Defying all naysayers, Ubisoft has revealed new beta dates for its upcoming piracy game Skull and Bones.
As reported by GameRant, the beta period is planned for August 25 to 28, 2023. Interested players can register now at the game’s official website.
Ubisoft made this announcement at the Ubisoft Forward event, where they also revealed the music video for the official Skull and Bones theme, performed by the band Home Free.
Home Free is a five man a capella singing group, most famous for performing and winning on the live action reality show The Sing-Off. Funnily enough, they performed a sea shanty medley in the middle of the pandemic, which you can watch here. This medley definitely isn’t the Skull and Bones theme, but maybe it’s what got them the gig with Ubisoft.
The music video’s visuals are probably of more interest to gamers, as it gives us a great look at the characters, ships, and locations to be found in Skull and Bones. There is no gameplay footage here, but that isn’t really a red flag.
This is because Ubisoft has been regularly updating those loyal fans the game has with a regular blog. Those updates has included video footage, and that footage has been including gameplay. You can watch some such gameplay from just this January here.
For those who need a refresher, Skull and Bones started development all the way back in 2013. It started out as DLC for Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, before eventually getting spun off into its own game.
A 2021 insider report from Kotaku claimed that the game had undergone eight years of development hell, with mismanagement and lack of clear direction cursing the project. Ubisoft apparently cannot cancel the game because they received plum sponsorship from the Singaporean government. Ubisoft Singapore had become a point of pride for both Ubisoft and Singapore, and the studio’s specialty was developing the ship based gameplay that Skull and Bones is built around.
But perhaps the bad press Ubisoft received from this report misled fans to thinking that this production was cursed, or unsalvageable, or had turned into flotsam.
In fact, Ubisoft told us that development on Skull and Bones was going well by last month. And before that, on February, rumor was spreading around that Ubisoft was sitting on a highly improved version of the game, and even the insider’s sources couldn’t get their hands on it.
So it seems Ubisoft has successfully kept those loose lips shut in preparation for all of this now. It really will no longer be surprising if Skull and Bones is releasing sometime this year or the next one.
Skull and Bones is planned for release on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows on Ubisoft Connect. You can watch the Skull and Bones music video, below.
