Why was Callisto Protocol Criticized so heavily? REDDIT ANSWER + YOURS

[CryoKeen]

Saw this explanation on reddit and thought it was very fair. Figured I would post it here. Now that I know that dodging is easier and healing is faster, I might actually reinstall this game and finish it sooner. Didn't realize what a big patch Dec 15 was for not just stutter issues.

I DID NOT WRITE THIS POST BELOW JUST COPY PASTING IT:

Originally posted by OGLonelyCoconut:

From someone who loves the game, the main criticisms that weren't performance related boil down to:

One. Rough combat.

In the first days, before the Dec. 15 patch, dodging was harder. You had to be holding it well before the attack or you'd get a failed dodge, where Jacob would still take a hit. At the same time, many would dodge only once and try to start attacking in retaliation, again getting them hit. This led many to believe the dodging was bugged, despite the fact they weren't engaging properly with this game's dodging mechanic.

Two. The save system.

The auto saves can feel really spaced out sometimes, leading players to lose ten or more minutes of progress. This is still a common complain, along with how manual saves don't save a new save state, but make a hard save of the last autosave. This also creates situations where players will spend a long time upgrading weapons, die, then have to not only redo the section, but redo their upgrades as well, which can lead to frustration.

Three. The lack of puzzles.

Many were hoping for more Dead Space-like puzzle sections using the GRP. I personally don't mind this, but to others it feels like a let down.

Four. The story.

The final 5 minutes are great, but the final 30 seconds can leave a sour taste in one's mouth, if they aren't used to the types of endings Glen is known for. Aside from that, many think it's a very generic or cliche story. Again, I personally thought it was fine, but is still a general criticism.

Five. Audio logs.

The audio logs don't automatically play, you can't play them over gameplay, and you have to dig into you inventory to find them. Some find this to be tedious.

As for pre-patch, many also complained:

One. Healing and reloading was too slow, making it a pain to heal in combat or swap weapon frames, but it's now twice as fast as before.

Two. Complaints of the crawling enemies that jump on Jacob, pre patch they were in a lot of lockers, post patch iirc there are none in lockers and they removed a bunch from the loot boxes as well.

Three. General difficulty, people just thought it was too hard, and the combat difficult to understand and engage with. After Dec. 15, grapples deal less damage and you can break out of them faster, enemies generally deal less damage in all difficulties, and Jacob seems to deal a bit more damage in general.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheCallistoProtocol/comments/100r919/now_being_50_done_with_the_game_i_can_confidently/

[Chrille 🎃]

The game is bad, we all know it. Some are coping more than others, which is both comedic and sad. Comedic, since some people excuse the games flaws and give really funny reasons why. At the same time it is sad to see that some people do not expect more quality of their purchases and have such low standard.

I could speculate about the reasons but I rather not, since that would mostly result in people attacking me with insults. Some seems to be temporatily banned, but they will probably return, even more angry and with more insults.

[CryoKeen]

Originally posted by Chrille:

The game is bad, we all know it. Some are coping more than others, which is both comedic and sad. Comedic since some people excuse the games flaws and give really funny reasons. At the same time it is sad to see that some people do not expect more and have such low standard.

I think it's kinda bad, but other people apparently LOVE IT, im guessing most people who never played Dead Space or already love Dodge mechanics from other games

[Chrille 🎃]

Originally posted by Haeley 'CryoKeen':

Originally posted by Chrille:

The game is bad, we all know it. Some are coping more than others, which is both comedic and sad. Comedic since some people excuse the games flaws and give really funny reasons. At the same time it is sad to see that some people do not expect more and have such low standard.

I think it's kinda bad, but other people apparently LOVE IT, im guessing most people who never played Dead Space or already love Dodge mechanics from other games

Yea, probably the combo of both. Maybe they have not seen great examples of good gameplay mechanics and so they believe this is it.

[Wiesshund]

Rough Combat:
Yes, unfortunately there were a lot of people who just could not figure out the combat
and a lot of them would get so mad that you could not even try to help them out and explain it to them.

It was not broke mind you, it did work, it did exactly what they had designed it to do
it was harder pre 12/15 patch.
But mostly you just had to stop holding onto how ever [insert game here] worked
and figure out what this game wanted from you, and what it was going to punish you for
(like button spamming when the game didnt ask you to)

Save System:
I did not mind the save system.
I get what people did not like about it, they wanted it to make incremental saves like other some games do, but it wasnt the way the devs chose to go.

The save method they used was not broken, nor was it some alien concept.
There are many critically acclaimed games in which you can only save at a save point
only save at the Inn so to speak.

