- The creative director of Assassin’s Creed 3 says the idea of Skull and Bones was “bizarre” to “see essentially the same stuff re-shipping 14 years after we made it”
- Alex Hutchinson and his team were behind the naval tech seen in Assassin’s Creed 3 and Black Flag
- Hutchinson suggests the development team was mostly made up of “junior” staff with not enough experience
Alex Hutchinson, creative director of Assassin’s Creed 3 and Far Cry 4, has discussed what went wrong with the launch of Skull and Bones, suggesting it was down to a lack of experience from the development team and the fact that he and his team had already created something similar.
Skull and Bones launched in 2024, but the action-adventure pirate game was initially intended to be an Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag multiplayer experience, which was conceived in 2013.
Development went on for a long time due to several delays and reboots, and even after finally launching 11 years later, the game wasn’t received too well critically, while also lacking player engagement.
However, despite the recent shakeup at Ubisoft, which has seen the cancellation of a ton of games and studio closures, Skull and Bones is still alive and well, and even received a major update recently.
Speaking to PC Gamer, Hutchinson, whose team developed the naval battles for Assassin’s Creed 3, tech which was later used in the follow-up Black Flag, the idea of Skull and Bones was “bizarre” to “see essentially the same stuff re-shipping 14 years after we made it”.
The developer, who later left Ubisoft to co-found Journey to the Savage Planet‘s Typhoon Studios, and Revenge of the Savage Planet creator Racoon Logic, explained that the concept was already “stale” at that point.
“Ideas have a window … they age out and become stale,” Hutchinson said, adding, “I think the team was junior. They were trying to essentially make Black Flag crossed with World of Tanks or World of Warships. But I don’t think they had experience in that. 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 also believes that the team at Ubisoft Singapore consisted of “junior” members with not a lot of experience.
The studio was established in 2008 and had 300 employees by the time the Skull and Bones project began, but it mostly served as a support studio that assisted in the development of the Assassin’s Creed franchise.
Hutchinson added that Ubisoft would send employees from its Canadian and French studios to help Ubisoft Singapore, but says the trips were more like holidays.
“For a lot of the French or Canadian developers, they would go down to Singapore for a year’s holiday,” Hutchinson said. “They weren’t going down there to make that studio huge. They were like, ‘Oh, that’d be fun to work for a year in Singapore.’ I don’t think they were serious. And you couldn’t get as many people, the talent pool just wasn’t deep enough.”
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