After the failure of the sci-fi horror game, Glenn Scofield leaves Striking Distance Studios, which was embraced by the publisher of PUBG and which he founded himself.
On paper, The Callisto Protocol, which debuted in December 2022, had every chance of becoming a gem of the horror genre: several people from the original Dead Space team worked on it (including Glen Schofield and Steve Papoutsis, who paved the way for the 2008 game as producers executives, the former also known to many as the father of the series), famous actors lent their names, voices and faces to the project (for example: Josh Duhamel, Karen Fukuhara and Sam Witwer), and the visuals, mixing naturalistic and photorealistic images, had an overwhelming impact.
It’s no wonder that Krafton, the South Korean publisher behind PUBG, which funded the entire project, had high expectations for the game, as did the customers themselves. But it soon becomes clear that there is no depth beneath the attractive surface, the characters are unpleasant, and the story is flat and boring. But the biggest disappointment was the combat system that formed the backbone of the game, which screamed that it was designed for one-on-one battles, but the developers nevertheless regularly threw several opponents at the player at the same time, pushing the clashes more interesting. Uncontrollable chaos.
As a result of everything, Callisto Protocol, which was originally supposed to be a spin-off of PUBG, but was eventually spun off from it, not only failed in front of critics, but also failed at the box office. Despite this, the studio has been delivering patches and free and paid content one by one over the past six months, and in the summer concluded the story with its first and final downloadable story, Final Transmission.
We don’t know yet what the future holds for Striking Distance Studios, which underwent a major downsizing in August (it shed 32 developers at the time), and what other plans Krafton has for it, but Glen Schofield certainly does. Don’t be a part of it. the Bloomberg Based on his report, Schofield is stepping down to pursue new goals, along with the studio’s COOs and CFOs. Steve Papoutsis, a long-time colleague of the former founder, will take the reins.
