For the record, I like World of Warships... but it's not the kind of experience I expect from a pirate sandbox game. This was explicitly born as a follow-up to Ubisoft's own slam-dunk success Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, so comparisons to that game are fair.
During its decade-long development, Skull and Bones jettisoned many features Black Flag had.
First, melee combat: here you only fight as your ship and never as your pirate, while in Black Flag there was plenty of combat on land and while boarding enemy ships. Jumping on an enemy vessel you had just hit with cannons to finish off its crew was pretty much the coolest thing ever; Skull and Bones replaces this with a cutscene.
Second, land exploration: here you can only visit established ports, while in Black Flag you could jump off your ship and go explore any island which caught your attention and maybe had an ancient temple hidden in a jaguar-infested jungle.
This is so misguided, it feels like some kind of "Springtime for Hitler" scenario where they deliberately wanted it to fail. It has to be. No human being with the intelligence to go to work and turn on his PC without accidentally killing himself would fail to realize that a pirate sandbox game where you don't swing your sword even once is a comically bad idea.
Literally all they needed to do was take the gameplay of Black Flag, a game THEY HAD ALREADY MADE A DECADE AGO, get rid of the obnoxious Abstergo / Animus stuff (good riddance, it was already a pain and a bore in an otherwise fantastic game), add new maps and a lot of customization for the player character and his ship, maybe co-op multiplayer with friends, and boom, it would have been the perfect sandbox pirate RPG.
So, is this game terrible, considered in a vacuum? No, it's a passable arcade-y pirate ship simulation, therefore I'm not giving it a very low score; Age of Sail purists will probably hate the way the ship "feels" though, it's unrealistic and lacks weight. But the context here is infuriating. They had the foundations of a great game and decided to blow them up and rebuild everything... poorly. The people who greenlit this must have no idea of what players loved about Black Flag.
Here's a thought experiment: let's say Rockstar makes a new Western IP different from Red Dead Redemption where the player is the guide of a wagon trail and has to lead it through the wilderness to its final destination - scouting, fighting, gathering resources, upgrading the wagons, and so on. Sounds good, right? Except, the player now can never get off his horse, only when camping at night to talk to characters: all combat and exploration is on horseback only. I guarantee people would be furious and ask "Why can't I get off my horse like in Red Dead Redemption???"... and they would be right.
Wake up, Ubisoft.
