Skull And Bones review: an exceptionally boring live service shipping sim

Sunk cost

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft

• Developer: Ubisoft Singapore
• Publisher: Ubisoft
• Release: Out now
• On: Windows
• From: Ubisoft Connect , Epic Games Store
• Price: £50/€60/$60
• Reviewed on: Intel Core i7-12700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3080, Windows 11

Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot recently said Skull And Bones is a “quadruple-A game”, which I think is very accurate, actually. “AAAA” is the sound that escapes my lips as I embark on yet another hour-long sail to retrieve some logs, or when I’m doing my little deliveries and a brigantine starts on me. After 11 years in development, Ubisoft’s pirate game isn’t necessarily a disaster, I just think its live service model has transformed piracy from a roguish lark on the waves into a tremendously dull series of shipping tasks.

Skull And Bones gets off to a good start. Your ship is attacked from all sides, in what’s a rip-roaring final stand that sees you wash up in a starting area filled with promise . A small area where levels don’t matter and an introduction to a universe and a crew that seem, at first, to hum with rum and roguishness. Unfortunately, the live service scaffolds go up once you’ve left this opening area.

You’re plopped into starter’s hub area a bit like Destiny 2 ’s Tower, but more wooden in every sense. Various vendors dot the place, all of them with fetch quests to accept and nothing interesting to say. In the big hut is where you’ll meet Captain Scurlock, a primary quest giver who’ll steer you through a main storyline that’s marginally less tedious than the rest.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft

To become a pirate overlord is to level up two things: your Infamy rank and your ship rank, both of which feed into each other. Most things you undertake - completing quests, destroying other ships, discovering new locations - nets you Infamy, with higher Infamy ranks letting you unlock stronger blueprints to craft better ships, cannons and the like. Your ship rank, meanwhile, is determined by the collective power of the ship itself and the weapons you’ve slapped on it.

As you’d expect from an open world Ubisoft game, the map is a vast noticeboard with lots of icons pointing to various resources: raw materials such as trees and cobalt you’ll harvest by parallel parking, then performing a little minigame. Islands big and small are home to forgettable factions, some with encampments you can barter with or plunder, the latter granting you extra goodies if you awkwardly float within a red zone and sink progressively tougher ships. And as you venture into the far reaches of the ocean, everything largely remains the same except that everyone’s levels are higher and the resources rarer.

Skull And Bones centres around stuff and things , where piracy is entirely motivated by a need to get the blue rarity cannon that’s marginally better than your green rarity one. You’ll idle along trade routes, scanning ships with your spyglass in the hopes that a pop-up says it holds the bits you’re after, lest you spend one more iota of your precious time bobbing on the ocean.

And that is, perhaps, the game’s most damning offence: your heart sinks every time you come into contact with water. Sailing in Skull And Bones doesn’t even attempt to capture or educate us on some of the thrills and challenges that I’m sure come with real life sailing. Instead, it’s a case of moving forwards and occasionally tweaking the angle of your ship so the wind better catches your sails, and doesn’t hammer the front of your ship, slowing you down. It’s still very Assassin’s Creed IV , in other words, and all the while, you’ll have the ‘pleasure’ of replenishing an ever-depleting stamina bar by popping open a radial menu and quick-selecting the likes of grilled coconuts (possibly the most direct interaction you’ll ever have with your crew).

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft

Head out into the ‘open sea’ and you’ll get flashes of what could’ve been: an ocean rife with ever bigger waves and tremendous gusts of wind; groups of ships spitting cannonballs at one another; or rogue traders in a “Don’t even try it” formation. These brief blips go a long way to break you out of your slumber, but they are sadly few and far between. Most of the time, the sea feels like a viscous slurry corrupted by a cruel live service model that has you forever crave the immediacy of fast travel. I’m not kidding when I say countless episodes of MTV’s Catfish and a series of Japanese language learning videos got me through each expedition.

Is there any joy on any of the surrounding rocks? Not a great deal. Islands owe all of their excitement to being fast travel points, otherwise acting as mini-hubs home to listless traders who’ll offer you more fetch quests, materials, and blueprints. Run about and you might bump into some buried treasure, which will net you some rarer stuff and things .

To make use of all the cargo you’re hauling around is to engage with the game’s live service pathway, and it’s one that left me feeling lost at sea. Often, service games like Destiny will have a main storyline that’ll guide you towards each of its offshoot reward tracks, granting you meaningful rewards, and handing you off to late game challenges. By the end of Destiny’s campaign ( at least, as I remember it ), you’ve got a suite of moreish activities that’ll make you want to log in everyday and get yourself closer to the peak: Raids, PVP, and the like. Most importantly, the main quest line will have left you at a point where you’re powerful enough to get stuck in and chase those level caps.

