I like to imagine tuning into Ubisoft's quarterly earnings call one day and seeing CEO Yves Guillemot appear and say, in his French accent, "I am not a fan of the French language! Let all the coffins and all the hearses be sunk in one common pond! And since neither of them can be mine, I will tear you, the accursed whale, to pieces while I am bound to you and while I am chasing you!"

I don't see that happening yet, but I think I'm way over the Ahab threshold mentally. I'll say it again. [because the actual release date was set for September 2022, and Ubisoft pushed the launch from November 8, 2022 to March 9 of this year. Obviously, that did not happen.

Since then, it has been postponed to an "earlier" date in Ubisoft's 2023-24 fiscal year, then not so earlier, and now later. Incidentally, the Q4 timeframe in which "Skull and Bones" is currently located would be between January 1 and March 31, 2024.

What makes this parade of delays truly puzzling is that "Skull and Bones" seems to be so close to launch time and again: after nearly a decade of almost nothing, 2022 really seemed like the year it was going to happen. There was beta testing, there were ESRB ratings, there were system requirements and PC-specific feature sets, there was full-blown gameplay released (which frankly wasn't very good) - and then, like MV Glory trying to parallel park in the Suez Canal, it ran aground hard. This was the fourth postponement since September 2022, and four postponements in one year is not a good sign.

Why Ubisoft is so relentless in pursuing a project that looks completely unremarkable remains a mystery to me. Perhaps they see something in this multiplayer shipboard combat game that I cannot see from the outside, or perhaps they are simply following the words of Herman Melville: "There is nothing in the stupidity of the beasts of the earth that is not infinitely outdone by the madness of man"

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Let's see what happens in 2024.