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Topic: Scalebound (Cancelled) on XBONE can this concept work on Nintendo?

Posts 21 to 40 of 46

uximal

@CrazedCavalier True, Scalebound had so much potential and considering the same team is what come up with the likes of Bayoneta and Nier Automata I think this would have been a polished product. Well, Kamiya is like a genius, its possible he wanted to do everything, I really wonder how Nintendo managed to work with him on Bayoneta 2 or was he given independence on the projects direction?

This game looked soo good ..

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&a...

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CrazedCavalier

@NEStalgia Though MS clammed up about sales numbers for 1st party stuff, 5's estimated to have sold 3 to 4 million at launch and they made $300 million off of it and hardware tie-ins.
Reach was my starting point, and I played it and 4's online the most-- didn't get to play much of 5's because I just got burnt out on the series. Honestly, though 5's campaign wasn't the best I'd still take it over CE's and 2's (the former has a few great moments, but both just feel too dated nowadays).

And eh, MS is a big conglomerate like Sony. While SCE has been doing well and Xbox hasn't been doing so hot, it's the opposite overall. I'm not much for "loyalty", but I don't hate them either. And I'd give a fair bit to have Phil Spencer instead of Reggie.

"There's a very fine line between not listening and not caring. I like to think I walk that line every day of my life." -Leonard Church Jr.

Nintendo Network ID: thedanman88

NEStalgia

@CrazedCavalier 3-4M isn't so amazing for your biggest 1st party exclusive. Zelda moved numbers in that ballpark in a few WEEKS and on a launch + dead console. And that number pales next to Sony exclusives (and 360 era MS exclusives.) It's not bad by any means, but I don't think Halo is the draw it once was.

I didn't play 4 or MC, after Reach I just kind of walked away from the whole series. 2.....was weird. 1 and 3 remain classics though. I haven't played it in ages (and I played the PC version of 1 rather than the OG XBox version), but I'm not sure what feels dated about it. It's one of the games that pioneered the "modern" feel of FPS.

Haha, oh, I like Phil, and Yoshida. It wasn't about companies but, Sony has a very capable, well staffed studios department for content development and retention. XBox did back in the OG XBox era and early 360 era. But they closed Microsoft Game Studios, lost most of their talent in that part of the business, and it shows. Their attempts at first party comes across as though they're using the same approach they use for business software. "Make sure to check off all the marketing feature boxes the focus groups identified as important." They weren't always like that, but at present, that's where they seem to be. Phil had to make that awful statement about exclusives not being important. That right there was a Reggie moment.

NEStalgia

Eddyson

I was at Gamescom 2015 were they had exclusive footage for people who went to their "booth". (just a small dark room)
It showed more in depth some customization options for your dragons.
I think they also showed a village of some kind but that could have been in the regular trailer...
It's been two years, I don't recall the latter all too well.

Long story short, This game single player and multiplayer could have become amazing, but for some reason this potential GOTY for me was canceled.

Eddyson

Grumblevolcano

@NEStalgia I'm expecting plenty of Reggie moments from Reggie at E3. Particularly about 3rd party support on Switch.

Edited on by Grumblevolcano

Grumblevolcano

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CrazedCavalier

@NEStalgia The series was never going to be as big as it was during 3's era. CoD's cemented itself, people have gotten burnt out on the series, you've got the smaller Xbox One install base... . Zelda is Zelda-- it's got the hype and zealous fanbase to carry out, on top of being the flagship game for a whole new console.

CE just feels floaty, the UI in both it and 2 is very awkward (why is the shield bar in the bottom corner of the screen?). Moreso in 2, you can get lost in playspaces trying to move forward because there's no waypoints. And then there's CE and 2 each recycling a campaign map. They're not bad, but I think nostalgia carries peoples' perceptions too much.

At least we have Phil being Phil on twitter and in most interviews, compared to Reggie always being Reggie. Either way, this thread has kinda been derailed.

"There's a very fine line between not listening and not caring. I like to think I walk that line every day of my life." -Leonard Church Jr.

Nintendo Network ID: thedanman88

NEStalgia

@Grumblevolcano Reg gotta' be Reg!

