Glen Schofield Came up with The Callisto Protocol While in the Desert

Famed European artist Moebius, real name Jean Giraud, once explained that he would come up with the stunning visuals for his stories like The Airtight Garage from his memories of growing up in Mexico’s forests, rivers, and deserts. Today Glen Schofield shared the surprising fact that his newest project, The Callisto Protocol, was originally conceived of while he was in a desert himself.

Specifically, Glen was out in a wellness facility in Tucson, AZ, and in between exercising and eating right, he took breaks to relax out of the facility, in Tucson’s desert, and that’s where he came up with the ideas for the game.

While the inspiration isn’t all that apparent in the footage that has been shared so far, Glen actually talked about coming up with multiple ideas for new creatures and how they were iterated on. He claims to have started with eight creatures, changed two of them, removed some of the creatures, and then added two more.

Glen was also enthusiastic in discussing how he conceived of several variations of generic grunt characters to fight, and how designers in Striking Distance Studios changed them all up by simply differentiating their AIs. So one grunt will be particularly aggressive, another one will back off of you, and there will be a bigger grunt that has a large number of hit points.

Glen is not avoiding the comparisons to Dead Space, the game he was executive producer of from 14 years ago. He is certain that once people start playing the final product, they will be coming out of it saying The Callisto Protocol is a completely different game. He also speaks about the story for The Callisto Protocol, how this time the story will be retold through different characters, and experiencing 45 minutes of story in one go.

But if you’ve seen earlier teasers for The Callisto Protocol, you already know there are very different gameplay elements. The gravity gun may seem reminiscent of Breath of the Wild‘s Magnesis Rune ability, but the way The Callisto Protocol uses it is patently not Nintendo-like at all.

Glen mentions adding objects that you can attract with the gravity gun, and that you can throw them at enemies to slow them down. However, this gun can also attract dead enemies, which you can then shoot at other enemies, or even use as a meat shield of sorts. These meat shields will fall apart so don’t even think about keeping them for the rest of the game.

Using the gun will enable you to get creative and try different kinds of gameplay. You can be playing offensive, defensive, do crowd control, melee, stealth, or improvise as you go. Other elements he mentioned include weapon systems and skill trees.

Glen is also fond of bringing up the thrills of the new enemies unique to The Callisto Protocol. The Blind, an enemy type Glen revealed on Twitter, is described as sticking to walls, converging in groups, and peeling themselves off walls. If you wake one up, they will all wake up, so you will want to do stealth takedowns on them when possible, and then either gun them down or make a run for it if they do get alerted.

The other enemy type, featured in the statue exclusive to the collector’s edition, is a lovely new thing called Two Head. Two Head comes up in the later part of the game, but if you take half of it down, the other half will still squirm its way towards you.

The Callisto Protocol launches on December 2. It’ll be available on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and PC.

Source: GamesRadar / YouTube