The War Stories video we ran a few years ago featuring Dead Space's battle with the drag tentacle is one of the most popular in the series, and ever since it came out we've been aching for another opportunity to collaborate with game designer Glen Schofield. That opportunity arrived a few months ago, when Glen's Striking Distance Studios reached out to us and asked if we wanted to visit the office for an inside look at Glen's upcoming sci-fi horror game, The Callisto Protocol.
We said yes, of course. In addition to the exclusive access, we also were excited at the opportunity to hang out with Glen again—an enormous friendly bear of a man, whose gifted and artistic mind churns out an endless array of many-limbed horrors.
Cut off their limbs... again?
It's easy to compare Callisto to Glen's seminal work Dead Space. But while the games do have some visual and thematic similarities—as in, "it's dark and you must dismember the dead things trying to kill you"—Glen doesn't see the game as Dead Space's spiritual successor. "I honestly don't mean it to be that way," he said to Ars at a preview event earlier in the year. "I want this to be a standalone game, and once you get into the story and experience, there are some key differences at work, which I'm really proud of."
The video we're presenting shows a bit of the work that the Striking Distance team put into polishing those key differences as Callisto neared release. It's a neat peek into the process that goes into perfecting small moments in a big game. Near the beginning of our video, I giggle like an idiot in a short segment where Glen and design director Ben Walker are discussing a scene in which a player turns on a large machine that fills the area with industrial noise—the expectation after making all this noise, Walker explains, is that the player will be jumped by enemies. But then Walker explains that there are no enemies—it's just a ploy to raise tension and screw with the player.
We were given the run of the studio and allowed to poke our heads into design and playtest meetings; Glen's folks were receptive, kind, and informative as they described the incredible effort that goes into dragging a massive AAA-type horror game over the finish line.
We’re big fans
And the best news is that this video is the first of a whole series of behind-the-scenes stories that Striking Distance and Glen were kind enough to allow us to shoot on-site, at Striking Distance's office, as Glen and his team worked through the final days of development on Callisto Protocol. This one focused on gameplay and a bit of level design, but that's just the start!
We'll be releasing another behind-the-scenes video every Tuesday, and The Callisto Protocol comes out on December 2 on Windows, Xbox, and PlayStation.
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