Skull and Bones, the Ubisoft-developed live service venture that takes players across the high seas as pirates, is soon getting a fully revamped control experience on PC. Revealed today, the keyboard-and-mouse control update will land alongside the previously announced Steam launch on August 22, which is also the day the title will receive its third seasonal content drop.
"With the upcoming release of Skull and Bones on Steam, we wanted to revisit the keyboard-and-mouse user controls, as many aspects of it were initially based on the controller," says the development team regarding the newest initiative. "Our goal here was to make the game feel more "PC" when using keyboard and mouse."
The changes will enable more optimized controls that allow for double-clicking as an action, dragging and scrolling motions for the mouse on the map, and better key assignments for the keyboard. Map navigation, shortcut bar, inventory management, and key binds have been the main focus of the Ubisoft development team for improvement.
Here's the full changes list:
- Selection States and Behaviors
- Hovering over an item will no longer select it by default. Mouse-and-keyboard players can now left-click to select the item and scroll tooltip details (without performing a mouse navigation from item grid to tooltip)
- Removed the concept of switching between inventories in the warehouse. Now, hovering over the item will contextually switch to the active inventory
- Interacting with items, such as bringing up the actions menu, can now be done by right-clicking
- Double-clicking on a hovered item will perform the first action in the actions menu (such as consume, discard, or transfer an item)
- Improved overall visuals for clarity
- Improved visual clarity for when an element is clickable or not
- Improved scroll bar visuals
- Reduced opacity of the button prompt in the objective tracker in cases where it cannot be triggered
- Ease of Use in Menus
- Ship loadouts (including Weapons, Armor, Furniture, and Cosmetics) now use horizontal tabs instead of vertical tabs, allowing mouse-and-keyboard players to switch between tabs by simply hovering over the category icon
- When an action menu is shown, clicking anywhere outside of the action menu will close it
- Key Binds
- Decoupled settlement interaction and disembarking button-remapping options - each of them can now be separately bound
- Supported [Hold] options for most [Press] keys that can be rebound
- Added a shortcut to directly access Journal [J] by default
- Rebound toaster notification keys for [F1] and [F2] by default
- Rebound cancellation of rebinding keys to [Hold][Esc] by default
- Map Navigation
- Zooming in/out on the map will now be based on the mouse cursor location, not the middle of the screen
- Zooming in/out of the map with the mouse wheel is now possible when the Journal is open
- Dragging the map with a mouse now retains the mouse cursor and follows a 1:1 ratio, allowing the screen distance moved by the map to correspond to the equal amount of screen distance moved by the mouse
- While dragging the map with a mouse, the mouse movement is clamped to the edge of the map
- Mouse and Keyboard Exclusive UI
- A new horizontal "action bar" is shown instead of the "action wheel" in the HUD when in mouse-and-keyboard control scheme
- Switch quickly between three different action bars with the mouse wheel, with a total of 12 quick action slots. Note: players using a controller can also switch the different action wheels by pressing and holding DPAD UP/DOWN buttons
Ubisoft says more changes are being made that will improve the PC player experience in the future, too. "Once these changes go live, we'll be actively monitoring feedback while continuing to work closely with our community to see what other refinements PC players would like to see in the game," adds the studio. Moreover, it touted the Skull and Bones Insider Program as one of the ways players can offer their feedback straight to the developer and even test out upcoming features.
Skull and Bones is currently available on PC (Epic Games Store and Ubisoft Store), Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and Amazon Luna. The Steam page is already up for wishlisting ahead of the August 22 release. A 6-hour free trial will also be available for those interested in trying out the experience for free.
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