Skull and Bones is around the corner (but we’ll believe it when we see it)
Skull and Bones — Ubisoft’s swash-buckling pirate sim that began as an expansion to Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag — is finally coming out. We think. Ubisoft hasn’t reneged on what we thought was a tentative 16 February release date, and it doesn’t look like it will before then. Sure, we’ve got good reason to be so distrusting, having seen the tail-end of plenty of forgotten release dates, but after Ubisoft’s announcement of an open beta, our fears have more or less been doused.
The beta will officially open on Thursday, 8 February before closing on Sunday, 11 February. With the game’s release date so close on that horizon, we’re guessing this is more of a marketing ploy rather than a bug-fixer — as Ubisoft attempts to re-lure those fans that gave up on Skull and Bones so many years before. Whereas the game’s previous closed beta only allowed for six hours of gameplay per player, the open beta has no such restrictions — unless you’re rocking a dwindling PC begging to be put out of its mercy.
Alongside the open beta’s announcement, Ubisoft revealed the sort of specs your PC needs before it’ll even consider booting up Skull and Bones at a decent framerate. It also mentioned that any progress made over the free weekend will be carried over to the main game if you decide to pick it up, alongside the content roadmap for the next year. At least we’re sure Ubisoft isn’t ditching the game the moment it drops anchor.
The Skull and Bones open beta opens on 8 February at 4 AM SAST and closes on 12 February at 1 AM SAST. It will be available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC (Ubisoft Connect/Epic Games Store).
See? Videogames can be useful
We won’t pretend we’re a little sour when it comes to our schooling. While we had lessons learning to use Microsoft PowerPoint, today’s students are being introduced to coding, robotics and even esports. At least, that’s the case if you’re an attendee of Centennial Schools — the first South African school to begin offering scholarships just for playing CS and Rocket League better than the rest. It got into the esports business last year, and now it’s back for round two. (FIGHT!)
Students in grades six to eight “who out-perform in the esports arena” will be eligible for Centiennial’s scholarships that are up for grabs, with the top three players earning R330,000, R220,000 and R165,000 respectively — which should be plenty to cover three two a single year at the school comfortably (it’s almost worth it for that gorgeous esports arena floating around on campus). Winners will also get their hands on an Asus laptop and 50% off the management fees levied by BRUSA.
The tournament is set to kick off on 29 February before closing a month later on 28 February 2024. Players looking to compete should already be practising Centennial’s choice of games: Minecraft, Aimlabs, Overcooked, and Superliminal. It won’t be enough to conquer the other children at these games; you’ll also need to pass the school’s stringent entry exam. Anyone keen on getting involved in the tournament should be quick about signing up here.
Nintendo Switch: Folie à deux
It’s been an open secret for some months now that Nintendo is hard at work, plugging away at a successor to the Switch. The last we heard, Nintendo was gearing up for a September 2024 release, before the news was removed (perhaps forcefully) from Altec Lansing’s press release. But that’s old news. We’re more interested in a new report from Bloomberg that reckons the Switch 2, Pro, Advanced — whatever you want to call it — will turn up with an 8in LCD display and will hit shelves before 2024’s end.
As we say, the latter is all but confirmed by Nintendo, but the talk of an 8in LCD display is news to us. You might think, after the Switch’s OLED derivation, that a follow-up might include OLED from the go. We, on the other hand, feel like it’s such an on-brand move for Nintendo that it must be true.
It all fits into the story that Sharp Corp was saying back in 2023, that it was busy supplying LCD panels and “working closely with the maker of an upcoming console that was then at the R&D stage.” Adding fuel to the rumours, Sharp’s parent company, Foxconn Technology Group, has been known to work with Nintendo in the past, most notably during the pandemic when it served as a Switch assembler.
Nintendo, typically, hasn’t responded to any of the rumours floating around. If the rumours of a 2024 release are true, it’s likely to turn up at a Direct sometime in March or April.
Sorry creepos, you can’t message underage users on Instagram anymore
In a move that seems so obvious we wonder why it wasn’t in the playbook from the start, Meta is tightening up its teenage users’ message settings across Instagram and Facebook. Adult Instagram and Facebook users will no longer be able to send a DM on either platform to underage accounts unless they’re already following each other or friends on the platforms.
The idea, obviously, is to create a safer space for underage users on either platform. The timing is suspicious as these stricter rules are introduced only a week after an internal document revealed that around 100,000 children are sexually harassed every day across both platforms. Still, it’s difficult to hate on a change like this one, even if the reasons behind it aren’t what we’d call genuine.
The new setting is equipped on underage accounts by default, though Instagram will notify the affected accounts of the change in the top right of their home page. Instagram’s blog post mentions that it’s also working on a new feature that’ll prevent younger users from seeing “unwanted and potentially inappropriate images” in their messages from people they already know and are friends with or following. The feature will be released later this year.