The Callisto Protocol director Glen Schofield came onto Twitter to clarify the situation with the death animations found on the DLC.
As we had reported in the Season Pass, The Callisto Protocol offers new death animations for some of their DLC. The Contagion Bundle promises thirteen new death animations for Jacob. The Riot Bundle subsequently has thirteen new death animations for the enemies.
While fans are looking forward to these new animations, some have become critical of these announcements. They have started speculating that this is content that is deliberately being held back to be resold as DLC. This sort of thing is a common accusation for many AAA video games, and in many cases, the developer and publisher really did choose to cut up their games this way.
On Twitter, Glen shared this statement:
“To be clear: We’re not holding anything back from the main game for the season pass. We haven’t even started work on this content yet. It’s all new stuff that we’ll be working on in the new year. Fans have asked for EVEN MORE deaths, so we’re making it a priority next year.”
It’s a weird situation for The Callisto Protocol studio Striking Distance Studios to manage. While the company has the scale and experience of a AAA, it comes from a comparatively new studio. Striking Distance Studios was itself set up by Krafton, a Korean game company that is just now trying to get out of its comfort zone, in publishing more games to the West.
But in terms of talent and manpower, Striking Distance Studios is more than capable of delivering the AAA game experience that fans expect, after all the previews the company has brought to what has been sold ostensibly as a spiritual successor to Dead Space.
Whatever resources Striking Distance Studios may not have, they would be more than capable of covering up for. It was recently revealed that the company brought all their motion capture needs, as well as some cinematic work, to the PlayStation owned Visual Arts Service Group. Given that The Callisto Protocol is coming to multiple platforms, this was likely work for hire, and Krafton and Striking Distance Studios would not have problems finding resources like this for their future games.
If there are good reasons to be skeptical of a new studio like Striking Distance Studios, we can still give them the benefit of the doubt.
The Callisto Protocol will be released on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on December 2, 2022.
Source: Video Games Chronicle