"Weirdly, every single closed-doors demo of Scalebound was like a different game,"
I tweeted in the wake of the announcement. What I meant by this, I went on to explain, was that in private demos it just looked like a more cohesive, proper video game, and one the developers had a great deal of passion for.
On stage, Microsoft always chose to present the game in what I thought was a strange light. It seemed as though they wanted to lean on Platinum and Kamiya's action credentials, which makes sense. The problem with that is Scalebound seemed to be far more besides.
The strangest and weakest showing came during an E3 stage demo in 2016, where the game was shown running a confusing-looking boss tackled with four players in online co-op play. It wasn't the worst demo of the conference (hello, Final Fantasy 15) but it was fairly underwhelming.
Heavily-briefed developers kept banging on about the 'scale' of the boss fight over and over again, something which smacked of the rehearsed PR lines to me. Scale is what Platinum is known for, they'd say. It's epic, it's crazy, it's action-packed, and this is just a taster.
The thing is… Scalebound seemed like a lot more than that whenever I saw it in a less public setting. At the last couple of Gamescom shows I was able to step into closed-doors meetings with Hideki Kamiya and JP Kellams, two key staff on the game, and the demos they gave showed a greater breadth of content than an action co-op game.
I remember glimpses and teases of a proper RPG-like world to explore, with NPCs, towns and quest-givers. I remember seeing a Resident Evil style Tetris-inventory system, which is always exciting. There were sections of the game where player and dragon would be split up, testing the player's abilities. The focus of the last presentation I saw was on the game's character progression system, which had an interesting little twist to the RPG traditions.
