Ubisoft Announces Skull and Bones, a new Pirate Game

[Ambrois LeGaillard]

A game that disgust me.

First, all these details will go only with a super-puter;
Second, unrealistic at all;
Third, multiplayer (I like single player);
Fourth, a sort of Disneyland-of-pirates made for the middle fat teen filled of money (the mass of buyers)

Erased from my head 2 seconds after have closed the first video. Let the fat boys spend their dollars, I have other interests.

 

[Captain Murphy]

Well, speaking from the experience of trying to promote Tides of War (which is pretty much NOT all of those complaints) the market for a realistic based ship combat game is reaaaaaaally tiny. I fully understand their targeting of a non-realistic design, as it just isn't profitable otherwise.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I honestly don't understand why it is so difficult to have realism settings.
Even stock PotC had that to some extent.
Surely it can't be that crazy difficult?

 

[Captain Murphy]

The problem would be the adjustment of the mechanics for each 'level' that has to be programmed in. Each adjustment and balance has to be tested by QA, and then approved by the end testers too. That takes a game with a QA budget of 10% to over 30% without really adding anything new to the game that would increase sales. If 1 million people were going to buy it with just one set of mechanics and adding several more nets them, say, 10% more sales? It isn't worth the budget costs to do it. Again, we are in that same situation with ToW in that every mechanic change costs a lot of time in debugging, QA, and testing.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

The problem would be the adjustment of the mechanics for each 'level' that has to be programmed in. Each adjustment and balance has to be tested by QA, and then approved by the end testers too. That takes a game with a QA budget of 10% to over 30% without really adding anything new to the game that would increase sales. If 1 million people were going to buy it with just one set of mechanics and adding several more nets them, say, 10% more sales? It isn't worth the budget costs to do it. Again, we are in that same situation with ToW in that every mechanic change costs a lot of time in debugging, QA, and testing.

Good thing you guys actually care about quality over quantity!

 

[Captain Murphy]

Good thing you guys actually care about quality over quantity!

That is sorta the reason we have not prioritized development of ToW. It is really expensive to develop and the return is not going to be great on it. So we just don't have the motivation to really work on it due to smaller marketability and audience reach. We care enough about the end result that we want, that we won't compromise is with a shoddy product or arcade based shell of it's former self.

 

[Armada]

I honestly don't understand why it is so difficult to have realism settings.
Even stock PotC had that to some extent.
Surely it can't be that crazy difficult?

That works for single-player games, but not for multiplayer games. When players are competing against each other, they can't each have different realism settings or things would be unbalanced. To maintain balance and have different settings, you'd need to split the player base into groups, but as Captain Murphy said, that would take more time to develop and test. And if your player base is small to begin with, splitting them up isn't a good idea.

The closest analogy I can think of is that some shooters have a "hardcore" mode that removes most of the HUD and vastly reduces player health, but it's often hard to rebalance all the guns to account for the change in health. The big-budget developers with massive fan bases can afford to do this, but smaller teams would struggle.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Fair points, all of it.

Truth be told, I do understand it. And I'm hardly the world's biggest pusher for realism in these sort of games anyway.
I've already got real life for my fix of actual realism.

But of course none of that means I have to agree with the wisdom of fully unrealistic mayhem.