‘The Callisto Protocol’ has reduce its hyperlinks with the ‘PUBG’ universe and I am gutted about it

This Week in Video games is a weekly column the place Vikki Blake pulls aside the most important tales in gaming every week. This week, she mourns the severing of the hyperlink between upcoming horror The Callisto Protocol and PUBG‘s peculiar universe.

Few issues have shocked me extra in video games than the information that upcoming sci-fi horror The Callisto Protocol was going to be set within the PUBG universe, primarily – regardless of taking part in it for a lot of, a few years – I do not know what on earth the PUBG universe is meant to be.

That’s to not say that assertion didn’t intrigue the hell out of me, although. As I’ve touched on earlier than, PUBG’s authentic Erangel map, ostensibly a former Russian navy testing facility that’s since been deserted for hitherto undisclosed causes, has at all times fascinated me.

I do know that to a few of us – hell, perhaps most of us – it’s simply the background to a narrative-light battle royale and serves no objective apart from window-dressing. Shooters – good shooters, anyway – want cowl. Locations to cover. Someplace to duck into whilst you heal up or reload. And an deserted Russian city serves simply pretty much as good a spot for that as another, I assume.

For me, although, the world’s smashed-down doorways, boarded-up home windows, and
litter-strewn hallways have at all times informed their very own story… even when that story was an entire figment of my creativeness. The place are the individuals who as soon as lived in these houses? Why are these buildings empty, however automobiles sit nonetheless in garages? What the hell occurred to have seemingly worn out a complete inhabitants?

There’s an enormous senior college, large enough to sport its personal swimming pool (cool trivia: its design is seemingly primarily based upon a real-life deserted pool within the city of Pripyat, which was evacuated following the Chernobyl catastrophe). There are huge tower blocks that might’ve housed 1000’s of individuals. A navy base. A hospital, a mansion: a bloody jail. There’s even a sprawling complicated of underground bunkers, for fuck’s sake. Who constructed these items? For whom? And why?!

4 years after its preliminary early entry launch, PUBG launched a superb 17-minute mockumentary that retroactively injected the world with the lore I so craved. The 2021 video collection manufactured key characters and occasions that packed flesh onto the bones of the sport’s skeletal narrative and included particulars of the very first battleground match. A nine-day battle in 1994, it passed off on Erangel, a small island that had been decimated in 1965 when the civilian inhabitants was worn out by a battle with Soviet forces. The only survivor – eleven-year-old Sergei Kalimnick – went on to be the twisted architect of the battlegrounds.

It’s superior, proper? No, it doesn’t reply every part and a few elements don’t fairly fulfill me – I by no means had the sense that the houses I rummage by way of had been deserted within the 60s, as an example – but it surely was a begin. It was one thing.

So when The Callisto Protocol – a Lifeless House-esque sci-fi horror created by the co-creator of the unique Lifeless House (I’m detecting a theme right here) – stated it was going to hyperlink the fully new recreation to the PUBG franchise, I used to be surprised and delighted in equal measure. And when it was later reported that the hyperlink between the 2 video games had been severed as a result of “the connection would have taken away” from The Callisto Protocol‘s “personal story and world”, I used to be – effectively, am – inexplicably crushed.

Initially, the video games had been going to be linked by way of a 400-year timespan and no, I’ve no clue how Glen Schofield et al had been ever going to shoehorn a Lifeless House-esque sci-fi horror romp into the PUBG universe however holy shit, did I wish to see how they tried.

The mockumentary offered us an origin story to the battleground matches themselves, names of the important thing individuals concerned of their underground organisation, and the way the battle golf equipment themselves unfold out internationally. There could possibly be extra, although; there ought to be extra. