Skull And Bones Has Been Hit With Another Crushing Delay

Skull and Bones has been delayed for a fifth time–with a new release date of March 2023.

By Jason Collins
| Published 33 mins ago

Delays ahoy! Ubisoft just announced that its open-world pirate adventure Skull and Bones is delayed once again, and the publisher says that the game will now launch on March 9, 2023. The game was previously scheduled for a November 8 release date on Amazon Luna, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox Series X, and Google Stadia — now we’re pretty sure it won’t land on the last platform since Google pulled the plug on its life support.

We would’ve said that this is a surprising turn of events for Skull and Bones, but Ubisoft has delayed this game before — four times, actually. Now that the game has been delayed for the fifth time, Ubisoft disclosed that the active development stage is over, and the game is currently in its post-production stage. According to IGN, the publisher is justifying the delay by using the extra time to further polish and balance the pirating experience, following the feedback and technical tests from its Insider Program, made during previous beta versions of the game.  

Admittedly, Skull & Bones’ development journey has been a rocky one. The game was revealed in 2017, appearing to the audiences of the time as a game based on Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag naval combat. It was originally scheduled to release in 2018, focusing primarily on previous-gen consoles. The first delay was announced in 2018, pushing the game to the 2019-20 release window before being entirely forgotten by the gaming community due to a lack of any news by Ubisoft.

Some reports have suggested that the game was rebooted behind the closed curtains, and the news about the second delay came in 2020 and then again in 2021. In the meantime, Ubisoft, alongside other gaming giants like Activision Blizzard, came under media attention for alleged toxic work culture, hostile work environment, sexual misconduct, and gender discrimination. This caused massive departures of key players from within the company, which adversely affected numerous in-development gaming titles.

Luckily, the development of Skull and Bones was continued, along with the highly-anticipated sequel to 2003’s Beyond Good & Evil, but the game was delayed once again to the 2022-2023 release window, with November 8 release date. However, besides increasing the price of their AAA gaming titles, Skull and Bones included, Ubisoft delayed the game once again. Assuming that we don’t get a sixth delay — which wouldn’t be surprising at this point — the game is supposed to launch on March 9 next year.

Gaming delays were known to break fandoms’ hearts, as they were very rarely issued some ten years ago, and game developers weren’t delaying their titles. 2006’s Gothic 3 was an absolute wreck at launch, and the highly anticipated game was so poorly optimized that its issues were the talk of the gaming community for the next five years. This only goes to show just how rare botched releases and delays were. Nowadays, they’re just another Wednesday at the office — not quite rage-inducing as a Monday or disappointing as a Tuesday, but indifferent, just like the middle of the work week.