Scalebound officially cancelled

Off-Topic
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There’s probably an interesting and relevant conversation in here about at what point you are better off releasing a flawed game versus killing a project. No Mans Sky racked up a lot of internet hate, but I think it also racked up quite a high number of sales. It has a respectable 71 meta critic score for PS4, so it reviewed “okay.” Better than, for example, Recore which scrapes by with a passable 61.

Tough to know with Scalebound because no one ever played it what a “fine, just finish the ■■■■ thing and put it out there” version would have looked like. With Fable Legends we have better data from the lengthy Beta that the game probably could have been released and reviewed at least moderately well.

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There doesn’t seem to be much on the horizon this and next year for x1. I’ve little interest in gears and halo and I don’t need another yearly addition to the forza franchises. Where are the rpgs and platformers?
Where is the fighting games Phil said were coming?
Where are the original games and not bombarded with sequelitis?
Are we really gonna be the halo, gears and forza machine again. Bar KI and backwards compatibility they haven’t really roused me this gen.

I was really looking forward to scalbound, but again another title bites the (phantom)dust. While Sony see to be romping it home

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I think your right, it could indeed have been reviewed moderately well. Fable improved a lot since the early beta, it was in my opinion a really solid game and had a solid fanbase, like KI. It was also made for continued updates, it could have become a great game even if given the chance. And at the great price of free to play, I had no issue with pooring money in there, which I did even in beta. You could see the team loved the game.

The bad press mostly came from people who only wanted a Fable 4 and didnt give it a fair chance, and perhaps a bit because they released the beta a bit too early…

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I think the challenge was once Legends went free to play there was no sales base. They had to look at “will this game bring in enough money to support itself over time” and that answer might well have been “no.”

That was more of a heartbreaker for me than Scalebound because I really wanted the promise of cooperative and asynchronous gameplay to become a thing but so far that is the biggest failed concept of this console generation. People just haven’t found the formula and I’m afraid the end of Fable Legends signals that developers abandoned what I still feel could be a good concept.

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Wait, Geek didn’t like original Spiderman games? Spiderman 2 on the PS2/Gamecube was one of the great open world games before open world really took off. There is a lot to be excited for with a new free movement Spiderman game.

Also, the main fact that PS4 is winning so handily influences the direction of games that show up on Xbox. Are you interested in anything from a Japanese developer? You probably won’t find it on Xbox, now that they have very little reason to publish on there. The only exceptions are the massive games like FF15 and Dark Souls 3. Quirkier but excellent games like Persona and Ni-Oh just will never find their way to Xbox.

Anyway, my Xbox is gathering dust under my TV and I’m not sure I will ever turn it on again. Xbox really blew their console lead from the 360 through a massive amount of hubris and trying to tell gamers what they should want. Even a bunch of backwards compatibility stuff isn’t helping me be interested in it anymore; they have completely lost my trust and I don’t want to invest in their ecosystem anymore, when I could rather invest in the PC ecosystem and have everything work in 10 years with absolutely 0 effort.

PS4 is actually not that good in itself. The console has lots of egregious problems too and I still don’t own one. But all they have to do is point to Xbox and say “at least we have games” and they’re automatically winning.

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Can’t say I ever cared about the game, to be honest. I MS cancelled, Platinum must’ve been doing really bad.

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This is most likely on Microsoft’s shoulder. Platinum Games make good games, with a few exceptions…
-looks at the recently released TMNT game-

But they know their sh#t. They know how to make awesome games. And Scalebound did not look bad. What the real reason is though, we can’t know for sure.

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Sorry for being off-topic but I want to relate a story.

I recently built a new PC, which means I clean installed Win10 on a new SSD (but plugged in my old two hard drives, one of them a SSD Windows drive, to use as well). All my Steam games were on these old drives, in multiple locations. Once I downloaded steam, I went to Options and said “look here for my games”. Within 5 seconds it found all the games on my old drives, showed that I owned them, and let me play them. I chose to move a few of them to my new SSD to improve loading times. To do this, I copied a directory to a new steam folder on my new hard drive, and told steam to try to redownload it to the new location. It immediately found all the game files without downloading anything and said “ok, we’re good to go”.

By comparison, I had KI installed on my old machine. This was 40 GB of data installed in a location I didn’t get to choose [at first, later they have added the ability to choose a drive to install but not a specific directory] and have no way of moving. In fact, I had to use Google to even find out where the install directory was, and then do a whole bunch of administrator nonsense to even see the directory. I was not allowed to simply play KI off my old hard drive; the Windows 10 store only looks to one location for games (and it was automatically set up on my new Windows partition). I couldn’t say “hey look for apps over here”.

