Ubisoft is all in on Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry (among other lucky IPs) following all the recent layoffs, studio closures, and project cancellations, yet Skull and Bones somehow continues to sail onward against all odds. Its launch was a bit disastrous though, and one key creative behind Assassin’s Creed 3 had something to say about that project and why it struggled so much.
PC Gamer had a chance to talk to AC3 and Far Cry 4 creative director Alex Hutchinson, who’s worked on the two Savage Planet games since leaving Ubisoft. From the get-go, Hutchinson commented it was “bizarre” to see “essentially the same stuff re-shipping 14 years” after he and his team cracked the systems for the third Assassin’s Creed. The full pirate experience wouldn’t become a thing until Black Flag, as Ubisoft reportedly wasn’t confident in the feature’s chances during AC3’s development.
The rest is history, but even as Skull and Bones enters another year of post-launch support, many are still wondering how and why the base game’s development was so difficult. In the director’s mind, it was a mix of its core ideas feeling “stale” and the main development team not having the necessary experience to finish such a daunting project without major hiccups.
“Ideas have a window… They age out and become stale,” he explained before adding a “junior” team trying to “make Black Flag crossed with World of Tanks or World of Warships” was a recipe for disaster. “And then they didn’t really have experience in making even an Assassin’s Creed game down there, because they really did co-development. And then I think it just got away from them,” he added.
As pointed out in the original piece by PC Gamer’s Fraser Brown and Jeremy Peel, Ubisoft Singapore was founded in 2008 and mostly acted as a support studio before its headcount “ballooned to more than 300 employees.” Even Hutchinson admitted many Ubisoft devs just moved to Singapore for the fun vibes: “For a lot of the French or Canadian developers, they would go down to Singapore for a year’s holiday… I don’t think they were serious.”
