Introduction
Greetings, Captains! As Year 2 Season 1 draws to a close, we're keeping with tradition by taking a moment to reflect on the season's highlights, and to give you a glimpse of what's coming with Year 2 Season 2.
We continue to be incredibly grateful to you, our community for the unwavering support that you demonstrate for the game.
Whether you're sharing feedback across our platforms or submitting a bug report, we truly appreciate all the ways you engage with us and the community. Your input is invaluable and plays a key role in helping us craft a game we can all be proud of. As we head into the next season, we hope you'll continue to share your feedback, in-game moments, and bug reports.
Year 2 Season 1 So Far
We kicked off Skull and Bones' Year 2 back in April with our showcase, giving you a glimpse into our plans for the future of the game, followed by the release of our Year 2, Season 1 update.
Our primary goal with the beginning of Year 2 was to mark a turning point for the game - and re-affirm our commitment to bring new, exciting content and features to the game while refining and improving our core game experience based on your feedback.
The many positive reactions from so many of you to both the showcase, and the new update were both encouraging and motivating for the entire team. While there is still a lot of work ahead of us, we strongly believe our decision to focus on quality first is the right strategy moving forward.
Helm Empire
With the conclusion of Year 1, we made the commitment to move away from the Seasonal Helm reset as a direct answer to your feedback.
To do so, the launch of our Year 2 Season 1 update brought some major and important changes to the Helm Empire.
With these changes, we've successfully re-positioned the feature as an endgame, long-term activity for our most dedicated players to invest in and build a significant source of passive income. Your manufactories are now able to produce not just Pieces of Eight but also a variety of different resources, and help you build and expand your fleet.
Thanks to your feedback, we are now looking at further improvements, such as improving the return on investment in the early stages of building your empire, but also further expanding the feature with more unique functionalities and benefits. Our long-term vision is to position the Helm Empire feature as more than a passive long-term investment, and a true reflection of your power and influence as Kingpin.
Item Ascension
With the launch of Item Ascension, we've brought a whole new range of options for you to optimise your favourite loadout and playstyle on the high seas. The amount of discussion this feature alone generated is a clear confirmation of the excitement and enthusiasm many of you find in theory crafting.
Here as well, the team is actively working on refining and improving this popular feature based on the feedback we've gathered. One key aspect we're looking into is reducing the amount of randomness involved in reforging - and give players more agency to craft their perfect loadout.
More specifically, we're working on implementing an option to lock the effect of a modification, while allowing you to reforge only its values, as well as giving you more venues to obtain weapons blueprints even when they are not on active rotation.
While these improvements are still a work in progress and not quite ready to release with Season 2 just yet, we wanted to acknowledge the problem space and offer some insight into what's coming up in the future. Do let us know your thoughts, or any additional suggestions you'd like us to consider for future improvements to Item Ascension!
World Tiers
Following the introduction of Mythic Vikram in Year 1 Season 4, we've continued to explore more ways to bring new levels of difficulty to the game for our most dedicated players. Our goal with introducing World Tiers is to create dedicated spaces for both new and veteran players, where we can tweak the various rules in our open world, and reward players according to their achievements.
As we move into future seasons, we've identified three key areas of focus that we believe will enhance the overall experience for both World Tier 1 and 2:
Density of World Activities
With the continuous addition of new content to our open world since the launch of the game, things can sometimes feel a little over-crowded. While random encounters bring a certain element of surprise and excitement, overlapping events also bring unfortunate difficulty spikes that can be difficult to manage. As such, we have decided to implement short-term fixes to reduce the frequency of Dynamic World events, while we work on more robust improvements to solve the issue in the long-term.
Balance of World Activities, Ships & Equipment.
Following up on our commitment to take a pro-active approach to balancing our game's content and difficulty, our next focus is set on solving on-going issues that you have been raising to our attention.
More specifically, we are actively looking at the amount of health ("bullet-sponge") or ability to deal sudden and significantly high damage ("one-shot") given to specific AI encounters, with the goal of introducing better ways for players to engage, manage and survive such encounters.
We're also continuously relying on your feedback to identify possible improvements to the many different ships and loadouts and give you all more options to tackle the various content we have in the game.
Fair Reward to Effort Ratio
With World Tier 2, we wanted to make sure tougher challenges came with more appropriate rewards. We started with the base world, including ships sinking, plunders, and world events. Moving forward, we'll keep refining rewards in both World Tiers, expanding to other activities such as quests, contracts, and Helm Takeover Opportunities.
All of these changes had a significant impact on how you engage with the game's content, and our end-game activities more specifically, and we want to provide you with even more enjoyable experiences in the future.
Throughout Season 1, Megafort Oosten remained the most efficient activity to earn Pieces of Eight as well as other sought-after materials and items. With Season 2, we're increasing the Pieces of Eight you can obtain from other activities to improve their risk vs reward ratio and increase the variety of activities you can choose to engage with.
Changes/Improvements to the UI
At the start of Year 2 Season 1, we made several UI changes — updating the look and adding new features. Along with a major visual overhaul of the menus, especially the HUD and map, we also added a new mini-map — an update many in the community had been asking for since launch.
The introduction of Loot Beams in Season 1, re-adjusted in Season 2 based on Community feedback.
Going into Season 2 and beyond, we’re continuing to improve our game’s user interface, and adding visual quality-of-life improvements in the game. We’re excited to introduce the outpost maps in Season 2. When docked at an outpost, opening the map will now display a new, dedicated map for that location — helping you better understand the various walkable paths within each outpost.
