Skull and Bones’ PC performance is mostly smooth sailing, but do stow it on an SSD

Because it’s somehow my job to worry about the technical fidelity of electronic toys, I’ve been eyeing the long-overdue arrival of Skull and Bones with some nervousness. After nearly a decade of delays, you’d probably just want to get it out the door, right? Skip straight to the open-world pirate adventuring, none of that ‘making it work on a range of graphics cards‘ nonsense.

But nope. For all its other shortcomings, Skull and Bones performs alright on PC, very often more smoothly than its system requirements suggest. Though I’d still recommend abiding by its SSD storage requirement – following the rules might not be very piratey, but installing on a hard drive will curse you to some pretty tedious load screen waits. Geoffrey Rush would hate it, honestly.

While Edwin sequesters himself in the starting area, let’s head below deck for a closer look at Skull and Bones’ PC particulars. That includes a full rundown of its graphics options – which include ray tracing and DLSS – and a quick guide to the best settings for an ideal prettiness-to-performance ratio.

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This refurbished 850W Corsair Shift PSU is £84 vs £150 new from Scan UK

Corsair’s Shift series of power supplies are one of my go-to recommendations, thanks to their reliable power delivery and convenient side-mounted connectors, and now you can pick up a factory refurbished 850W 80+ Gold unit for just £84 from Scan, versus £145 for the very same PSU new at Amazon or £150 at Scan. That’s a huge, nearly 50% saving, and well worth it – even for a factory refurb unit with a 12-month warranty.

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Logitech’s excellent G915 TKL low-profile wireless mechanical gaming keyboard is 55% off at Amazon UK

The Logitech G915 Lightspeed TKL is a phenomenal gaming keyboard with low-profile mechanical switches, reliable Lightspeed wireless and a compact layout, yet Logitech normally ask well over £100 for it – and double that when it first launched! Today though, the G915 TKL Lightspeed is 55% off, dropping it to the more reasonable price of £99.

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V Rising’s 1.0 changes to PvP, endgame and armour detailed ahead of spring release

V Rising remains on track to reach 1.0 in the second quarter of this year, in what finance people call Q2 but I like to call Aprilmayjune. The latest developer blog post goes into detail on some of the new features coming for the full release and in particular its changes to PvP, higher tier weapon and armour, and vampire fashion.

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No Man’s Sky Omega update takes aim at “lapsed players” with free weekend and pirate dreadnought

Hello Games describe No Man’s Sky‘s latest Omega update as being geared towards newcomers and “lapsed players looking for a way back in”. Hey, they’re talking about me! I haven’t played the wide-eyed space game since before the pandemic, partly because I only own the PS4 version and now that I’m RPS news editor, I’m not allowed to touch consoles any more. Seriously, they burn my skin on contact. Anyway, let’s have a gander at the trailer.

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The Electronic Wireless Show podcast S3 episode 6: Skull & Bones is finally about to come out

It’s happening! Why I played Skull & Bones back when it wasn’t even a live service game. But now it is, and it’s out this weekend. We talk a bit about how long it has been coming out, why it’s been in development this long, and why they didn’t just release the sucker the two or three previous times they got close to doing so. Honestly, I hope it does okay. We also talk about the games we’ve been playing this week, and Nate challenges us with a game of Palworld Pal: real or fake? PLUS the giant game dildo and our recommendations this week.

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I’m not sure I’ll ever leave the prologue area in Skull And Bones

Last night I spent an hour in Ubisoft Singapore’s Skull And Bones, the much-reconceived, nigh-mythical open world pirate game that has been in development since 2013. Taking a leaf from the book of feared intergalactic corsair Samus Aran, the prologue starts you off at the height of your bucanneering powers, with a mighty gold-and-scarlet galleon at your disposal that is shortly blown to bits by the English Navy.

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Islands Of The Caliph is a colourful and cleverly condensed griddy RPG

I have never enjoyed those grid-based dungeon-crawling games. I dislike the very notion of dungeon-crawling in general, frankly, but the awkward juddery squareskipping rat-toucher games have always left me absolutely cold.

You will be shocked and aroused to learn that I preface with all this just so I can make an exception of Islands Of The Caliph. Does this mean she’s becoming more open minded, or just that she’s found a way to gripe and complain even within a recommendation? Who can say, readers.

What I can say is that I don’t merely hate it less than its genremates. I think it’s a bloody great little RPG, full of charm and detail that never drags it down.

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Palworld’s community manager reminds people impatient for updates that playing other games is fine

If you told me at the start of the year that Palworld would break Steam records, I would’ve done a hearty “no no” chuckle. But here we are, with the survival game exceeding 19 million players and Pocketpair probably wondering how they managed such a feat. With its success has come the inevitable slew of impatient people saying the game’s dead because it’s not received updates fast enough, or folks saying it’s lost a hefty percentage of its player base, and others saying its viewership numbers over on streaming services have plummeted. Palworld’s community manager Bucky has gently reminded folks that not only is this discourse “lazy”, but to play other games instead.

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