Dead Space creator Glen Schofield's 2022 survival horror game The Callisto Protocol might have been met with lukewarm reviews, but the director says this came after he was "forced to ship the game" three months earlier than expected, prompting him and the other devs to release a whopping 86 patches after launch.
In a new interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Schofield discusses The Callisto Protocol's troubled development, noting that the devs at Striking Distance Studios had been working on the game for around six months when the COVID-19 pandemic kicked off, which was "a real pain in the ass," to put it lightly.
As well as struggling with remote work – with Zoom meetings replacing the ability to speak to devs face to face in the studio – there were also apparently some management issues with publisher Krafton. Specifically, Schofield alleges, he'd previously been promised three extra months to work on The Callisto Protocol to make up for the disruption that COVID had caused, which would have seen the game launch in March 2023. However, it's claimed that the publisher then decided it wanted it to launch in December 2022 regardless.
"I was forced to ship the game. I'm mad at myself, there's no doubt. I was so stunned by that decision, because we had fucking COVID," he states. "A million people died in America. I lost one of my best friends. Every single month, four to six people in my company were getting sick. There were times our small team in Spain was shut down; it goes through a small place like that and you lose your rendering team for a while. The main thing you're concerned about, not that you aren't normally, is the health of your team. Making a game just became secondary because this is about life. This is about humanity."
As you'd imagine, all this saw parts of The Callisto Protocol change from what Schofield originally had in mind, with certain levels, bosses, and enemies removed from the game altogether.
And, alas, The Callisto Protocol wasn't the success that Striking Distance Studios or Krafton were hoping it would be. "They thought Callisto was a complete failure," Schofield says of Krafton. "What they didn't know while all they were doing was complaining, we were doing patches. I waited until I finished all the DLC and put out 86 patches. That was a lot of fucking work. Every day you're going in, you're making changes. Some are little, others are massive. That was all to get it back to where it needed to be."
After all that, it's not exactly a shock that Krafton wasn't interested in a Callisto Protocol sequel, either. Schofield says it would have been a bigger game – about a whole plague rather than an outbreak – set in a "giant junkyard" of spacecraft docked in a massive space station. "We had a lot of drawings and a lot of some of the stuff that didn't get in the first game was going to be in this one," he reveals. Unfortunately, it seems we'll probably never see this vision brought to life.
While you're here, be sure to take a look at our roundup of new games coming this year and beyond.
