Hideki Kamiya on Scalebound cancellation: “We weren’t experienced enough”

PlainumGames was ‘too inexperienced’ to deliver on the challenges it faced developing Scalebound, which led to its cancellation, according to director Hideki Kamiya in a newly published interview with YouTube channel Cutscenes.

Scalebound was announced for Xbox One at E3 2014, and added a PC version at E3 2016. It was planned for release on both platforms in 2017, before publisher Microsoft announced its cancellation early that year.

Here is the full transcript of Kamiya’s words on Scalebound:

Scalebound was a project we had teamed up on with Microsoft. They expected good things from us, and we needed to live up to those expectations with the project. Teaming up with Microsoft meant releasing the game on the latest Xbox console. I once again had the desire to make a high-end game. I wanted to go back to something photorealistic.

While it was a personal wish of mine, I thought it was also a necessary mission for PlatinumGames to improve our graphical ability and get to the next step of modern game creation. So we first decided to go with a universe like that.

I loved fantasy worlds since I was a child. I’ve always enjoyed worlds with swords, magic, and dragons. When I was a child, I don’t know if people overseas are familiar with these, but I would play Sorcerian, Hydlide, all these fantasy games from the classic PC era that I really enjoyed. I always wanted to make something around that theme. This is how I thought of a world revolving around a young man fighting together with a dragon.

However, it was a big challenge for PlatinumGames. We were working in an environment we weren’t used to. We were developing on the Unreal engine, we also lacked the necessary know-how to build a game based on online features. The hurdles we had to overcome were very big.

We weren’t experienced enough and couldn’t get over that wall, leading to what happened in the end. I’m sorry to the players who looked forward to it, and moreover I’m sorry to Microsoft who had placed their trust in us as a business partner. I want to apologize both as a creator and as a member of PlatinumGames.