So here I am, stuck with 40 GB of wasted space that I can’t use. Windows would not let me delete the directory outright, even with full administrator privileges and a bunch of google nonsense. I finally asked “how do I delete this directory” to the Win10 subreddit. You know their answer? Install Linux on another partition (!!!) so that I could delete the directories without Windows blocking me, or format my entire drive. What an amazing answer.

So, I started to redownload KI. Without the ability to throttle your download like in Steam, I had to do it overnight so other people using my internet would not be blocked from doing anything. The store doesn’t even tell you how fast your download is going, just that it’s downloading, and it often paused for minutes at a time doing nothing. But fortunately, Windows let me choose where to install KI this time, so I chose the drive of my old SSD, just to see what would happen (hopefully it would overwrite the old KI install so I would get that space back). It did this, thankfully, but it also deleted the entire parent WindowsApps directory where KI was installed. Can you imagine this?? An install of a game deleting other content in surrounding directories because Windows is not happy about something? In a gross twist, this is actually what I wanted to have happen (because, with no way of telling Windows anything about this directory, it’s all wasted space).

But I am not happy that the only way this worked is because Microsoft’s total combination of incompetence worked out to being “ok KI is installed where you wanted it and you got your space back”. In the end, it was an extra 40 GB of bandwidth wasted and hours of googling time and frustration over how much control over the files on my hard drive I actually have.

Which in Steam’s case is 100%. In Windows Store games’ case, is virtually 0%.

… and this is why I would much rather buy games on Steam going forward.

Sorry for the derail. I didn’t want to make a new topic about this but I am still ■■■■■■ off about this, a week later, and I had to tell someone.

3 Likes
89

If anyone has earned the right to vent on these forums its you, I hope it helped you get it out of your system :sweat_smile:

Microsoft has a long way to go to get close to the way steam works, the faillure of their previous attempt (what was it called? Games for windows…) really set them back, since it was lost time. Maybe they should just co-operate with steam…

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Yikes, that sounds like a horrible experience.

Honestly, when I see all the money spent on upgrading a PC or building a new one, plus all the basic to intermediate knowledge you need in order to keep things well maintained and keep your system properly optimized for what you’re looking to play (notice the highly detailed technical language I just used there lol), I realize that for all the flaws with console gaming, that’s the ecosystem I belong in.

I feel like it’s almost the difference between buying a decent compact car and buying a nice sports car. If you’re a sport car enthusiast, you’re not going to mind the amount of love and money that goes in to maintaining such a car. It might even be one of the perks for you. Personally, I’m just looking for something with a little kick to it that gets me from here to there.

But yeah, hope for your sake you don’t have to deal with any of that BS again, cuz that sounds really frustrating.

1 Like
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That sounds awful. I would have given up at that point.

Thank god you survived :thumbsup:

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I wasn’t remotely interested in Scalebound but I was happy that Platinum Games had something big planned. At least it would be the start of something great to come.

Fable Legends was a huge letdown for me more than anything. The game itself was mediocre for a Fable title, and although it seemed like it was in development was everlasting, it had huge potential. If given the right angle and enough feedback that game it it’s sequel would’ve been a hit.

Anyway, sucks to see another game being canceled.

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Sure, PC gaming has its pitfalls at times as well. It’s not perfect and it often does require some extra work and care to get stuff running at 4k with max settings (though sometimes it’s just as painless as consoles).

I’m not here to make anyone feel bad about being primarily a console player. I was mostly consoles since the 90s myself, only recently getting more into PC gaming in the last, say, 3 or 4 years (because the Xbox One was such a letdown for me). That had a lot to do with the types of games I wanted to play, though… the two main genres I love are rhythm/music games and fighting games, both of which weren’t really represented on PC (and music games still aren’t).

The main point of my rant was just to communicate that I am fed up with MS’s ecosystem. I bought thousands of dollars worth of content, games, and accessories on 360 (including fight sticks and Rock Band equipment and tons of other stuff) that they decided (initially) to invalidate in one fell swoop. Their efforts to go back on that now are appreciated in theory, but their execution is only halfway there and it’s too late for me. On PC, since at least Windows XP going forward and certainly in the last 10 years at least, there is no backwards compatibility, and we have 10+ years of Steam refining its system so that it’s extremely user friendly now. That MS is choosing to enter the PC space with a system that isn’t learning anything from Steam is what makes me so frustrated. I am too old and irritable to watch MS bumble around, not providing basic, necessary services to their users such as letting them move install directories.

