The Callisto Protocol got revealed at The Game Awards last Thursday. Schofield said PUBG Corp., now known as Krafton, gave him the OK, and they’ve largely left him alone over the past 18 months to create that studio and develop its debut game. He envisioned “the most terrifying game on next-gen platforms” when he made his pitch for The Callisto Protocol last year. “‘And here’s the game I’d like to make.’” “I went to them and said, ‘I’ll give you a game studio,’” Striking Distance founder and CEO Glen Schofield told Polygon in an interview this week. However, players should never drop their guard altogether during these reprieves. Schofield teases “even then we might get you once or twice.When the former executive producer of Dead Space, Visceral Games’ beloved sci-fi survival horror series, went to the people who make PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, he had a simple plan.
“So we kind of give you little moments – not a lot – where you’re just like, ‘Okay, this is just going to be combat for a little bit or maybe I’m just going to get a little story here and there, then I’ll get back into it.” “If somebody plays five, six hours of the game, it’s hard to be amped up for that long,” Schofield continues. There is a lot of paperwork, if you will, to keep up with something like this.”Īs unrelenting as The Callisto Protocol appears to be, Striking Distance realizes that giving players a break now and again is also important. Now we can do it again or something like it in Level 7,' or something like that. “One of our producers has taken the levels and then marked exactly where the different scares are and the tension areas so that we can remember, ‘Okay, we did this one about three hours ago in Level 2. “We have these giant graphs,” Schofield says. By doing so, the team can better visualize and remember when it executed a particular scare to determine the best place and time to repeat. But Striking Distance also keeps a complete written record of moments and setpieces.
Gut instinct serves as one big factor in knowing when and where to scare players. But after several levels of opening doors safely, the player relaxes only to, finally, be attacked again when they least expect it. By doing this in the beginning, the player hopefully becomes wary of entering doors going forward. “There are times when you’re like, ‘I know you’re going to scare me, I know they’re going to get me,’ right? And then maybe we don’t.”Īn example Schofield gave us was having the player open a door and getting attacked early in the game. “We want to throw the timing off as much as possible,” says creative director Glen Schofield. If you think The Callisto Protocol will go one way, Striking Distance wants it to go the opposite. Your headphones may pick up an unsettling noise from the left only be assaulted from the right. For example, for players who think the formula will be “Big scare, tension building, big scare, et cetera,” there may be times that a frightening attack is followed by another terrifying surprise mere seconds later. The developer recognizes the patterns players have come to expect and instead focuses on crafting surprises that buck those trends.
Horror engineering stems from the team’s desire to make The Callisto Protocol’s scares unpredictable even to genre enthusiasts. Imagine Disney’s Imagineering process applied to something much more gruesome. That ranges from designing a room with strategically placed entry points for the biophage, The Callisto Protocol’s monsters, to pop out, to obsessing over details as small as whether a light bulb should flicker two times or three. Horror engineering defines the meticulous manner in which the team constructs its scares so they have the maximum effect on players. And it does so through a process the team dubs "horror engineering." But it’s not enough to simply have horrifying monsters and an oppressive atmosphere developer Striking Distance believes it’s how you arrange these elements. Believe it or not, The Callisto Protocol is a scary game.
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