Skull and Bones‘ problems are seemingly still ongoing. The pirate RPG has not only lost another creative director, but it reportedly also doesn’t have an internal release date, either.
There’s still no Skull and Bones release date
According to a report from Kotaku, Elisabeth Pellen came to Ubisoft Singapore as the title’s third creative director a few years ago (her LinkedIn profile says January 2019, but the report states that she started working with the team in 2018). According to her LinkedIn profile, she’s now an online editorial director at Ubisoft. Despite the problematic outward appearance, a Ubisoft spokesperson told Kotaku that it is natural for a creative director to leave at the end of a project.
“Five years ago, Elisabeth Pellen went to Ubisoft Singapore with a mission to reboot the creative direction of Skull and Bones,” said the spokesperson. “She succeeded, and the Skull and Bones team is now fulfilling her vision to deliver a unique naval action RPG experience to our players.”
Two of Kotaku’s anonymous sources explained that Pellen was at least supposed to last until the end of the year. Pellen did not respond to Kotaku’s request for comment. As previously stated, she was the third creative director attached to the project. Justin Farren was the previous creative director and served from 2016 to 2019. It’s unclear who was creative director before that.
While not damning on its own, the game still reportedly has no internal release date. Ubisoft noted that it would be coming out sometime in late 2023 or early 2024 when it delayed the title in January 2023, but Kotaku stated that it understood that the studio still doesn’t know exactly when it will be launching. This goes against Ubisoft’s statement from January that claimed a new release date was coming “very soon.”
It also seems like the studio is still reckoning with reports of its alleged mistreatment of employees, which was the subject of another Kotaku report in 2021. Singapore’s Creative Media and Publishing Union has been trying to get employees to join through flyers around the office. A “ballot exercise is being conducted this week among eligible team members in the studio to determine whether formal recognition should be granted,” according to Ubisoft. It also stated that it “believes in the importance of listening to our employees and fostering an open dialogue.”
Skull and Bones has been floating around Ubisoft for almost an entire decade. It started development in 2013 as a multiplayer spin-off to Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (which is also reportedly being remade) before spinning off into its own title. It was formally unveiled at E3 2017 and initially scheduled to release in 2018 before being continually delayed. According to a Kotaku report, it suffered from a lack of direction, poor management, and muddled design, all of which help explain its constantly shifting release window.