I'm calling it now, and you can quote me, the canned quotes to expect are "For us/Nintendo it's all about fun" and "We're more interested in people playing [sic sharing experiences] together wherever they are"

@CrazedCavalier Yeah, but that's kind of the point. Halo is not what it was. 2...honestly I try to forget 2. it was a better game than Reach, but it wasn't a very great game Though I don't have much nostalgia for Halo, it was always a fun but vaguely generic FPS particularly for a PC gamer in the era of the first one. It was never special but it was good at what it did, and did help shape the modern FPS. I'd argue CoD is past it's shelf life too, making it's rumored arrival on Switch bitter sweet.

Reggie's likable when he's actually human. It's just normally he's a PR blurb with legs. Tough job though, spinning decisions you may not agree with from overlords in Kyoto as something you believe in. At least Phil can be genuine, he's under a mountain of debt and owned by a company that hates his entire department and can't wait to try to ditch it. Pleading with his customers in a straight forward way is all he can do, which makes him a lot more human than Nintendo's robotic stances on everything.

Back on topic, the original topic, what IS scalebound? And can what we already saw work on ANY platform? Probably not. It was a mess, stuck in development [heck]. Like SF:0 but without Nintendo to keep their feet to the fire.

NEStalgia

Octane

@NEStalgia That's one of my favourite parts of E3, the interviews with the higher ups. Always great to see Yoshida excited about every single game he played. Reggie's answer is always; ''Look, we at Nintendo...''

Octane

NEStalgia

@Octane LOL, it's so true. And that sentence starter....OHHH that inspired me....I wonder if I could get a Switch dev kit and make an eShop game "Reggie Official Sentence Maker" You could shake the Joycons and feel the real 2d10 D&D dice shaking around thanks to HD Rumble. The first die could have a collection of favorites: "Look, we at Nintendo..." "For us..." "We don't look at what those other guys are doing...." "For the first time on a Nintendo console..." and "When you look at the numbers..." The second die could feature a collection of franchise names, competitors names, and hardware. Then players can compete with who can cobble the most accurate Reggie sentence from the pairing.

He answers every question like someone just off-camera is holding a gun aimed at him waiting for him to say the wrong thing. MAYBE, just maybe that era is ending at the end of the WiiU. He seemed more....autonomous during the Treehouse session after the Switch presentation. Iwata always came off as more genuine, and he didn't really even speak English, he just memorized his speeches for directs and presentations in a language he didn't know well (I can't even begin to imagine how one could do that....but he did.)

I enjoy watching Yoshida because he actually seems very similar to Iwata in a lot of ways. A gamer that's in it for the joy of it and it just so happens to also be business.

Phil Spencer is half way down the middle. He's kind of a gamer, but not quite so much, but he's not just a programmable robot in defense mode like Reggie has been. Not that he's not on the defensive, but at this point, everyone knows XBox's position so it's more like "pftt, screw it, here's some cool games and stuff!"

NEStalgia

Octane

@NEStalgia You know it's true when you recognise each and every one of those sentences.

I'm sure Iwata spoke some English though. I find it hard to believe he memorised it all without knowing the context! He definitely understood English.

I think the problem with Phil Spencer is that he himself is a like-able guy, but that doesn't always translate to Microsoft as a whole. If I didn't know he worked for MS, I would've never guessed it. It's always as if he's saying one thing and MS is doing the opposite.

OT: The issue with Scalebound was probably that there still wasn't a game after so many years. From Microsoft's perspective, I can understand why they dropped it in that case. If what CrazedCavalier said is true, I can't imagine it'll end up well. As far as I understood it, it was the game Kamiya always wanted to make, and I can't see any other dev finishing it.

Octane

NEStalgia

@Octane Haha. Yeah, I know Miyamoto understands English almost perfectly and speaks English fairly well, he just refuses to do so these days after some interview responses weren't perfect wordings and the press ran with it. Iwata, I think I recall reading didn't really speak it and would rehearse and rehearse and rehearse those directs and insisted on doing it in English anyway because he wanted it to really be |direct|. I forget who talked about that, I think it was either Sakurai or Itoi. It's amazing. Learning Japanese would be next to impossible enough for me. Memorizing 20+ minute speeches in it without even understanding it would be unimaginable.

