Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones, a spin-off of the whole naval combat section of Assassins’ Creed Black Flag, was initially announced way back in 2017. After nine whole delays and almost a decade, it finally has a release date: February 16th, 2024. And now Ubisoft has shared the official PC requirements for it.
The main PC features mentioned include ray tracing support, with Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR support for temporal upscaling. There’s no mention of frame generation (DLSS 3.0 / FSR 3) yet. It also supports HDR, widescreen and comes with an in-game benchmarking tool, which is always a nice plus point. (The recent Ubisoft release Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora notably having a very extensive and detailed in-game benchmarking tool)
Storage across the board requires an SSD with at least 65 GB of space, which is pretty much the norm these days especially with the console counterparts featuring the same. Notably, the 4K preset mentions DLSS as turned on with the “Balanced” preset, so expect the requirements to be slightly higher if you’re aiming for native 4K.
Looking at the requirements across the board, with the 1080p 30 FPS low preset able to run with modest hardware, it’s no doubt this is not a demanding game by far, compared to some other recent releases. This makes sense as this game was originally in development for the entire last generation of consoles with an original 2018 release date slated, which was before ray tracing was even a phenomenon. (And seeing ray tracing support here is nice)
Currently, Ubisoft is accepting registrations for the closed beta which is scheduled to run between 15 Dec 2023 (3AM CET) to 18 Dec 2023 (9AM CET). Play time will be limited to 6 hours, including any idle time. You’re also allowed to invite up to 2 friends to participate if selected. Go ahead and check out the page, and register if you’re interested in giving it a try before release.
Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones describes itself as a piracy and naval combat simulator with elements of PvP similar to Sea of Thieves. Pre-orders are now open.