They Did on the other hand fail to clearly explain the save system, especially the manual saves, if they would have clearly and simply explained things, well i dont know if less people would be mad actually?
But their gripe would change to saving is broke to your save method choice sucks.

I think no matter what, they were going to get a lot of vocal people over not being able to just randomly save where ever.
Does not mean it should be changed.

Lack of Puzzles
Eh, i was actually thankful for lack of puzzles, dont think the game was really designed around puzzle solving, and i would have hated having to sit around doing GRB puzzles
just for the gimmick of it.

I dont hate puzzle games, when the game has been carefully designed around it and the puzzles are well crafted, but i hate when someone just throws them in to say look, we have a puzzle.

The Story
Not sure what is meant about the final 30 seconds?
It's basically saying
"Hey, it might not be over, but i need you to buy the expansion"

Maybe everyone here is just really Young and i am really old.

Every Edgar Rice Burroughs story basically ends this way
Everything looks over and then BOOM
Someone kidnaps Deja Thoris!
And you have to wait until the next story comes out and buy it to find out what the hell just happened.
And that happens EVERY single book, until it is really the end
(which just means that we go to another set of books about another character mentioned in the previous set, and this set of books will end the exact same way.)

I guess no one reads him anymore, he used to be popular.

Audio logs
They are what they are i guess.
If i could, i would have begin playing them, closed the UI and continued on about killing.

But

Then i probably would NOT really pay attention to the logs
(im guilty of that in doom all the time)

I guess they wanted to make sure that you focused on what was going on in the logs
and figures you really wouldnt pay any attention if the log is playing while you are busy doing wack a spitter?

I wish the last picked up log flashed blinked or something, often the name info fades away
before you get to see it and then you have to figure out which log it is.
and what section it is in, since some people have logs spanning sections

Healing and Reload/weapon swap
See this is where i think they messed up by patching these so that a cadaver can heal
and effortlessly reload in a fight.

And this is going to get a lot of hate but
If you have to reload mid fight or heal, you need to back up and redo the fight until you can get things down and not have the need.

No one would be able to heal, like the game portrays it, while something is beating on you.

The one handed weapons all share a common frame
No one is assembling a weapon while a mutant is slapping the shizz out of them

All the boss fights, where you can not create space or can not run away etc
All of those have break spots where you could reload, or heal or swap a weapon, pre patching.

None of the normal fights need reloading or weapon swapping
usually means you are relying on the gun too much and not leveraging the baton fully.
You want to come through these fights not need to swap weapons and not needing to heal, you want to be able to sell the med kits as they give 100 credits each
In Max Security, you will want those credits.
So if things go that bad, you want to come back to the checkpoint and roll through that section again and see how you can do it different so you dont need to heal at all, or reload while in mid fight.

You do that, you will realize, you dont need no stinking heal kits, and you dont need to reload and are actually selling surplus ammo (Mo Money)

By changing it the way they did, i think they removed a big chunk of the anxiety and suspense that should be present in this genre of game.

They also removed and sense of accomplishment when you know you done screwed up
and just woke ever sleeping blind for 500m and some how, with no bullets left in gun and half a bar of red health, and no time to heal, reload or breathe, you some how manage to save your own arse and pull through it.

even better when stomping the corpse heads afterwards heals you for free.


I wish they didnt take the jumping spermatozoids out of the lockers
(I also wish they would have randomized them since you can memorize the locations)
Granted, they are a one trick pony as you will mostly remember then on 2nd play through
but they are a great little tension/anxiety builder
You start not trusting boxes and lockers.

Id like to have the original difficulty back at least for medium and max security
leave the post patch as low security is fine

[danygia]

Because it runs better on a PS5 than a 4090.

[Wiesshund]

Originally posted by danygia:

Because it runs better on a PS5 than a 4090.

It runs better on my PC than your 4090 and his PS5
though i am not sure what that means exactly?

There is a guy here, someplace, running it on a 4090 with RT on, and running it well.
find some of his posts and videos, and ask him how he has stuff configured?

[danygia]

Originally posted by Wiesshund:

Originally posted by danygia:

Because it runs better on a PS5 than a 4090.

It runs better on my PC than your 4090 and his PS5
though i am not sure what that means exactly?

There is a guy here, someplace, running it on a 4090 with RT on, and running it well.
find some of his posts and videos, and ask him how he has stuff configured?

There's stuttering and low FPS. 4090 get 30 FPS at some points.

