The Callisto Protocol is one of the most visually advanced games currently available. With extremely high quality assets paired with multiple ray tracing effects, it packs some truly superb visuals – at least if you’re playing on a high-end console or PC – but despite its remarkable graphics, The Callisto Protocol is a cross-gen title, which means it also ships on last-gen consoles, including the nine-year old base machines. So how did Striking Distance Studios manage to cram this game onto the PS4 and Xbox One? Is last-gen Callisto serviceable, or do the cuts simply run too deep? And if so, is this perhaps indicative of the beginning of the end for cross-gen development?
To put it frankly, The Callisto Protocol is seriously downgraded on last-gen consoles in a way we rarely see in cross-gen games. There’s a clear generational divide, and putting the best version up against worst – PlayStation 5 vs Xbox One S – there’s a vast gulf between them. The first and most obvious difference lies in texture quality. Across the board, the artwork has been hugely simplified. Texture resolution is much lower on just about any surface in the game and it’s not just resolution that’s been cut back – a lot of overlaid textures are simply missing.
On top of that, there’s a streaming problem too: after loading a save, textures can take a while to load in fully on older hardware, sometimes taking upwards of 10 seconds before the full-res assets appear. The last-gen machines are simply way behind current-gen here, with smeared and low-detail 2D artwork. Model geometry is similarly simplified. Environments look significantly chunkier and often have a bit of a low-poly look. Broadly speaking most aspects of the game environment have less geometric complexity on the last-gen console platforms. Most of the coarse details on the walls and ground are still represented to some degree, but they have usually been decimated somewhat relative to current-gen machines. In a couple of instances, I was able to spot larger cutbacks as well – actual parts of the environments removed. Ground clutter can also see obvious cutbacks. These items don’t seem to affect collision but do add some ambience that is missing on the weaker hardware.
