Glen Schofield, the director behind The Callisto Protocol has revealed that the finished product wasn’t exactly what he wanted from the game. The vision behind 2022’s horror says the game had various different features, additional enemies and story content. However, Krafton rushed the development of the project in order to release it.
Schofield says The Callisto Protocol even had some major different story beats. I am going to discuss some game spoilers ahead so close this page if you don’t want them spoiled.
According to Schofield, the original plan in The Callisto Protocol was to kill off Jacob Lee, played by Josh Duhamel. He says he wanted to kill the main character off and perhaps bring him back in the sequel He says Jacob would likely have no arms or legs as a result of his “supposed” death.
“Plus, yeah, I killed off Josh in the end. He loved that by the way and I’m not saying he’s dead either. I mean, I’m just saying he doesn’t have arms and legs….I wanted to bring back Josh and but I actually wanted to to act like he was dead and start off with a different character and then halfway through this character dies, and then they’re like “well, we know one guy” and then you surprisingly bring him back.”
As for the other game elements, Schofield says COVID-19 greatly impacted the development of the game. He says a lot of developers worked from home at the time which changed the pipeline. He also says 10 – 20 employees were getting sick each month. These devs would get sick for weeks, again slowing down the development of various assets.
“Callisto, we had to cut two and a half bosses out of it I mean I had to cut like three or four enemies out of it. So think about this during COVID, America lost 1.2 million people died, right? This wasn’t like “oh, they’re getting sick.” we all lost people on top of that when someone got sick and inevitably you have a studio of 200-250 people, 10 to 20 people a month were getting sick, and they were getting sick for weeks, right? We were devastated; sometimes our whole department of VFX would be out; our animation department. When I would call in Korea they’re not having that problem, right?! You know, we don’t follow rules as well maybe? I don’t know what it is, but we have a bigger country, you know, so doesn’t matter we lost a lot of people. We went through hell, and then on top of that in ’21 we had the “great resignation.” We had 49 people quit on top of that. Because everybody’s paying through the roof, and so people are leaving for $10,000 their jobs are made ,and they’re they don’t have to leave their house all they got to do is turn in their their equipment.”
Schofield asked Krafton for a few extra months of development to help with the game. He says the publisher granted this but closer to that promised time, it never happened. Schofield was willing to work through the Christmas holiday season alongside other developers.
I wanted about three and a half more months yeah and I was led to believe for about three months…four months that that’s the way it was going to be, and so I actually was in October or or September of ’21, I was told that, you know, you’re going to get the time just no regrets. That was the term that was kept being used, no regrets. Just put whatever you want into the game, you know, and so you know, I spent over that Christmas vacation, well, when you’re developing how much they are anyway, but just designing, come up with other ideas with some of the guys, and January comes around and some of the the folks come over and they just said, “no, no, no, no, it’s December of 2022,” and and I was like, it’s not going to get done and it’s going to cost you more money. It’s not like it costs you less money because you’re getting it out three months sooner, no. Because if I just kept it on the way it was going, I wouldn’t have to add anybody. But if you want it done, I got to accelerate everything by three and a half months, which means I need to jam people on here if I need 20 people, I actually get 30 or 40 because that learning curve will not adjust.
As a result of all this, The Callisto Protocol ended up being a financial failure for Krafton. The game’s launch-day review embargo was already a sign of this. Reviews say it was plagued with technical issues and lacked depth.
Krafton currently owns the IP for The Callisto Protocol. While Schofield has expressed his want to do a sequel, it is unclear if the publisher will greenlight the game.
Source: Dan Allen