[IDKFA]

Because it offers little to no innovation, has a very short length, virtually ZERO replay value (at this time and for another ~6 months) and oh yeah, a launch made the game unplayable for most people for 2 weeks, even still most of us are playing without raytracing just to make the game not s..s.... DID I STUTTER!?

[Wiesshund]

Originally posted by danygia:

Originally posted by Wiesshund:

It runs better on my PC than your 4090 and his PS5
though i am not sure what that means exactly?

There is a guy here, someplace, running it on a 4090 with RT on, and running it well.
find some of his posts and videos, and ask him how he has stuff configured?

There's stuttering and low FPS. 4090 get 30 FPS at some points.

I dont have an nvidia card at all, but there is a guy in this discussion area, that is running a 4090 and he is running it with RT on.

I dont know how he has his system configured etc, but he is running @4K 60fps or better.
See if you can find him in one of these threads, and see if he will tell you his configuration
it cant hurt

[✪ Wuhan Warrior 🍉🍉]

To be fair, game's not terrible. It's really just not up to par with the design quality and expectations people have for a AAA studio selling the game with a AAA pricetag. To be fair I did fall in love with the graphics. But a pretty lil' thing does not make it a good game.

I'm not sure why people are accepting such a mediocre quality of a game and would justify paying a full price for a game which doesn't even have a proper ending (rather just a cliffhanger) and one which forces people to buy the DLC, making the game even more expensive than the original $60.

It's just not worth the $$$. The more people "normalize" this practice, the more lower quality games one can expect moving forward.

[Ting]

I continue to wish that people who have finally come to grips with the combat could have played the original version of the game: it challenged you so much more and in interesting ways. I was able to replay the game nearly three times in the original version, and was ready and *excited* to do a 4th, but then the 12/15 patch hit and just turned the game into a snooze fest in comparison. It completely sapped by desire to play it again out of me, because I knew I would find no challenge.

People right now who complain about the game giving them no reason to go back in, I feel that *so much*. Because for me, replaying games is about challenging myself, and while I feel somewhat excited for the custom difficulty, if it uses the i-frames of the current dodge and mechanical balance post-patch, you could probably crank that ♥♥♥♥ all the way and it still won't hold a candle to Normal mode pre-patch.

[Wiesshund]

Originally posted by Ting:

I continue to wish that people who have finally come to grips with the combat could have played the original version of the game: it challenged you so much more and in interesting ways. I was able to replay the game nearly three times in the original version, and was ready and *excited* to do a 4th, but then the 12/15 patch hit and just turned the game into a snooze fest in comparison. It completely sapped by desire to play it again out of me, because I knew I would find no challenge.

You needed to join the Heineken challenge.
Well, you'd kinda have to live close, cause you cant just mail a case of Heineken

Max Security
Not allowed to die, at all
Not allowed to use heal injectors, at all (you can pick up the instant gel packs)
You can only upgrade one gun, which you must declare before starting, and once you have said gun in base form, you may not use any of the other guns.

I went with the skunk gun
Ferris was still too easy, but i mean Heineken!!!
He'd be even easier, if they gave more crawlers to throw in his face, but he didnt really live to
see the 2nd crawler wave anyways

[Grr. [SG CMD] Majah Lazah]

The game was never hard and the reloading and meds were fine.

The game's story is schofield 101, which seems to be polarizing.

Puzzles are overrated but people seem to need them to check a box. Lee isn't an engineer, so craft a thingie makes zero contextual impact to the game.

Audiologs: Hit or miss, except for three add nothing to the story but force everything to come to a halt.

Analog Dodge: Trash. It just is. Using analog... "analogs" for digital inputs is just simply pants on head bad. Ranks up there with Mass Effect's "one button does everything" retardation.

The game's frametime and input resolve performance are an open trashfire right now, much less on launch day when they were a continent sized garbage fire.

Game still has, right now, audio stuttering and Ik stuttering.

State/Save system is trash.

[Kai]

Will this nonsense of convincing people whether this game is good or bad ever end? What drives people spend all their time whine and cry like this for weeks

[vann7]

Good question.. what drives people to try to convince others who like the game to stop playing it ? Simply they are trolls ,that had nothing better to do.. Instead of trying another game , they come here to let us know ,that we should not be playing the game because they don't like it.. The game is AWESOME and best way to stop the trolls is to cheer the game ,so they leave. and stop crying . If they don't like it , is their problem. most people like the game.. only a minority of people don't like it. I rather play Callisto protocol many times over than The Witcher 3 crap ,with its boring character development and disastrous combat.