You can only track one blueprint at a time, with some blueprints only trackable if you go back to the vendor and explicitly press the track button while in their vendor menus. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft

Complete Scurlock’s questline and there’s a high chance you’ll leave it both underwhelmed and underleveled. By the time I completed it, I was at least three levels below the next region’s questline (a Scurlock equivalent) and couldn’t so much as scratch enemy ships who patrolled those waters. Sure, it’s the game saying, “Time to complete some contracts, level up, and improve your ship!” But it’s an agonising process when the contracts and their rewards leave you short-changed.

The main way to power up, outside of the endgame at least, is to visit the blacksmith or the shipwright. It’s here where you’re able to craft new weapons and new ships, so long as you’ve got the materials and, crucially, the pissing blueprints. To obtain these blueprints, the game forces you to buy them from vendors scattered all over the seas, as well as up your Infamy rank to unlock better versions.

Now, bounties, quests, whatever it is you’ve done, often reward you with Infamy that’ll barely raise the bar, zero materials, and about as much silver (money you use to buy things including blueprints) as you’d get if you melted down a Tesco trolley. Not only does the act of endless sailing compound the agony, but the ‘better’ stuff rarely ever results in a jump in your overall ship level (or, indeed a yelp of excitement). The best live service efforts at least reward you frequently, giving you guns with unique names, their borders radiating with power. New boots with sockets for gems. A mount to speed up traversal. But Skull And Bones rarely ever puts its hands in its coffers and gifts you treasure befitting a pirate fantasy. Rather, it expects you to put in the grind and craft everything . It’s a deeply ungenerous game.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft

Still, there’s some joy - joy teetering on relief - to be had when you finally, finally obtain something better. It’s at the Docks where you can customise your ship, with bigger ships able to accommodate more weapons and furniture. That’s right, your ship’s build is determined by pieces of furniture like rope lockers and rigging stations. My ship is affectionately named “Citroen C1”, and is a DPS type boat, with a shotgun-like cannon on one side, a fire bombardment on the front, and some sniper rifles on the other side. Your crew? They may as well not exist. You are a boat in Skull And Bones and as far as the game’s concerned, and that’s that.

And there’s some happiness to be found in combat, which is simplistic, approachable fun for folks who enjoy sidling up alongside other boats and slamming metal into their sides. Watching wood splinter as big red numbers spring off a big red zone you’ve hit, is admittedly, a brain receptor tickler - much as it was, and is, in Assassin’s Creed. Really, though, levels are all that matter, not positioning. The only real strategy lies in hitting button prompts that let you fire muskets to secure extra damage, or ‘board’ ships - though here you don’t even get the thrill of doing the actual boarding as you would in Ubisoft’s time-hopping murder’thon. You are a boat, after all, not an Assassin captain, and all you get is a mere cutscene instead, the end result being some more netted bonus materials.

Performance was fine and the game does look quite nice. I’d say I encountered some annoying bugs, though. The game has a habit of not closing properly, and one time I couldn’t open menus or interact with anyone or anything. There’s a fun one where your ship disappears from your map, alongside enemy ship health bars and levels, too. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft

But the combat simply isn’t deep or engaging enough to keep you coming back for more, especially when Skull And Bones begins to lean into its end-game, which centres around more deliveries. To get ‘Pieces Of Eight’, a new currency that lets you purchase some of the best gear, the game wants you to get sugar cane, refine it into rum (later, berries into opium) and deliver it to people. The challenge stems from fast travel being disabled and AI-controlled boats chasing you down.

Truthfully, I couldn’t bring myself to reach the farthest corners of the end-game, where seemingly, there is a sea monster and tougher ships to battle. Life is too short and my mental wellbeing too important to put myself through an experience that genuinely drained every drop of life out of me. I may have managed the slog with pals, but to me, multiplayer seemed largely non-existent anyway. I rarely ever saw anyone else, and if I did, we’d bob together while plundering zones then drift away the moment they ended. Sometimes the game would prompt people to get together to tackle a big baddie or engage in some optional PVP, but no-one ever showed up.

I think Skull And Bones might be one of the most boring games I’ve ever played. There might be value in it for those looking for a leisurely sail, or folks who enjoy the time management side of making deliveries optimally. For everyone else, boat-lovers, live service fiends, and people who like fun, the game will be nothing more than a tedious slog through unrewarding waters.

This review is based on a retail build of the game, provided by publishers Ubisoft.

Find out how we conduct our reviews by reading our review policy .

Skull and Bones

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

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All 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints and where to get them

These areas have the highest chance of giving you Blueprints

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Looking for more Arc Raiders Blueprints? It’s a special day when you find a Blueprint, as they’re among the most valuable items in Arc Raiders. If you find a Blueprint that you haven’t already found, then you must make sure you hold onto it at all costs, because Blueprints are the key to one of the most important and powerful systems of meta-progression in the game.

