The Callisto Protocol - new survival horror from Dead Space creator

[lightbane]

The final boss' fight has been leaked. It fights like a regular enemy seemingly, just more HP. Not even special QTEs as far I can see. Compare this to the gamey but spectacular final boss of Derp Space 1 done 15 years ago.

The final boss of Dead Space 1 was spectacular !?

It may not look like much, but the final boss of DS1 can summon enemies, has ranged attacks and weak points it can protect, has special cutscene attacks where the control is flipped (because it grabs you) and you must shoot its weak points before it insta-kills you, does lots of damage with its attacks, is large and impressive...

Meanwhile, the boss of Stutter Protocol turns into a walking cancer who ambles forward, has a short-ranged vomit attack and a charge and... That's it as far as I can tell from the video. It doesn't look different from regular enemies besides having more HP.

I don't know what the fuss with Dead Space was about (apart of the HUD, which never had caught on, sadly). It got repetitive real fast. It was loud, flashy, and a little dumb too. Never finished it admittedly. Technically, this new one looks impressive. But: This highlights even more what I thought about Dead Space: Dead Space is what System Shock would have been like had Michael Bay directed the official movie. And then afterwards a studio equally in love with big explosions and bigger budgets had turned that movie into another game. Voila, Dead Space.

IIRC supposedly DS was meant to be System Shock 3 before it got repurposed into a console game.

 

[fork]

Dead Space was mediocre back then, but it had gameplay and atmosphere. It's a masterpiece compared to this dung.

 

[gerey]

I am genuinely curious to see what exactly went wrong with this game.

By all account they were not reinventing the wheel, this was just supposed to be a copy of Dead Space without any of the copyrighted material, so how come the project lead and his team, many of whom worked on three Dead Space games, could drop the ball so badly?

It's not even the optimization issues, but the fact the game is inferior to DS1 in terms of mechanics, content and gameplay:

• there is little enemy variety - DS1 had a multitude of enemy types that it liked to mix and match to create diverse combat encounters;
• it's linear and has no backtracking - DS1 offered occasional branching paths that rewarded the player with more loot and lore, and at certain points you could explore areas at your leisure and backtrack - this is particularly egregious because this is supposed to be a survival horror title;
• the combat is built around the melee, despite the fact you only make use of a single melee weapon through the whole game - about the only praise is that the upgrade system allows you to drastically change how the guns handle and behave;
• besides walking down the corridor and fighting the same enemies over and over again there is nothing else to the game - no puzzles, no optional areas, no unlocks for finish the game, no NG+... just nothing.

It's becoming more and more apparent that developers, even ones that showed competence in the past, are becoming incapable of making games. The question is, was this due to mismanagement from the top, or because the workforce itself is incompetent?

 

[fork]

It's just laziness and corporate greed.
And learned behaviour at this point, because as long as the game looks great, people buy anyway.

 

[Fargus]

Ok, bros. Technical issues is one thing, but this...

 

[lightbane]

I wonder if there were danger hairs in the dev team. These beings automatically make shit worse the more numerous and/or influence they have.

 

[Fargus]

Follow the line, goyim.

 

[toro]

I wonder if there were danger hairs in the dev team. These beings automatically make shit worse the more numerous and/or influence they have.

It looks like manlets can do more damage than danger hairs.

Edit: they have a studio in Spain San Ramon California

 

[toro]

PC patch is out.

 

[toro]

 

[Fargus]

 

[Outlander]

Yo dawg I heard you don't like stutterin' so we put out a patch that fixes stutterin' but there's still stutterin' in the game...

 

[Tehdagah]

I am genuinely curious to see what exactly went wrong with this game.

By all account they were not reinventing the wheel, this was just supposed to be a copy of Dead Space without any of the copyrighted material, so how come the project lead and his team, many of whom worked on three Dead Space games, could drop the ball so badly?

It's not even the optimization issues, but the fact the game is inferior to DS1 in terms of mechanics, content and gameplay:

• there is little enemy variety - DS1 had a multitude of enemy types that it liked to mix and match to create diverse combat encounters;
• it's linear and has no backtracking - DS1 offered occasional branching paths that rewarded the player with more loot and lore, and at certain points you could explore areas at your leisure and backtrack - this is particularly egregious because this is supposed to be a survival horror title;
• the combat is built around the melee, despite the fact you only make use of a single melee weapon through the whole game - about the only praise is that the upgrade system allows you to drastically change how the guns handle and behave;
• besides walking down the corridor and fighting the same enemies over and over again there is nothing else to the game - no puzzles, no optional areas, no unlocks for finish the game, no NG+... just nothing.

It's becoming more and more apparent that developers, even ones that showed competence in the past, are becoming incapable of making games. The question is, was this due to mismanagement from the top, or because the workforce itself is incompetent?

"there is little enemy variety - DS1 had a multitude of enemy types that it liked to mix and match to create diverse combat encounters;"

Not true, the first Dead Space had very low enemy diversity.

 

[gerey]

Not true, the first Dead Space had very low enemy diversity.

It certainly had more than Callisto Protocol.

