SEASON 4 HIGHLIGHTS

As we head into the final weeks of Season 4, we want to once again take a moment to share our thoughts on how everything went, what we've learned from it, and things we're working on.

The first, constant and most obvious element to us all is the unwavering passion that each of you in our community have continued to demonstrate throughout the entire first year of Skull and Bones. The ongoing flow of community engagement and feedback we've received since launch has become an essential part of our production cycle, and we can't thank you enough for that.

With the launch of "Shadows of the Deep", we've brought conclusion to our Year 1 narrative: the arrival of Vikram Rajan, the reveal of Freeman's Treasure true nature, and the cursed sea monsters brought back from the dead through the power of the artefact.

Season 4 was also the opportunity for us to experiment and bring new levels of difficulty to the game. Through the introduction of our new matchmaking feature, "Call to Arms", you are now able to prove yourself as a deadly pirate captain against both Vikram and Megafort Oosten in their most challenging forms.

We're very proud of the content we delivered throughout the year and in Season 4, for which we have dedicated an entire event of celebrations, "The Founding". But before we dive into this, we also want to acknowledge that some things didn't unfold as we had envisioned.

With the launch of Skull and Bones back in February 2024, we've made the commitment to be fully transparent with you, our community, on the key topics you raise to our attention as regularly as possible. We do so on a weekly basis through our Maintenance posts, Patch Notes, Devstreams and Letters from the Producer such as this one. Today we wanted to give you full context on what happened, but also share that we are extremely confident the work accomplished has not only helped us address the most critical issues, but also prepared a more stable environment for us to deliver all the great content we have planned for future updates, at the level of quality you expect from us and we thrive to achieve.

Throughout Season 4, you brought to our attention a significant number of on-going issues, many of which were so complex and specific they only manifested once our content updates were released onto our live public servers - and even then, still refused to manifest consistently. Thanks to you, we were alerted to the situation early on after the launch of Season 4 and immediately assembled a dedicated team focused on identifying, prioritizing, investigating and fixing as many of these issues as possible, as quickly as possible.

To share today the results of our work: 16 patches delivered over 13 weeks since the release of Season 4, fixing a total of 562 issues on both client and server side of our game's systems. This is an intentional, increased commitment to refining the quality of the game, from 7 additional patches in Season 1, 10 additional patches in Season 2, and 10 additional patches in Season 3.

To highlight just a few as examples - some of you might remember being unable to fire weapons after launching a crew attack or being unable to accept Helm Contracts. These were the kind of issues that appeared simple on the surface, but were the symptoms of a more complex, underlying and growing problem we were facing.

The silver lining here is that we now know many of these issues were the result of the volume of new content, features and game mechanics we have been adding to the game with every season, since launch. The various world events, new game mechanics and visual effects, all spawning or getting triggered at different times, in different locations across the map, added to the ability for players to fast travel to and engage with at different times - all of these combined put significant pressure on our network infrastructure, resulting in many of the various bugs and blockers some of you raised to our attention.

As we continue to add the many features and content that you are excited to see in Year 2, we wanted to ensure that stability and quality remains at the forefront of what we do.

Our work has already shown significant progress based on internal benchmarks, and we are committed to continue improving our core systems which will have a positive impact not just on Year 2 Season 1, but all future updates as well.

We have very ambitious plans for the year ahead and beyond, and the entire Skull and Bones team is more dedicated than ever to build the ultimate pirate fantasy together with you, our community.

LOOKING THROUGH THE SPYGLASS...

Speaking of our plans for Year 2, the full reveal on how large and exciting those plans really are, will be coming a bit later - but we do have a couple of things we'd like to share with you, as they are being worked on and will be implemented soon as a direct response to your feedback.

The first one goes back to a promise we've made through our Letter from the Producer at the end of Season 2. To put it simply, you shared a very strong desire for darker and grittier cosmetics and content, and while we've already made significant changes throughout Season 3 and 4, we're confident you'll like what we have planned.

Some examples of new cosmetic options coming in Year 2.

Related to cosmetics, but more specifically to the look of your ship, we also know many of you have eagerly been waiting for an option to hide (or change?) the look of your armor.

Soon, you'll be able to hide any armor visuals on your ship, allowing you to fully realize your very own visual theme without losing out on gameplay perks.

Hide the look of your armor to better showcase your ship's cosmetic theme and colors.

Other quality of life changes we're working on implementing include cleaning up and improving inventory management tools. While we're working on adding more options to help you sort out your items in the future, we will first be helping you declutter your cargo and warehouse by moving Treasure Maps or non-main contract Items from your inventory to the Journal, where you can keep track of all your objectives in one location. You'll also be given the option to move non-main contract items to the warehouse.

Another major change we're planning is our approach to our seasonal formula. We can't wait to share more details about this, but to give you an idea, our future seasons will expand beyond the addition of new world events, ships, equipment and narratives. Our aim is to bring more variety to the game with each season, with the goal of offering our players new ways to engage with and experience their own pirate fantasy.

What this means is that we believe the true endgame isn't just about building and managing our Helm Empire - a key learning we've made by observing the different activities all our players like to partake in. In Year 2, we will give you more options to progress through one or multiple end-game activities of your choice, based on the Pirate life you want to experience. While this might sound a bit vague for now, rest assured more details on our plans will be revealed very soon!

This also means our Helm Empire feature will be receiving a major overhaul with the launch of Year 2. Our primary goals are to move away from the seasonal reset of manufactories each season, improve the tools you have at your disposal to manage your empire (e.g. fund all manufactories within a region), expand the production capabilities of your manufactories, and give players long-term objectives to work towards with every season.

These changes are aimed to re-position our Helm Empire feature as just one out of the many possibilities for you to accumulate wealth and resources, build the strongest fleet you can assemble, and claim your spot as the most infamous Pirate Kingpin in the Indian Ocean.

To achieve all of this, we will be proceeding with a seasonal reset when transitioning into Year 2, Season 1. We know how much you value being informed in advance, so you can prepare accordingly. As such you may find our current plans for this reset below:

We believe this Seasonal Reset to be particularly important as the overhaul of our Helm Empire feature also comes with a significant re-balance of our end-game economy. This re-balance will impact the value of Pieces of Eight the most, increasing its rarity and value as the sought-after end-game currency.

It goes without saying your feedback on this specific topic matters greatly - and plans can change accordingly. Do let us know your thoughts!

All of this is just a tiny fraction of everything we have yet to reveal for the future of Skull and Bones - and this reveal will come soon! In the meantime, you may have noticed some changes in St. Anne...

ONE YEAR ALREADY?

You heard it right, captain! It's been one year, and for that, a celebration is very well on the menu.

Welcome to The Founding. Our dear kingpin, John Scurlock, of Sainte-Anne has put together an event to celebrate the founding of this infamous Pirate Den.

Starting February 18th, take part in The Founding - a series of celebration events where you'll have the chance to earn heaps of silver, an irresistible new pet, a new firework, cosmetics and tons of equipment for your ship. If you have missed out on any of it throughout the year, now's your chance to fill your arsenal!

One last important thing to mention before we let you go - this anniversary event is also are rare opportunity for you to convert your soon-to-be-retired sovereigns into John Scurlock's own celebration currency, the Silver Lions. This currency will allow you to purchase everything related to the anniversary event, and stock up before Year 2 Season launches. You'll find the celebration vendor located by the Scurlock statue in Sainte-Anne, don't miss it!

For more information about the event, check out our dedicated article Year 1 Anniversary devblog.

Once again, we want to take this opportunity to thank all our players for their support, engagement and passion for our game. And we'll see you all the high seas!