Skull and bones burned in Digital Foundry analysis

After many delays, the pirated game Skull and Bones, which Ubisoft calls “AAAA”, has finally released. It received low reviews (our score was 5/10), but what are its specifications? Digital Foundry editors, particularly Alex Battaglia, have traditionally paid attention to this. And he, of course, was not delighted.

But let’s start with the positives. Battaglia praised the PC version, which has detailed settings and no stuttering. Frame rates across all consoles are very stable in both modes. Quality (30 FPS) has absolutely no dips; Performance (60 FPS) may have some dips, but very rarely. In terms of visuals, the sky and water simulations are very good according to DF (although water reflections are gone since they rely solely on SSR).

But basically, that’s where the advantages end. One of the biggest issues is the image quality on consoles, where there is perhaps one of the biggest differences between modes we’ve ever seen. While quality on PS5/XSX offers a native 4K resolution, Performance mode internally renders the game at 720p and then upscales it to 1440p using FSR 2. However, upping the resolution causes significant ghosting, aliasing, and other artifacts, so the picture doesn’t show up at all. doesn’t look stable. Battaglia does not recommend using quality mode due to the unresponsiveness of the controls, which is very important for games of this type.

For the Xbox Series S, you have the choice of either Quality at native 1080p at 30fps or Performance at 60fps, where the image is rendered at 540p and then upscaled to 1080p using FSR 2.

Also an issue with the low resolution is that particles and effects are rendered at quarter resolution, making them look very pixelated. Battaglia further criticizes the not-so-great lighting based on older technology, and while the title also features ray tracing, he says it’s one of the worst implementations, making almost no changes over the base setup.

Another point of criticism was the facial animation, which doesn’t look very good in Skull and Bones, and according to Battaglia, even the 10-year-old Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is better. And textures are also a big problem. While some objects are fine, others (even quite important ones) have very low resolution textures that never fully render even on a powerful PC. In addition, the LOD is also bad, and objects or shadows only jump when you are very close to them.

Overall, Skull and Bones has a lot of problems. The PC version is still good, but neither mode offers the perfect console experience. To this should be added all of the above disadvantages that are found on all platforms, as well as a number of errors. On the technical side, don’t expect “AAA quality” from the game.