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The Callisto Protocol - Information Thread, update: Glen Schofield (CEO), CFO, and COO all "voluntarily" depart from Striking Distance Studios

Commissar SFLUFAN

By Commissar SFLUFAN
in The Spawn Point

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BloodyHell

BloodyHell

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“Quadruple A all day”

 

😂

I think I missed that one before today.

 

Oh well, I can afford it, but saving 70$ at Christmas always helps. Trying to make a positive out of this, but it is what it is. Dead Space 1&2 are among my favourite horror games. I was maybe expecting too much.

 

hopefully Dead Space Remake is better. They really should have delayed.

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Bloodporne

Bloodporne

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57 minutes ago, BloodyHell said:

Agreed, I was really hyped for this. I started to temper my expectations when sflufan mentioned that embargo was today, but damn, feels bad, man.

The SkillUp review is especially damning and that's my #1 review place personally. Some quotes:

 

"No puzzles, no exploration, it's essentially one long corridor, one recycled mini-boss and the combat straight up doesn't work" Also to quote "To call the story threadbare would be generous" and "one of the worst designed boss encounters I've ever done in my life".

 

Also rated it a "I Do Not Recommend" which is actually a bit rare. The level design and exploration being non-existent especially is lame as fuck. 

 

Edit: Why set this setting up with a whole audio play and all and then not let us actually explore it? 

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Bloodporne

Bloodporne

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Just now, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

 

Well...

  Reveal hidden contents

 

No I know, I listened to it. I phrased that weirdly but meant it more like "you're setting up the world but I can't explore that world". And yes, I'm aware it's just marketing but still. 

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BloodyHell

BloodyHell

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15 minutes ago, Bloodporne said:

The SkillUp review is especially damning and that's my #1 review place personally. Some quotes:

 

"No puzzles, no exploration, it's essentially one long corridor, one recycled mini-boss and the combat straight up doesn't work" Also to quote "To call the story threadbare would be generous" and "one of the worst designed boss encounters I've ever done in my life".

 

Also rated it a "I Do Not Recommend" which is actually a bit rare. The level design and exploration being non-existent especially is lame as fuck. 

 

Edit: Why set this setting up with a whole audio play and all and then not let us actually explore it? 

Yeah, SkillUp was the second review I watched. It made me sad.

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Commissar SFLUFAN

Commissar SFLUFAN

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Patrick Klepek/Rob Zacny review at Vice:

 

1669934086488-ssbcee7d0948cdcd3ff45012f1

‘The Callisto Protocol’ Is Not the Second Coming of ‘Dead Space’

WWW.VICE.COM
A video game set in space, where everything has gone wrong, should rule. This one doesn’t.

 

Quote

 

Nothing gets the Waypoint staff hooting and hollering faster than the announcement of a new space horror game. What, you didn’t ask for the video game industry to make a dozen of these games? Sorry, but we did, and we’re going to play every last one of them, thank you.

 

And though setting your game in space and dropping in gross mutations of humanity go a long way towards laying the groundwork for something that’ll get us playing, that’s not enough on its own. We’re not in the 90s anymore, where the setting is wholly novel for a video game. Dead Space, a game itself receiving a proper remake early next year, set a new standard for the subgenre. The Callisto Protocol, in part made of ex-Dead Space developers, attempts to revisit the success of that game with some extremely mixed results.

 

Both Rob and myself couldn’t have been more excited to spend parts of our Thanksgiving holiday sneaking away from family and food to shoot up some gross little dudes, but to our surprise, The Callisto Protocol left us wanting more. A few hours into the game, I find myself a little more taken by the combat and what it’s doing than Rob, but we both agree this is a game making up for a lack of a unique identity with an endless parade of unearned jump scares.

 

 

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Keyser_Soze

Keyser_Soze

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This game is giving me Auto Modelista vibes. A game that looks great, but when you play it it's anything but.

I think the concept of the game was we want you to die in a gory way and everything else is secondary. It's like it doesn't even play like a real game but you sure as hell will die brutal deaths.

