After a short delay owing to the arrival of some embargoed Witcher 3 content, DF Direct Weekly returns with its 89th instalment – featuring a chastened and bowed Alex Battaglia exhibiting extreme disappointment with his lot. The truth is, putting together our review coverage for The Callisto Protocol proved rather challenging. While the PlayStation 5 version of the game arrived in excellent shape, we faced production issues in reviewing the game because the other renditions of the title were essentially unfinished and we had no real idea if they’d be representative of the day one experience.
The biggest challenge facing us concerned the PC version – hence Alex’s dismay – which launched in a completely unacceptable state, rife with stuttering problems that swiftly condemned the game’s Steam rating and rendered the title basically unplayable. We reported these issues to the developer as and when we discovered them and were told they’d be addressed – but we couldn’t actually confirm whether this was the case until the arrival of the day one patch (improvements were slight). Meanwhile, throughout the review period, Xbox patches arrived that improved a game that was clearly experiencing issues that PS5 didn’t have. Even so, the game launched on Xbox without the ray-traced reflections that are very important to the look of the game in its quality mode – again, the developer is looking to address this but we can’t quite fathom why this happened.
We’re trying to find the time right now to re-examine the PC version, which received a day two patch that apparently improves the stuttering problem – but this is the most high profile example yet of a compromised PC port that should never have shipped in the state it did and highlights continuing problems with shader compilation stutter that have made this one of the worst years yet for PC gaming.
