Striking Distance Studios CEO, Glen A. Schofield, has been responding to complaints regarding the launch state of The Callisto Protocol. Soon after its December 2 release reports from both players and reviewers spread across the internet about massive stuttering issues. PC users reported that no matter how powerful a system they had, they could not brute force past rampant stuttering that persisted throughout the game. Many commented, and it was confirmed, that a large portion of the stuttering was due to caching issues which are a common challenge for developers, and the game’s first patch was quickly rolled out to address it. Shortly after that, the CEO began responding on Twitter to the complaints.
We hear you. As we say in the tweet, we will communicate and keep you all updated. We want you to play the game as intended. https://t.co/6PVt1ogNjE
— Glen A. Schofield (@GlenSchofield) December 4, 2022
I’ll take vacation when it’s fixed. The fans are my priority.
— Glen A. Schofield (@GlenSchofield) December 4, 2022
There were a sizable number of supportive replies to Glen’s posts but earlier on there were also some that had the CEO on a more defensive stance.
Being mean, cynical and acting like you know me isn’t making it go any quicker. I’d ask for patience and understanding as we fix this issue. We aren’t happy about it either.
— Glen A. Schofield (@GlenSchofield) December 3, 2022
Kotaku reports that Schofield had also stated that “a damn clerical error” was to blame for how the game was released because a wrong file had been patched into it. A second patch was released a few days ago to further address stuttering issues and DSOG has said it fixed all traversal stutters as well as those during scripted events but CPU optimizations still remain an issue.
We’re listening to your feedback and working hard to further optimize PC performance. Today we released a new PC update that improves PSO caching and further reduces any stuttering issues. Additional PC and console optimizations are in the works now. Stay tuned.
— The Callisto Protocol (@CallistoTheGame) December 7, 2022
Apology to the team
Clearly, the Striking Distance Studios CEO, and his team, have more work ahead of them but they are putting in the time to fix the game as quick as possible. It has been reported that they had been putting in an extensive amount of “crunchtime” hours in order to keep the launch date but now in retrospect the CEO has apologized following these events. A now-deleted tweet boasted about how much effort was going into getting the game out with a no-matter-what type approach but after the game’s launch, another addressed the consequences of such an approach.
“Anyone who knows me knows how passionate I am about the people I work with. Earlier I tweeted how proud I was of the effort and hours the team was putting in. That was wrong. We value passion and creativity, not long hours. I’m sorry to the team for coming across like this.”
Glen A. Schofield