I’m guessing no one really had a creative vision for the project beyond “make big pirate game.” It looks like Ubisoft got exactly what they paid for.

They basically changed the core concept at least twice during development, first rejecting every prototype for two years straight then telling the studio to make "Siege, with boats" and then going "Sea of Thieves!" when that came out.

And the whole time they were shitting on the local devs, rotating out the management, and basically just using the ongoing project as a way to grift subsidies from the Singapore government and have some place for their execs to vacation while pretending to work.