Announced at The Game Awards late last year, Striking Distance, the newly formed studio devised by the co-founder of Sledgehammer Games, revealed it would be working on a spiritual successor to Dead Space known as The Callisto Protocol. The initial cinematic reveal of the creepy new sci-fi title was a hit with fans, however, it became quite the talking point after the studio revealed it would be narratively connected to popular battle royale mainstay PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.
Although it's difficult to see how the two franchises are canonically linked, Dead Space producer and founder of Striking Distance Glen Schofield recently talked to GamesRadar about how significant the connection between the two games will be. According to Schofield, the two are joined more by lore than story, claiming that the way that The Callisto Protocol and PUBG are interconnected won't be "really deep."
"We're helping PUBG Corp right now as a team of writers, working on the lore for PUBG and its universe," Schofield tells GamesRadar when asked about his newest project. "They have a timeline, and we fit on that timeline now. It's not going to be really deep, but there will be little connections here and there," he continues, citing that the connections will crop up more through small references to one another than major, game-altering story beats. Of course, he tells the publication that it will make more sense when players actually get their hands on the game.
PUBG's story became a fixture of the game back in 2019, with its Season 4 cinematic trailer highlighting the tragic tale of a young boy who watched his family and friends killed in a bombing on the island of Erangel. Flashing forward into the future, the boy has grown into an exceptionally wealthy man, residing in a large manor and watching over a series of surveillance feeds of the island of Erangel. It seems he now runs the PUBG games that players can hop into online, searching to see who, like him, has what it takes to be a sole survivor.
The Callisto Protocol, on the other hand, seemingly revolves around a futuristic space prison, with the cinematic trailer focusing on an inmate contained within the facility. Something appears to be wrong with the robots patrolling outside his cell, so the inmate gets up to check, all the while failing to realize his cellmate has transformed into a zombified creature reminiscent of Dead Space's necromorphs. He is soon attacked by the creature, with the trailer cutting to someone watching a feed of the inmate's death from a control room based on a mysterious moon. Whatever's going on, the link between both games has made them all the more intriguing.
The Callisto Protocol is slated to release on PC and consoles in 2022.
Source: GamesRadar