Hand-carved wood, Full 360-degree rotation, Velocity Paddles, and—most importantly—a great big button right in the middle that orders your crew to break out into sea shanties. Oh, aye, it’s truly the pirate’s life for me with the Ship Wheel Controller forSkull and Bones, which received a glossy trailer in time for the game’s release just before the weekend. Honestly, even as someone whowasn’t at all impressed with the game’s final betabefore its release, the idea of a beautifully detailed wheel to steer my ship across the seas was a seductive one.
Because there’s a little pirate in all of us, methinks…
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So of course it had an even more profound effect on people actually invested ($70 deep, at least!) in Skull and Bones. Comments on the video range from excitement, to slightly snarky but totally fair “You gotta make a game people want to play before releasing expensive add ons,” to a rather witty “Must come with the game, that’s why it has a $70 price tag.” What very few comments seemed to clock on to was the tiniest of smallprint right at the end of the video saying:
“This device is not for sale; it has been developed for Skull and Bones promotion only.”
A Wheel That Is Not A Wheel
Yep, this beautiful controller isn’t real. And of course, when you join the dots, it makes sense that a hand-carved wooden ship wheel may be a bit overkill—but it could’ve been, dunno, made of plastic butdesignedby a highly skilled carpenter in a way befitting of the style and period? In reality, a peripheral like this would probably have been best saved for a year or so down the line once the game establishes itself (which, for the record, yours truly doesn’t think it will), but why create a promo for a genuinely appealing product when the end result is that it’s inevitably going to disappoint a substantial number of players who believed it was real? And are we really living in a time now where we need to read the smallprint even for something that’s supposed to be a trailer presumably depicting something that’s actually in the game?
Skull and Bones is a game defined by misdirection.
It’s like a sneakier, less innocent version of those April Fool’s pranks that you see from developers and publishers around that time of year. But the difference there is that they usually announce or advertise things that are either played for comedy, or are so absurd as to be unbelievable. What theydon’tdo is tease something not entirely inconceivable, something that many players could be perceive as adding value, then pretty much conceal the fact that it’s fake (that smallprint really is small, and for a part of the video the white font is conveniently masked by a splash of yellow graphic in the background).
It’s a bizarre marketing move that just seems to have a great big ‘L’ built into it—building up excitement, then plunging into disappointment.
Black Flags And Red Flags
With Skull and Bones already receiving a lukewarm reception from reviewers, and not many people having faith that it can emerge from from its 11-year development hell into the solid service game Ubisoft wants it to be, advertising things that don’t exist that could genuinely make the game more desirable, only to whisper right at the end of the trailer ‘But you can’t have it’ just leaves a bad taste in the mouth; it’s a bit of a dick move.
But it’s also not that surprising, given that Skull and Bones is a game defined by misdirection. From its multiple changes in actual direction since the start of its troubled development, to some really quite bad in-game design choices like the resource-gathering mini-game and horribly sparse on-land elements, to this ad that taunts players with things the game doesn’t have, Ubisoft has never seemed sure about quite what to do with Skull and Bones (other than brand it a ‘Quadruple-A’ game and market it in an underhand way).
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