Glen Schofield, the creator of Dead Space, who announced his retirement from the games industry in July, has spoken about the situations that led to the release and poor reception of his last title – The Callisto Protocol. Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Schofield said that Krafton essentially forced Striking Distance Studios to ship the game following COVID-19-induced lockdowns.
He also noted that the title shipped in a more pared-down state than what was initially planned, thanks in large part to members of the development team falling sick due to the global pandemic. This led to the studio cutting out quite a bit of planned content, including boss fights and entire levels.
“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 f***ing COVID. 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.”
The state in which The Callisto Protocol was released likely did it no favors when it came to critical reception, and Schofield admits that even Krafton “thought Callisto was a complete failure.” He blamed the publisher for “complaining” while the team itself was working on patches to raise the quality of the horror title.
“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 f***ing 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.”
On the subject of how the team worked through the pandemic, Schofield discussed getting “everybody together on Zoom” and going through individual calls despite the difficulty of managing a team of hundreds of developers. “But we did it. We did all these things because we were searching for the best way to do it. There were so many meetings.”
Interestingly, there was even a pitch for a sequel to The Callisto Protocol. However, owing to the poor critical and commercial reception of the horror title, Krafton decided to pass on the project. Schofield describes the concept as revolving around a plague, noting that it would have been bigger in scale than its predecessor.
“Over the years, different things have warped into one crazy freaking place. You go anywhere, and there are ships and stuff. That was just part of it. That’s where the outbreak would start. 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.”
The Callisto Protocol is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. For more details, take a look at our review.
