If there was any PC graphics option I could choose to tweak in real life, it would be “Clutter”. My flat forever has it set to Very High, but Skull And Bones will let PC players cycle it down to Low with only a few clicks. It’s one of many options highlighted in the “PC features” trailer, which also highlights 4K HDR, ultrawide monitor support, ray tracing and other graphical wizardry available in Ubisoft’s pirate ’em up.
Here’s the video:
I’m not able to run games in 4K and I’ve yet to be impressed by ray tracing, but I suppose they’re rather like the canary in the coal mine. If a blockbuster PC game doesn’t have them, perhaps that’s an indication of broader problems. There are also other features here I am grateful for, including an uncapped framerate and the customisation options to tweak whatever graphics settings you want.
Skull And Bones has had a long trip to get to this point. It was initially announced five years ago, and has been Ship of Theseused several times since. It resurfaced earlier this year as what Alice B described as “a Sea Of Thieves-like without the jokes”:
Sea Of Thieves goes “you’re a pirate, please go off and do pirating”, and that, within a bit of scaffolding, is kind of it. In Skull And Bones, you have to collect crafting materials to build stuff, targets have flashing weak points, you have to stay inside areas demarcated for fights as if Poseidon spray-painted an orange line on his water. It’s a lot, and it will form, I suspect, a bulwark to the kind of instant joy on the open water that Sea Of Thieves facilitates.
Alice B didn’t know about the Clutter slider, though, so she may feel different when Skull And Bones launches in full on November 8th.