This guide aims to be the very best guide on Blueprints you can find, starting with a primer on what exactly they are and how they work in Arc Raiders, before delving into exactly where to get Blueprints and the very best farming spots for you to take in your search.

We’ll also go over how to get Blueprints from other unlikely activities, such as destroying Surveyors and completing specific quests. And you’ll also find the full list of all 75 Blueprints in Arc Raiders on this page (including the newest Blueprints added with the Cold Snap update , such as the Deadline Blueprint and Firework Box Blueprint), giving you all the information you need to expand your own crafting repertoire.

In this guide:

• What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?
• Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes
• Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders Blueprints obtained from quests Blueprints obtained from Trials Best Blueprint farming locations

What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?

Blueprints in Arc Raiders are special items which, if you manage to extract with them, you can expend to permanently unlock a new crafting recipe in your Workshop. If you manage to extract from a raid with an Anvil Blueprint, for example, you can unlock the ability to craft your very own Anvil Pistol, as many times as you like (as long as you have the crafting materials).

To use a Blueprint, simply open your Inventory while in the lobby, then right-click on the Blueprint and click “Learn And Consume” . This will permanently unlock the recipe for that item in your Workshop. As of the Stella Montis update, there are allegedly 75 different Blueprints to unlock - although only 68 are confirmed to be in the game so far. You can see all the Blueprints you’ve found and unlocked by going to the Workshop menu, and hitting “R” to bring up the Blueprint screen.

It’s possible to find duplicates of past Blueprints you’ve already unlocked. If you find these, then you can either sell them, or - if you like to play with friends - you can take it into a match and gift it to your friend so they can unlock that recipe for themselves. Another option is to keep hold of them until the time comes to donate them to the Expedition.

Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes

Below is the full list of all the Blueprints that are currently available to find in Arc Raiders, and the crafting recipe required for each item:

Note: The missing Blueprints in this list likely have not actually been added to the game at the time of writing, because none of the playerbase has managed to find any of them. As they are added to the game, I will update this page with the most relevant information so you know exactly how to get all 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints.

Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders

Below is a list of all containers, modifiers, and events which maximise your chances of finding Blueprints:

• Certain quests reward you with specific Blueprints .
• Completing Trials has a high chance of offering Blueprints as rewards.
• Surveyors have a decent chance of dropping Blueprints on death.
• High loot value areas tend to have a greater chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Night Raids and Storms may increase rare Blueprint spawn chances in containers.
• Containers with higher numbers of items may have a higher tendency to spawn Blueprints. As a result, Blue Gate (which has many “large” containers containing multiple items) may give you a higher chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Raider containers (Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, Medical Bags, Grenade Tubes) have increased Blueprint drop rates. As a result, the Uncovered Caches event gives you a high chance of finding Blueprints.
• Security Lockers have a higher than average chance of containing Blueprints.
• Certain Blueprints only seem to spawn under specific circumstances: Tempest Blueprint only spawns during Night Raid events. Vulcano Blueprint only spawns during Hidden Bunker events. Jupiter and Equaliser Blueprints only spawn during Harvester events.

Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, and other raider-oriented container types have a good chance of offering Blueprints. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints have a very low chance of spawning in any container in Arc Raiders, around 1-2% on average. However, there is a higher chance of finding Blueprints in particular container types. Specifically, you can find more Blueprints in Raider containers and security lockers.

Beyond this, if you’re looking for Blueprints you should focus on regions of the map which are marked as having particularly high-value loot. Areas such as the Control Tower in Dam Battlegrounds, the Arrival and Departure Buildings in Spaceport, and Pilgrim’s Peak in Blue Gate all have a better-than-average chance of spawning Blueprints somewhere amongst all their containers. Night Raids and Electromagnetic Storm events also increase the drop chances of certain Blueprints .

In addition to these containers, you can often loot Blueprints from destroyed Surveyors - the largest of the rolling ball ARC. Surveyors are more commonly found on the later maps - Spaceport and Blue Gate - and if one spawns in your match, you’ll likely see it by the blue laser beam that it casts into the sky while “surveying”.

Surveyors are quite well-armoured and will very speedily run away from you once it notices you, but if you can take one down then make sure you loot all its parts for a chance of obtaining certain unusual Blueprints.

Blueprints obtained from quests

One way in which you can get Blueprints is by completing certain quests for the vendors in Speranza. Some quests will reward you with a specific item Blueprint upon completion, so as long as you work through all the quests in Arc Raiders, you are guaranteed those Blueprints.

