11 years old.

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Despite claims it is a "quadruple-A" live-service experience, Skull and Bones's user Metacritic score has taken a pummelling since the pirate ship game was released on Friday, 16th February.

Based on the 222 user scores recorded to date, Skull and Bones' user score is sitting at just 2.8 out of 10, making it the lowest-rated game of 2024 released thus far when ranked by user score alone.

Complaints are centred chiefly around its "underwhelming and lacklustre" gameplay, a "poorly designed" end game, and claims that it is "boring", with many players comparing it unfavourably to Sea of Thieves and even Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, the latter of which is now 11 years old.

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Because it’s somehow my job to worry about the technical fidelity of electronic toys, I’ve been eyeing the long-overdue arrival of Skull and Bones with some nervousness. After nearly a decade of delays, you’d probably just want to get it out the door, right? Skip straight to the open-world pirate adventuring, none of that 'making it work on a range of graphics cards' nonsense.

But nope. For all its other shortcomings, Skull and Bones performs alright on PC, very often more smoothly than its system requirements suggest. Though I’d still recommend abiding by its SSD storage requirement – following the rules might not be very piratey, but installing on a hard drive will curse you to some pretty tedious load screen waits. Geoffrey Rush would hate it, honestly.

While Edwin sequesters himself in the starting area, let’s head below deck for a closer look at Skull and Bones’ PC particulars. That includes a full rundown of its graphics options – which include ray tracing and DLSS – and a quick guide to the best settings for an ideal prettiness-to-performance ratio.

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It's happening! Why I played Skull & Bones back when it wasn't even a live service game. But now it is, and it's out this weekend. We talk a bit about how long it has been coming out, why it's been in development this long, and why they didn't just release the sucker the two or three previous times they got close to doing so. Honestly, I hope it does okay. We also talk about the games we've been playing this week, and Nate challenges us with a game of Palworld Pal: real or fake? PLUS the giant game dildo and our recommendations this week.

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Last night I spent an hour in Ubisoft Singapore's Skull And Bones, the much-reconceived, nigh-mythical open world pirate game that has been in development since 2013. Taking a leaf from the book of feared intergalactic corsair Samus Aran, the prologue starts you off at the height of your bucanneering powers, with a mighty gold-and-scarlet galleon at your disposal that is shortly blown to bits by the English Navy.

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