Schofield doesn't even try to hide his style here, but what is it about this kind of body horror that draws him in? From its first trailer, it was clear that its enemies are mostly humanoid, often the result of Black Iron prisoners and guards put through a truly grisly transformation. The Callisto Protocol is an extremely Schofield game, and as a work of horror, it also taps into a very specific nightmare. "I'll be like, 'You know what, right here, you can die four times and I'm OK with that.' Other times, 'No, that's too much here, they should be able to get past this pretty well." Schofield adds that he wants players to feel a sense of unpredictability in the scale of challenge – encountering moments where you may need to die once to better learn from the experience, and others where all you can do is grit your teeth and hope for the best. Schofield says his team is paying particular attention to how many times an encounter will probably kill a player, and whether that feels right for the scenario. We want to keep it scary, but I didn't want it to be like some survival horror where I've got one bullet and nothing else."ĭifficulty is an area Striking Distance continues to tweak as the Decemrelease date inches ever closer. Some of these enemies can really take you out. It's gonna be a hard game, and it's gonna be scary in that respect. But if you use the tools you've got and upgrade, you'll be OK. "He'd get that one thing where he's shooting the gun around his head, you've got line weapons. "In Dead Space, he could really ammo up," he says, referring to the equipment of main character Isaac Clarke. I ask Schofield where he wants The Callisto Protocol to land, and unsurprisingly he reckons it's toward the Dead Space end – it's in his DNA, after all - but also just shy of it, in terms of how powerful you are. And at the other end are games like Dead Space and Resident Evil Village, where you're still scared and in danger but also much more active in how you engage with threats. At one end you have games like Outlast, where you'll hide in a locker if you so much as hear a rat fart. As I tell Schofield, I like to put horror games on a spectrum. We spent a lot of time making that work." Jacob and IsaacĬombat seems more advanced in The Callisto Protocol, but it hasn't gotten any easier. How do I want to use my weapons and save that stuff? You're probably going to go down one direction, but it allows for replayability when you go down another direction.
#THE CALLISTO PROTOCOL GAME UPGRADE#
But you don't upgrade that, you upgrade the skill trees for your weapons.
It's more like this one is for outdoors, this is for the cold, this can take more hits.
We didn't upgrade the suit, we changed the suit.
"We decided that was getting too much like Dead Space," Schofield says. But in The Callisto Protocol, Schofield says melee is often "your first go-to" attack, though he notes that there are some enemies – presumably of the explosive or caustic variety – that you won't want to get close to.Įlsewhere, some mechanics and systems were deliberately tweaked to avoid excess overlap with Dead Space, like Jacob's suit. If you were swinging at Necromorphs, you were probably either panicking in close-quarters, out of ammo, or about to die – or all three. Interestingly, melee attacks are more important here than they were in Dead Space. There were some things that Dead Space introduced like no HUD, and why would I go back to a HUD? Glen Schofield Because you're gonna want to go at these guys one-on-one." Or the better thing is to shoot them across the room, either into a hazard or out of the way for crowd control. "You can grab an enemy, you can pull them to you, use a gun, use a melee. "It's much different than in Dead Space," Schofield says, touching on the surface-level similarities between Grip and Stasis.