Dead Space creator Glen Schofield has revealed new information about his upcoming sci-fi horror The Callisto Protocol - still scheduled for 2022 - including a breakdown of combat, its not-so-subtle Dead Space influence, and more.
www.ign.com
In an extensive interview with Game Informer, with screenshots shared on
Reddit, Schofield explained the game's basic story. Set 300 years in the future, protagonist Jacob Lee is forced to make his way through a prison on Jupiter's Callisto moon that's become
overrun with all sorts of horrifying monsters.
Combat in The Callisto Protocol
Lee is just an average cargo ship pilot so doesn't have any special training. Over the course of the game, he'll gather new weapons, but in the demo shown to Game Informer he's only equipped with a baton, a pistol, a shotgun, and a device called the GRP that lets players push and pull items (or enemies) across the environment.
A combination of every weapon at your disposal will often be needed to get through combat encounters with the gross, once-human monsters called Biophages and, according to design director Ben Walker, the player won't ever feel particularly powerful.
We want you to be afraid of single enemies," he said. "All these tools we built up for Jacob are to deal with the difficulty as opposed to coming at it from the end of, 'hey, you can kill all these cool things, now let's make some enemies'. We did it in reverse for that very reason. You feel scared, and you have to make the right calls at the right time."
Dead Space's Influence on The Callisto Protocol
Dead Space — a space-based sci-fi horror game from 2008 that
IGN said was great — was also created by Schofield and he was pretty open about pulling ideas directly from Dead Space. "I'm not going to shy away from a good idea because it was in one of my games," he said. "All game makers look at ideas from other games. Picasso said, 'good artists borrow, great artists steal'. Well, why not steal from myself?"
After leaving EA and Activision Schofield linked up with PUBG: Battlegrounds publisher Krafton, whose CEO Chang-Han Kim guaranteed Schofield "100% creative autonomy".
The Callisto Protocol's Connection to PUBG: Battlegrounds
While the PUBG connection was confirmed soon after the game's reveal, Schofield shared more information on the two games' connection, saying that while it is technically the same universe, The Callisto Protocol is so far in the future that it doesn't really matter.
"The idea of us being in the universe at first sounded really good, and then as you start coming up with your story we realized, 'wow, this is a little out there,'" Schofield said. "We built in some touchpoints, and you'll find them throughout the game like Easter eggs and things like that."
UBG is known more for its Battle Royale gameplay than its story but publisher Krafton does have official lore and a timeline for the PUBG universe.
"They write this giant timeline and our writers are involved in helping," Schofield continued. "We sit on the timeline but we sit pretty far out there, and kind of alone. So if they ever make another game, let's say that's after our timeline, I would imagine our game will inform that more than we are being informed by their timeline."
The Callisto Protocol is set to be released this year. Coincidentally, EA is also working on a remake of the first Dead Space, something
Schofield says is "weird" given that he's still working in the horror genre.
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