DS1 had 9, not counting setpiece enemies and bosses - Callisto has maybe half that number, and even those lack the unique quirks of the DS1 enemy roster.

This game is an inferior copy of DS1 that somehow passed by the past 15 years of iteration on the RE4 formula.

 

[Fedora Master]

It should be glaringly obvious by now that developers are incapable of reproducing earlier successes. Just like later Romans were incapable of maintaining their aqueducts.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

This games encapsulates all that was already bad with Dead Space. All the critics the people, including Dead Space fans, now do to Callisto, you can apply verbatim to Dead Space itself. The only thing Dead Space did better is the technical implementation.

 

[fork]

Not true, the first Dead Space had very low enemy diversity.

It certainly had more than Callisto Protocol.

DS1 had 9, not counting setpiece enemies and bosses - Callisto has maybe half that number, and even those lack the unique quirks of the DS1 enemy roster.

This game is an inferior copy of DS1 that somehow passed by the past 15 years of iteration on the RE4 formula.

I agree with your first two sentences, but why do you have to bring up RE4, one of the worst games of all times?
It's also worth pointing out that it's irrelevant how many enemy types there are if combat is as bad as it is in Callisto crap.

 

[what am i doing]

This games encapsulates all that was already bad with Dead Space. All the critics the people, including Dead Space fans, now do to Callisto, you can apply verbatim to Dead Space itself. The only thing Dead Space did better is the technical implementation.

Hmm... Dead Space 1, maybe. Certainly not Dead Space 2. DS1 had a lot of issues of pacing and repetitive combat, samey environments, very clunky gameplay, etc. In that regard it and TCP have similar problems. But Dead Space 2? No. Dead Space 2 was nearly a perfect game; all it's missing is a map editor.

 

[Ryzer]

rusty_shackleford explain yourself.

 

[Daedalos]

I dunno, I'm enjoying myself as the game is just like dead space 1, as was to be expected. Is it better than dead space1? ehh not really, its not alot worse either.
The story is decent enough, and the atmosphere, graphics and stuff is very good.
I'm having 0 technical problems, and it runs butter smooth for me at 1440p 3070 np

melee combat aint that bad once u get the hang of it, but i find myself having more than enough ammo anyway even on hardest difficulity.
enemy diversity is fine.

its quite linear, yeah, and that would perhaps be my biggest critique, but so was dead space right?
im not expecting half-life 1 lvl design or whatever or even RE.

Overall, I am content with my purchase.

Get mad, faggets

 

[gerey]

Hmm... Dead Space 1, maybe. Certainly not Dead Space 2. DS1 had a lot of issues of pacing and repetitive combat, samey environments, very clunky gameplay, etc.

Thing is, DS1 came out 15 years ago, and in many ways it was an improvement on RE4, which it was inspired by, so it's unfair to judge it harshly. Callisto Protocol, on the other hand, is a letdown on every level. Not only does if fail to live up to the standard set by DS2, but it even manages to be inferior to DS1.

but so was dead space right?

Yes and no. Many levels in DS1 were fairly linear, that's true, but even then you had places off the beaten path you could explore, and there were a few sections where you had to backtrack.

 

[Alienman]

Ok, bros. Technical issues is one thing, but this...

Sent to organ harvesting camp in China for glitching through a door.

 

[Fargus]

I dunno, I'm enjoying myself as the game is just like dead space 1, as was to be expected. Is it better than dead space1? ehh not really, its not alot worse either.
The story is decent enough, and the atmosphere, graphics and stuff is very good.
I'm having 0 technical problems, and it runs butter smooth for me at 1440p 3070 np

melee combat aint that bad once u get the hang of it, but i find myself having more than enough ammo anyway even on hardest difficulity.
enemy diversity is fine.

its quite linear, yeah, and that would perhaps be my biggest critique, but so was dead space right?
im not expecting half-life 1 lvl design or whatever or even RE.

Overall, I am content with my purchase.

Get mad, faggets

Don't seem like a bad game to me. But i'm tired of has-been big names, scummy corporate behavior and useless cunts with danger hair and other diversity hires that can't even release the game properly anymore. So i just refund it and pirate it at a later date, even though i paid literal scraps for it.

I owe these fuckers nothing.

 

[what am i doing]

Hmm... Dead Space 1, maybe. Certainly not Dead Space 2. DS1 had a lot of issues of pacing and repetitive combat, samey environments, very clunky gameplay, etc.

Thing is, DS1 came out 15 years ago, and in many ways it was an improvement on RE4, which it was inspired by, so it's unfair to judge it harshly.

I'm not judging it harshly, it's a decent game today. Not great, but decent. TCP, with the stuttering fixed, I think is also decent. Not great, but decent. For all its issues it's not bad per se, just disappointing relative to my expectations. If I judged DS1 by the standards of the time when it came out I'd say it's a broken unplayable piece of shit, which it was back then because they fucked up the X and Y sensitivities, scaling them to your aspect ratio so that looking up and down was slow as fuck. It's fixed now, but still.

 

[Fargus]

Not great not terrible