Skull and Bones delayed until at least April 2019

Ubisoft's open-world pirate game Skull and Bones has been pushed back until at least April next year.

It was initially due to release later this year, but it will now come out in the 2019-2020 financial year, which means we'll see it in April next year at the earliest. Ubisoft said the decision was in part motivated by strong sales of its back catalog and "excellent momentum of recent releases".

"Ubisoft has decided to give itself more time to develop Skull & Bones to offer players an even more engaging experience," the company said in its financial report, in which it also announced that The Division 2 will be out within the next year.

The game's creative director Justin A. Farren spoke in more length about the decision on the Ubisoft forums. "[We] want to make this game right in order to achieve our ambition to deliver the ultimate pirate game set to thrill players at launch and for years to come," he said.

"Our goal remains as clear as ever: build a shared systemic open ocean that captures the essence of the pirate fantasy and is full of activities."

Tim enjoyed his time with a demo version of the game—although he felt it was a tad shallow. It's primarily a multiplayer game, but it will have a single-player campaign.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.