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When The Callisto Protocol arrived on PS5 and other platforms in 2022, everyone was very intrigued to see how the former director of Dead Space’s new sci-fi horror game would do, especially since it was arriving barely a month before the Dead Space Remake would hit consoles and PC.
Unfortunately for Striking Distance Studios (SDS), it didn’t strike in the way Dead Space did back when that first launched, and the remake of Dead Space only weeks later almost unsurprisingly had a much bigger impact for players.
But according to Glen Scholfield at least part of that comes down to the fact that the game’s publisher, Krafton, didn’t give SDS the time it really needed in the end, and that was just one of many development woes the game faced.
In a new interview with Dan Allen Gaming, Scholfield spoke about all this now that he’s left SDS and is on to whatever is next. Scholfield claimed that Krafton had been promising an extra three-four months, but in the end they were forced to release it by December 2022, which they did.
“I wanted about three and a half more months. I was led to believe that that was the way it was going to be. In October or September ‘21, I was told ‘You’re going to get the time. Put whatever you want into the game.’ So I spent that Christmas holiday just designing and coming up with ideas with some of the guys.
And then January comes around and some of the [Krafton] folks come over and they just said ‘no no no. It’s December 2022.
It’s not like it costs you less money because you’re getting it out three months sooner, because if I’d just kept it on the way it was going, I wouldn’t have to add anybody. But if you want it done, that means I’ve got to accelerate everything by three and a half months, which means I need to jam people on here.”
Scholfield also talked about how the relationship with Krafton changed four years into signing a publishing deal with SDS. He explains that when they signed the contract, it happened because there was a lot about the deal that felt right. Which makes sense, of course. Then things changed.
“Four years later, you know, not all the same things are always said – by me as well probably. I really liked working with them for the first couple of years. It was really the last year or so. We went public and it put an awful strain on the company, on the board of directors, and everyone else. And then they [Krafton] put the strain on us probably.”
And then on top of a straining developer-publisher relationship resulting in the publisher putting their foot down regarding the release date, Scholfield talked about how entire teams were getting sick from COVID-19 at the time, and the strain that put on development.
But at least when people get sick, they come back to work when they feel better. The studio took a turn for the worse when it lost a lot of its talent the year before The Callisto Protocol launched.
Scholfield called 2021 “the worst year of development of my life,” because of all this hitting at once.
“You have a studio of 200 people. Ten to 20 people a month were getting sick, and they were getting sick for weeks. We were devastated. Sometimes our whole department for VFX would be out, our whole animation department.
And then on top of that, in ‘21, we had the great resignation. 49 people quit, because everybody’s paying through the roof, and so people are leaving for $10,000 more. ‘21 was the worst year of development of my life.”
To the game’s credit, The Callisto Protocol looked and sounded excellent. It was clear early on, even before we knew about The Callisto Protocol, that SDS was really leveraging modern platforms to do some technical wizardry with its visuals and audio work.
And the team at SDS did just that. Everywhere else though, it’s debatable as to how much another three and a half months would’ve done for the game.
Now that its founder has bounced, and it unfortunately went through a round of layoffs, it’ll be interesting to see what SDS does next. We know they are working on a new game, something being made in Unreal Engine 5 but not very much beyond that.
Source – [Dan Allen Gaming via PC GamesN]
