Gaming: Skull & Bones has been delayed again, this time to 2024

Bad news, Captain Jack wannabes: Ubisoft’s eternally delayed multiplayer naval combat game Skull & Bones has been pushed back yet again.

Most recently slated for a 2023 release following a closed beta phase that ran through this summer, a Ubisoft earnings call revealed it’s not scheduled until early 2024.

Anyone who’s been following the Skull & Bones saga so far won’t meet that news with a tremendous amount of surprise. The game entered development all the way back in 2013, when ‘Brexit’ was a meaningless portmanteau and the PS4 was the hot new console in town.

It hasn’t been plain sailing for Ubisoft’s ship-on-ship online battle sim since then, if you’ll excuse the excellent pun. It wasn’t even officially revealed until 2017, and it’s fair to say it was met with mild bafflement even then. It had been several years since Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag by that point, and while the popular ship combat in Edward Kenway’s adventure seemed an obvious point of inspiration for Skull & Bones, not many were clamouring for a standalone experience five years later.

It’s gone dark for long periods since that reveal, but the most recent 2023 release date looked pretty locked in due to the closed beta that ran earlier this year. However, Ubisoft announced to its investors that it’ll now be hitting retail during the first quarter of 2024.

There was a tantalising mention of an unspecified ‘big game’ being delayed on that same earnings call. Some, like Eurogamer, are speculating this game is Ubisoft Massive’s upcoming open-world game Star Wars: Outlaws. Nobody knows much about that one except for its name - and as of this week, that it’s coming out a bit later now.

This news shouldn’t be taken as any indication that either title will be bad. Delays are annoying, but they’re also necessary to hit certain standards - high tide marks, if you will - and as much as we like to play, we don’t want anybody to crunch so that we can play now instead of next year.