Good points about Phil...it's very true. Same could probably be said about Yoshida, but at least in his case, Playstation is the breadwinner of the Sony family so they give him more free reign. XBox is the deadbeat beatnik step child always begging for money of the Microsoft family (though the problem stems from a time long before Phil's leadership)

Well, if there was no game in that amount of time it clearly wasn't the game Kamiya always wanted to make. He just always wanted free reign of a project without limits but didn't actually know what he wanted to make with it. What we saw last E3 was directionless and bland. It didn't have that Platinum magic at all, just the Platinum camera angle and HUD. Either that or Luna is right and the game Microsoft wanted him to make isn't the game he was trying to make and it stalled out.

In either case, once a project gets so derailed from initial intent it seldom ever turns out good when it finally comes back together. They just don't want to lose their marketing hype from it and hope to try to resurrect it.

NEStalgia

Luna_110

I know it isn't the most reputable source in the net, but the rumor about Microsoft meddling came from Neogaf, and supposedly they changed direction to make the game fit with the heavy push on multiplayer and Ames as a service Microsoft has had in the last year.
MP is definitively not Platinum's strength based on their previous games.
Add to that the fact that Kamiya is a bit of a crazy genius, but I assume not that easy to work with, plus stressed to the point he had to take time off after Scalebound was cancelled, and it shows the game was in development hell, maybe made worse by culture clash (east vs west) and communication problems.

One good point to see the situation is to see what happened to the Phantom Dust sequel that was slated for XB1 and was cancelled. It was a similiar situation, and sadly sheds some light on how MS operates.
https://www.vg247.com/2015/04/11/phantom-dust-reboot-xbox-one...

I have a chronic lack of time, for everything.

Now playing: Okami HD, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

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Peek-a-boo

You see, games like The Last Guardian, which was in development on and off for eight years, Journey (had to be delayed for a year and have Santa Monica Studio come in to help them out) and releasing a mainline game in a series like God of War 2 at the very end of the PlayStation 2 life, as well as Gran Turismo 6 on the PlayStation 3 when the PlayStation 4 has been out for a few weeks; you just simply could not envision Microsoft doing any of those four (and more) the way that Sony does.

In the past three years alone, Fable Legends was cancelled followed by the sad closure of Lionhead Studios, a fully fledge reboot to Phantom Dust abruptly disappeared after showing a full length trailer at E3 in 2014, Press Play (Max: The Curse of Brotherhood and Kalimba) was closed, Project Spark ceased to be, Xbox Fitness shut down last year and bridges were burnt between Platinum Games and Microsoft for cancelling Scalebound, amid stories of the latter studio wanting to tinkle with the formula.

The phrase 'a picture is worth a thousand words' springs to mind upon comparing these two images in a space of two and a half years:

July, 2014

Untitled

January, 2017

Untitled

It's grim reading, whichever way you are inclined.

Edited on by Peek-a-boo

Peek-a-boo

LzWinky

Is the Xbox even relevant? I haven't heard much of it this year compared to previous years.

Current games: Everything on Switch

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Linoshi

@TheLZdragon The E3 where Microsoft announced the Xbox One, DRM and all pretty much crucified the console and the brand. Even now I don't believe they've recovered from their foolishness as the general consumer just doesn't trust them and I hope it stays that way for a long time. Sony clearly weren't so foolish and took full advantage of Microsoft's weakness and are now dominating the market because of it.

Edited on by Linoshi

Linoshi

LzWinky

@Linoshi Well time for Nintendo to shine again

Current games: Everything on Switch

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Kinoen

It is a crying shame what happened to Scalebound, as for the concept of it and if Nintendo can do it, they sorta already have with Xenoblade.

Kinoen

uximal

Kinoen wrote:

It is a crying shame what happened to Scalebound, as for the concept of it and if Nintendo can do it, they sorta already have with Xenoblade.

I agree with you on this.

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kkslider5552000

I'm pretty sure Nier: Automata went on to be a huge success SOLELY because it would be a hilarious contrast to Microsoft being short-sighted idiots. And it is.

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Fooligan

(raises hand) I was ready to purchase an Xbox and Scalebound and when I found out the game was canceled I bought a PS4 and Nier Automata.

I hope some form of this game can make it to the Switch. According to Kamiya, Scalebound started out as a Wii game staring a girl that controlled dinosaurs. So maybe he can go back to that concept for a Switch game.

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