Here is the full list of all Blueprints you can get from quest rewards:

• Trigger Nade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Sparks Fly”.
• Lure Grenade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Greasing Her Palms”.
• Burletta Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Industrial Espionage”.
• Hullcracker Blueprint (and Launcher Ammo Blueprint): Rewarded after completing “The Major’s Footlocker”.

Alas, that’s only 4 Blueprints out of a total of 75 to unlock, so for the vast majority you will need to find them yourself during a raid. If you’re intent on farming Blueprints, then it’s best to equip yourself with cheap gear in case you lose it, but don’t use a free loadout because then you won’t get a safe pocket to stash any new Blueprint you find. No pain in Arc Raiders is sharper than failing to extract with a new Blueprint you’ve been after for a dozen hours already.

One of the best ways to get Blueprints is by hitting three stars on all five Trials every week. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints obtained from Trials

One of the very best ways to get Blueprints is as rewards for completing Trials in Arc Raiders. Trials are unlocked from Level 15 onwards, and allow you to earn rewards by focusing on certain tasks over the course of several raids. For example, one Trial might task you with dealing damage to Hornets, while another might challenge you to loot Supply Drops.

Trials refresh on a weekly basis, with a new week bringing five new Trials. Each Trial can offer up to three rewards after passing certain score milestones, and it’s possible to receive very high level loot from these reward crates - including Blueprints. So if you want to unlock as many Blueprints as possible, you should make a point of completing as many Trials as possible each week.

Best Blueprint farming locations

The very best way to get Blueprints is to frequent specific areas of the maps which combine high-tier loot pools with the right types of containers to search. Here are my recommendations for where to find Blueprints on every map, so you can always keep the search going for new crafting recipes to unlock.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Dam Battlegrounds

The best places to farm Blueprints on Dam Battlegrounds are the Control Tower, Power Generation Complex, Ruby Residence, and Pale Apartments . The first two regions, despite only being marked on the map as mid-tier loot, contain a phenomenal number of containers to loot. The Control Tower can also contain a couple of high-tier Security Lockers - though of course, you’ll need to have unlocked the Security Breach skill at the end of the Survival tree.

There’s also a lot of reporting amongst the playerbase that the Residential areas in the top-left of the map - Pale Apartments and Ruby Residence - give you a comparatively strong chance of finding Blueprints. Considering their size, there’s a high density of containers to loot in both locations, and they also have the benefit of being fairly out of the way. So you’re more likely to have all the containers to yourself.

Buried City

The best Blueprint farming locations on Buried City are the Santa Maria Houses, Grandioso Apartments, Town Hall, and the various buildings of the New District . Grandioso Apartments has a lower number of containers than the rest, but a high chance of spawning weapon cases - which have good Blueprint drop rates. The others are high-tier loot areas, with plenty of lootable containers - including Security Lockers.

Spaceport

The best places to find Blueprints on Spaceport are the Arrival and Departure Buildings, as well as Control Tower A6 and the Launch Towers . All these areas are labelled as high-value loot regions, and many of them are also very handily connected to one another by the Spaceport wall, which you can use to quickly run from one area to the next. At the tops of most of these buildings you’ll find at least one Security Locker, so this is an excellent farming route for players looking to find Blueprints.

The downside to looting Blueprints on Spaceport is that all these areas are hotly contested, particularly in Duos and Squads. You’ll need to be very focused and fast in order to complete the full farming route.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blue Gate

Blue Gate tends to have a good chance of dropping Blueprints, potentially because it generally has a high number of containers which can hold lots of items; so there’s a higher chance of a Blueprint spawning in each container. In my experience, the best Blueprint farming spots on Blue Gate are Pilgrim’s Peak, Raider’s Refuge, the Ancient Fort, and the Underground Complex beneath the Warehouse .

All of these areas contain a wealth of containers to loot. Raider’s Refuge has less to loot, but the majority of the containers in and around the Refuge are raider containers, which have a high chance of containing Blueprints - particularly during major events.

Stella Montis

On the whole, Stella Montis seems to have a very low drop rate for Blueprints (though a high chance of dropping other high-tier loot). If you do want to try farming Blueprints on this map, the best places to find Blueprints in Stella Montis are Medical Research, Assembly Workshop, and the Business Center . These areas have the highest density of containers to loot on the map.

In addition to this, the Western Tunnel has a few different Security Lockers to loot, so while there’s very little to loot elsewhere in this area of the map, it’s worth hitting those Security Lockers if you spawn there at the start of a match.

That wraps up this primer on how to get all the Blueprints in Arc Raiders as quickly as possible. With the Expedition system constantly resetting a large number of players’ Blueprints, it’s more important than ever to have the most up-to-date information on where to find all these Blueprints.

While you’re here, be sure to check out our Arc Raiders best guns tier list , as well as our primers on the best skills to unlock and all the different Field Depot locations on every map.

ARC Raiders

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

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