Scalebound designer and Platinum Games co-founder Hideki Kamiya has aimed to clear up a few questions concerning how the action RPG’s multiplayer will work when it launches next year for Xbox One and Windows 10. Speaking to Polygon, Kamiya clarified that the game’s co-op mode won’t be separate from the campaign – they’re to be one and the same, and will allow players to team up whenever it takes their fancy.
Co-op works throughout the campaign. You can play by yourself if you’d like to. You can play with your friends whenever you like. It’s not a mode — a lot of people have asked us if it’s just for bosses, but it’s for the entire game’s campaign.
How exactly co-op will work though, remains a mystery. Our money’s on some sort of drop-in/drop-out system used in titles like Crackdown and many popular shooters. One thing’s for sure though, there’ll be no lobbies in sight, according to creative producer JP Kellams.
I hate lobbies and there’s no Japanese multiplayer game that has a good lobby. So you can fully expect that Scalebound will not use lobbies.
Well that’s that, then. Regardless of how Platinum ends up pairing players together though, Kamiya says that, while he doesn’t want fans to feel like they have to “play the multiplayer to beat it [the campaign],” he also doesn’t “want single-player to be a totally different beast,” hence coming to rest on the decision to make both modes the same.
We don’t want to make a game where you have to play the multiplayer to beat it, but we don’t want single-player to be a totally different beast. What’s more important is designing the combat encounters to encourage you to play multiplayer and reward you for playing multiplayer. For instance, in the boss we showed on Monday, if you played that in single-player you’d be really busy because of all the different attacks happening. But when you play it in co-op, everybody can split up and do different things.
Scalebound may not be out until next year, but new footage showcasing a boss fight while in co-op was shown at this year’s E3 during Microsoft’s main conference. Check it out below and let us know what you think.