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Brian

Brian

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Stock in Krafton, the company behind The Callisto Protocol studio Striking Distance, closed down -8.41% today in Seoul. TCP's metacritic score is in the mid 70s, apparently too low for Krafton investors who were hoping the IP could become a new pillar for the PUBG company.

Damn. Clearly needed more crunch to fix bad design 

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Greatoneshere

Greatoneshere

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Yeah I tried playing this last night on PC and it was a pretty awesome opening but the stutter was pretty rough. I'm refunding it for now until a couple of patches but I'm definitely interested in returning to this despite reviews at that time. No exploration, no puzzles, and long corridors though, yikes. Back to God of War: Ragnarok and Triangle Strategy for now then.

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ShreddieMercury

ShreddieMercury

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Yikes, this is such a bummer.  With the pedigree of the developers I did not expect something this broken and stale.  I played the opening last night and it was impressively cinematic, but almost immediately you can see the seams, because the priority is clearly on the look of the game rather than any sort of interesting game design.  It plays well, but the "one long corridor" thing is the most damning aspect to me so far.

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Commissar SFLUFAN

Commissar SFLUFAN

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Taken in a vacuum (the blazing disaster that is the PC version aside), the overall review score average really is pretty good for the first effort from a brand new studio.

 

However, because we don't exist in such a vacuum, I cannot help but wonder if the overall reception/perception would be significantly more positive if:

 

(a) the game didn't cost $70 because other than the visual production values, it doesn't "seem" like a $70 title, and

(b) the marketing campaign leading up to release was more low-key/reserved as befitting a release from an unproven studio (crowning it as an "AAAA" title probably left a sour taste)

 

All-in-all, this looks to be a decent "deep discount" pickup in a few weeks' time!

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stepee

stepee

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Not pre compiling shaders is just insane for a major release now. It has so much attention and everyone knows how to fix it. I don’t know how they keep shipping pc games like that.

 

Like Sackboy had it and they fixed it in less than two weeks I think, but why did it ship like that? Does nobody on the dev team really know about it? How??? Nobody is aware that it gets bad press every time and then studios have to go in and add it in a patch anyway?

 

They don’t notice that every single system they test it on has bad issues with stuttering? It’s a universal thing so it’s not like it just got missed in QA.

 

It makes no sense to me. 

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ShreddieMercury

ShreddieMercury

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Performance aside, I think that current games criticism landscape is pretty abysmal.  The vast majority of outlets are not able to offer any sort of cogent or thoughtful analysis, because games are too multi-dimensional to be scored in the way that they currently are.  Polygon seems to prioritize the story and themes of a game, even when these elements are trivial to the experience.  Digital Foundry, while they don't explicitly review games, analyzes specific technical minutiae while also offering an opinion of the game's overall quality.  And large legacy sites like IGN or Gamespot lean more heavily into the AAA space and tend to score between 7-10, seemingly blinded by a game's production value alone.

 

And even in cases where people are very thoughtful and nuanced in their analysis, gamers typically can't be bothered to read or watch or engage with something that doesn't offer a shorthand "score".  The aggregation of all criticism into one number really does a disservice to entertainment from my perspective, and it's especially pronounced with video games.

 

I'm bummed about how this game turned out, but at the same time, with each new release I find myself more and more weary of trusting Open Critic or Metacritic to reflect a game's overall quality.  I do really enjoy reading posts about games here, because people get pretty in depth and offer solid breakdowns of what they like or didn't like.  And I tend to think Eurogamer/DF are pretty even and eloquent.  Other than that though, woof.

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legend

legend

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2 hours ago, Bloodporne said:

 

Like man, did they play their own game before rushing it out the door to beat Dead Space Remake? 

 

Edit: Sorry in advance for ranting in here just did not expect this outcome at all and was incredibly excited for this being a fan of Dead Space. 

 

 

:/ Yeah this one is going to be a wait and see if they make improvements situation. Unfortunate.

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