Also in Season 2, you can look forward to more polished and streamlined tooltips, making it easier to find the information you need, when you need it.
Our commitment to neater and more consistent UI across seasons reflect our desire to bring our visual standards to a greater level of quality – and of course, the work does not stop here. We’ll be constantly looking to improve the look and feel of game menus and UI season upon season, blending artistry with immersion in the game. We’ll be revisiting some of the older menus and UI to bring them visually closer to our newer, well-polished elements.
Death Tides
Our mid-season update brought the long-requested dedicated PvP mode - Death Tides.
Its development was kickstarted by a smaller dedicated team as a direct response to players requesting for a balanced team-based PvP experience for the game at launch.
We launched Death Tides in BETA as a first step, with our aim to continuing iterating and improving the mode for the long term, working with you our community and the feedback we receive.
More specifically, we are currently looking at improving rewards as well as presets - bringing in new, more competitive presets, and potentially implementing a preset only game mode in the future.
Balancing
Thanks to your feedback and the beta release of Death Tides, existing balancing issues that were already present in the game but arguably less impactful on your overall PvE experience became more apparent. As a result, we made the commitment as a development team to place a stronger focus on re-balancing all aspects of Skull and Bones.
The first step was a significant series of changes made to the various ships and equipment that were progressively added to the game throughout Year 1. While we believe these changes were necessary for the game, we're aware they had a significant impact in the way many of you engaged with our PvE content.
As such, our next steps are very much focused on improving - and not reducing - the effectiveness of underperforming ships and equipment for every encounter in the Indian Ocean. We will continue to carefully review and adjust edge cases, and to ensure all of our content can be tackled using the right approach and strategy, in both World Tiers.
We strongly believe balancing for both PvE and PvP to be an ongoing process, that will require continuous monitoring and adjustments over time. That being said, we want to reassure you, our community, that we have all the tools at our disposal allowing us to approach PvP and PvE balancing separately and fully intend to do so moving forward.
Please continue to share your constructive feedback with us on this topic---it greatly helps us identify the areas we should focus on next.
Year 2 Season 2: Oaths of War Launches July 15
During our Year 2 Showcase, we gave you a high-level overview of our plans for new content coming with in Season 2 - Oaths of War.
Today, we're excited to finally share a little more information about the first (and long-awaited!) large ship coming to Skull and Bones, the Frigate. Large ships in general have been long requested by the community.
Designing the Frigate, we wanted to take into consideration all the feedback and suggestions we've received and ensure it meets your expectations. As such, the Frigate is a powerful and imposing vessel that's sure to leave an impression---although it is not exempt from weaknesses. As with any ship introduced to the game, we have made several tuning passes ahead of launch and will continue to monitor its performance closely after launch. For more details, keep an eye out for our upcoming devblog deep dive!
Throughout Year 2 Season 1, the most observant among you may have noticed the on-going construction of a new Megafort. Expected to be complete with the launch of Season 2, its ownership will have changed... bringing a new challenge to the Indian Ocean for you to tackle.
Without spoiling too much of the experience, we strongly recommend you bring not only your most powerful ship, but also other like-minded captains. Our matchmaking system will ensure you get more than a party of three to work together and seize victory. Keep an eye out for the dedicated devblog covering the Megafort.
Faction War - Coming Mid-Season
With our mid-season update, comes a brand-new major feature: Faction War. Focused on the Compagnie and DMC conflict, you'll soon have to choose a side, and fight for it to reap the rewards.
This key feature introduction in Season 2 is only the first step, as we have plans to expand on it throughout the rest of our Year 2 roadmap, with updates and improvements shaped by your feedback.
We'll share more details on what you can expect as we get closer to the mid-season update!
Contract and Stories
Year 2 Season 2 will see a new series of contracts and stories, all of which are set around the growing conflict between the Compagnie and DMC. This season will see the return of a Community favourite character from Year 1. We’re sure that will be music to your ears.
Quality of Life Improvements
Along with the new key features in Y2S2, long requested QoL updates are coming as well along with the update. Among which are:
Wind & Sailing Improvements - these changes make sailing more responsive and skill-based, giving players more control. If you align your ship well with the wind, you'll go faster than ever. If you drop anchor smartly, you'll turn harder and faster. These improvements are aimed at introducing additional layers of challenge to navigation in general and provide a little reward for experienced captains who can steer their ship masterfully.
To be clear, we intend to keep the current sailing controls and mechanics largely intact while we introduce further gameplay depth to sailing - all of which would provide additional navigation bonuses; there will be no new penalties introduced for sailing against the wind.
Ship Loadout - a long-requested feature that's finally here.
Weapon Vanity – a new feature that lets you personalize your weapons with unique skins.
We'll have more to share on the new content coming with Year 2 Season 2 in the coming weeks on Discord, Reddit, Social Media, and our website.
Community Spotlights
Last but not least, we want to take a moment to highlight some of the members of the Skull and Bones community.
Today, we're shining a spotlight on none other than Heinz --- the creator behind Skull and Bones Tools, a fan-made resource that's helped many players. And if you haven't checked it out yet, make sure to visit the Skull and Bones Tools.
Once again, we want to take this opportunity to thank all of you for your continued support, engagement and passion for our game. Whether you are sharing your stories, providing feedback through the Insider Program, or taking the time leaving suggestions on Discord and Reddit even when things aren't perfect - we truly appreciate it.
It's thanks to you, our community - we're able to keep improving and shaping the future of Skull and Bones. We'll see you all the high seas!