I found this summary on Reddit, and this all screams corners cut/budget mismanagement.
” 1) You can’t physically leave your ship. You can go to land but its a teleport action. You cannot just jump off your ship and swim to shore. Equally, when your ship is docked 2 foot from the shoreline, you have to take a darned boat or go to the embarkmant point. It snaps the immersion
2) You cannot board ships. There is a boarding element to the game but you simply sail up next to the target, press triangle, and you get a cut scene simulating the boarding.
3) Equally, there are loads of wrecks, but you don’t explore any of them. You just sail next to them and do a bizarre QTE / Minigame and get your rewards
4) The same weird QTE / Minigame is used for resources, you see trees on an island, and rather than leaving the ship you do a wood sawing QTE and on you go.
5) The on land experience generally is really really bad. You go to a location, you disembark, you wander round a really big area with very little going on. Talk to a merchant, maybe talk to a captain, light a bonfire, and you leave.
6) Pretty bad facial models and poor voice acting
7) Tedious missions, it really is just fetch / return or sink / fetch / return”
So yea, if we don’t even call GTA or Red Dead Redemption “AAAA” with the obsession to detail in them, how the hell did Skull & Bones get called a “AAAA”? Just tons of lazy corners cut and a desperate attempt to recover a sunk budget from what I’ve seen.