2 Likes
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It’s an over exaggeration yes. But you can deny it feels like for every time they announce a non shooter game they announce 2 shooters.

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I think the frustrating part is that operating system is the “core business” of Microsoft. And they are terrible at it. Your experience highlights one of the increasingly prevalent flaws in windows which is the attitude that “if we just keep the user from being able to do anything, they won’t be able to mess up our nice operating system.”

The only games I own on the Windows store are KI Gears 4, Forza and Recore and all of these were bought in Xbox One. And in just trying to use these things (I similarly upgraded my hard drive and couldn’t move KI) makes it clear that the Windows store was designed to solve problems that Microsoft had not to solve problems that consumers/customers/users are having. I’m not a Steam fanboy but the damn thing just works. The way it’s supposed to. Easily. Every time.

Consoles are still great for couch/tv gaming and for a lot of reasons I’d rather have my kids playing in Xbox than on Pc. But the Os on Xbox One is a perpetual problem and we are approaching parity with PC in all the wrong ways (wonky OS, hassle filled gaming, hard drive installs) with none of the right ones. Once a month my Xbox has me plumbing the depths of my router settings because it suddenly decides I have strict NAT settings. Invariably this has nothing to do with my router and it just resolves itself once Xbox Live is in a better mood (wtf?). I turn out to be doing LESS fussing with my PC.

So for now, I’m happy with my Xbox one. But if they want me to drop $700 on a Scorpio next year I’m going to be seriously asking the question of why wouldn’t I just get another PC?

Uh… and shame about this whole Scalebound thing.

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This reminds me that KI is so extremely temperamental about who and what you can connect to. Invites get lost and never received, you click accept and nothing happens, and sometimes players just have to hard reset their Xbox to even have a chance to connect (something that isn’t possible on PC and I have no idea how to fix when it happens there).

Was playing some KI with a local friend online, and neither of us could connect to each other (both on PC). His invites weren’t received on my end, and mine weren’t received on his. Multiple restartings of the game + the Xbox app later, one of us finally got an invite through, but we got a “couldn’t connect” error.

We tried a few more times and finally it worked (with zero explanation as to what changed), and then we played for a while and had fun. But we were very close to just going and playing another game, and in the future we are considerably less likely to try for 20 minutes.

KI is the only game I’ve ever had this type of problem with. The netcode is so good once you get it going, but I have no idea why it doesn’t play well with invites or the Xbox OS/app. I mean, if you’ve ever watched an 8 bit beatdown, with its constant “ok everyone, please hard reset your Xboxes so we can connect to each other” PSAs, you know it’s a widespread issue.

And yes, I hear you on this. For me, the thing is that I will spend a little more than $700 and a little extra effort setting up my PC at first, but then I have something that I know will work for as long as I want it to, and I can upgrade it piecemeal to stay relevant as my interest or budget allows. Meanwhile, on Xbox, every game you ever buy on the service might not work in 3 years when they decide to do who knows what with the next-gen service. So yes, you’re saving a bit of money (though not much!) and hassle vs a decent gaming rig, but I just simply do not trust Microsoft anymore to take care of my long-term gaming library.

The sad thing is that PS4 is not any better! In fact, it’s worse! They don’t even have basic back compatibility that MS has been working towards, because of the giant mess that was the PS3’s architecture, and they treat their fanbase with just as much contempt. But because MS botched the Xbox One so badly at the start, and PS4 does continue to churn out games, all they have to do is say “haha we’re not MS at least” and they have already won.

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The way to avoid this is periodicals hard reset.

I unplug my xbox once each 2 weeks. It works to avoid the nat problem if your xbox has all the ports open and (ideally) DMZ.

It would be better to NOT rely on that… but welp

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I have two Xbox Ones and if I set one to DMZ the other is basically locked off the Internet. No real reason but that’s what happens.

The larger point is not that I can’t make it work it’s that if I’m going to struggle maybe I should be struggling with a PC…

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You can refund games and get 100% of your money back on Steam. You can’t even do that at physical retail stores.

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This is the mentality that I don’t like hearing in this discussion. Winning at what? There is no war here. Just sales - and while Sony may have had a better start, Microsoft is doing fine overall (even without Japan) and has had the top-selling console for a few months now. You need to look at it like you do with the tier lists - in a vacuum. Is MS making a profit? Yes, they are. That means they’re fine, regardless of how Sony is doing. There’s really no reason to compare. As long as it’s successful, and it is, then that’s all you need to really worry about. 1 cancelled game isn’t going to be the end of an entire platform. I shall continue to support it for as long as is reasonably viable, and it’s nowhere near the end.