Scalebound: New Details

In an interview at this year’s Tokyo Game Show, the team behind Platinum Games’ surprise Microsoft collaboration remained typically tight-lipped about the game. Between vague allusions to multiplayer, open-world possibilities and getting friendly with dragons, a few quotes lay nestled like golden dragon’s eggs. “Every moment that you see [in the trailer] really has meaning and purpose behind it,” explained game director Hideki Kamiya, while creative producer JP Kellams added that, “Every shot counts and every shot means something.” So we just have to watch the E3 trailer really closely to know what they mean. Challenge accepted, Kamiya…

Scaly Pals  Come on, that’s co-op, right? Lots of different colour-coded dragons coincidentally, four in total, which is a nice number for local multiplayer all seemingly being ridden by tiny little humans? Maybe it’s just a dragon tea party. Who knows?

I Spy Sci-fi  See all this sci-fi stuff? Some kind of spaceship? Giant moon thing? Clearly an indication of Scalebound being set on some Earth-like, but slightly different, planet. Hence the dragons. Earth doesn't have dragons but we do have lemurs, and that’s fine with us.

Here Be Dragons ?  We’re thinking that this screenshot could and we realise we’re wildly speculating here indicate the presence of dragons in Scalebound. We don’t want to make assumptions and then look like idiots when we’re wrong, but we’ll see.

Beats By Dre-Gon  Kamiya really wants us to notice those damn headphones. What are they for? Is it a rhythm game? Are there important audio cues? Is it the How to Train your Dragon audiobook? Or is it a GTA-style playlist? Taylor Swift could make or break a dragon battle.

Super Smaug Bros Brawl  Dragon punches monster, and suddenly you’re caught in the middle of a rather big, rather dangerous battle. You’re not the only enemy here; there’s clearly some kind of monster-eat-monster beef going on, and it’s all you can do to stay alive.

Ranger Danger  In the space of a two minute trailer, our protagonist brings out both a sword and a magical bow and he’s clearly proficient with both. Kamiya’s Bayonetta was a dab hand with multiple weapon sets, too. Of course, our man could just be a Rambo fan.

Chromo Trigger  You may have noticed that the nice man’s dragon friend is colour co-ordinated with his outfit. We really wanted this to be a sign that the guy has style, but we think it’s probably to do with which dragons he can bend to his will.

Armour Armoire  Armour grows over our man let’s call him Headphones Jones like some kind of medieval fantasy Iron Man. Did he press a button, or does he have danger sensing clobber? We're hoping this means environmentally reactive kit.

Mythical Menagerie We saw a dragon, a big chompy beetle thing, a hydra-like snake monster, something that looks like lava crossed with a bull and several colour-coded dragons who looked a bit too busy to save you from said hydra-snake. It’s a busy world, then.