There should be a Callisto Protocol 2, says Dead Space creator Glen Schofield: "we had to cut two and a half bosses"

Dead Space developer and Striking Distance co-founder Glen Schofield left Striking Distance last September, following lower-than-hoped sales and mixed reviews for the studio's debut project The Callisto Protocol. Now, he's back to share a little about the horror game's difficult development, offering details of cut materials, a complicated relationship with parent company Krafton, the impact of Covid, and abandoned plans for a sequel.

The interview in question is with Youtuber Dan Allen. While more appreciative than critical, it's a long, candid chat that's worth watching in full if you're interested in the game. I've put together some highlights.

Striking Distance were founded in 2019 as part of Krafton's efforts to establish revenue streams beyond their legendary battle royale Plunkbat, aka PUBG: Battlegrounds. The Callisto Protocol began life as a game in the PUBG universe but eventually became its own thing, heavily inspired by Dead Space. It was a tough project from the outset. "We started off with a new studio, a new company, a new IP, a new everything," Schofield recalled to Allen. "And then we're six months into it, and they say, by the way, there's new consoles. They actually thought, let's just switch to PS5, and I said well that's a magnitude harder. We're talking millions of dollars more."

Nonetheless, Schofield said the relationship between Striking Distance and Krafton was positive at first. "I really liked working with them for the first couple of years. It was really the last year or so [before I left] - we went public and it put an awful strain on the company, the board of directors and everybody else, and then they put the strain on us."

Amongst other things, Schofield feels he was deceived about how much time Striking Distance had to finish the game, which led to impractical project scoping. "I wanted about three and a half more months, and I was led to believe for about three months, four months that that's the way it was going to be," he said. "Actually in October 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 kept being used, 'no regrets'. Just put whatever you want into the game."

Buoyed by this encouragement, Schofield and other Striking Distance devs spent the Xmas 2021 holiday working on the game - "just designing, coming up with other ideas with some of the guys. And January comes around and some of the [Krafton] folks come over and they just said, 'no, no, no, no - it's December of 2022'.

"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 need to get 30 or 40, because that learning curve will not adjust."

In hindsight, Schofield says he should have "put my foot down on not shipping it", to the point of challenging Krafton to take away control of the company. "If you want the game to ship, come take over the studio and ship it. Sometimes you don't know who you are, and four or five years ago I was like, who am I, telling these guys I'm not going to ship it. I should have, absolutely."

Schofield certainly isn't without fault amid all this. In October 2022, he boasted on Xitter about Striking Distance staff working "6-7 days a week". Schofield subsequently apologised in an interview with Inverse for making his employees crunch on the game, and promised to keep healthier working hours in future. I'd be interested to get some perspective on his management tactics from other members of Striking Distance, former or current.

The Callisto Protocol met with iffy verdicts at launch, not least thanks to technical problems on PC. In the wake of its release, Schofield says that Striking Distance and Krafton essentially stopped talking to each other. "As we're making DLC, I kid you not, they started ignoring me. The game came out December 2nd. As we're making DLC, I'm telling the team to start patching - I'm going to go out to the community, I'm going to ask them for help. We know what we want to put in the game, and we're just going to patch it. And so we just kept patching. And Krafton weren't talking to us - they were just like, where's the DLC? We did 86 patches, and in three and a half months, that's what we needed. And on PlayStation Network it kicked ass. The reviews were really good."

According to Schofield, Krafton lacked the experience as a company to nurture an original videogame property beyond PUBG. "What new IPs need around them is some steady guys, but the truth is they were so new at the time - they didn't have any new evergreen-type games". He feels it's absurd that Krafton haven't (that we know of) greenlit a sequel, given the amount that had to be chopped from The Callisto Protocol during development. "The fact they're not making it is ridiculous, because 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."

Some of these cuts were brought about not by Krafton's release schedule but staff sickness during the on-going Covid pandemic. "America lost 1.2 million people, right?" Schofield said. "This wasn't like 'oh, they're getting sick'. One of my best friends, my college roommate died. 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. It was sometimes our whole department of VFX would be out, our animation department." Differences between how the US and South Korean governments handled the pandemic exacerbated communication difficulties with Krafton. "When I would call in Korea they're not having that problem, right? You know, we don't follow rules as well maybe [in the USA]? I don't know what it is, but we have a bigger country, you know, it 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 more, and they don't have to leave their house - all they got to do is turn in their equipment, and in most cases, we tell them you can keep the equipment. 2021 was the worst year in development of my life, because you had Covid going on, you had the great resignation going on. I did not even think we'd get the game done. And we're cutting stuff to get it out. We added some stuff back in in the end. Freed up some time - not time, freed up some people. But you're right, there should be a sequel."

Schofield's abandoned plans for the sequel include a story concept featuring side character Dani Nakamura as lead. Another scenario would have brought back the original game's Jacob, who was voice-acted by Josh Duhamel. "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," Schofield said.

I wasn't a huge fan of The Callisto Protocol myself, but I am automatically enthused for anything that whiffs of Dead Space, and I'm sorry to hear that development of the game was such an ordeal. Again, though, I'd like to get some perspective beyond Schofield's on the making of the game.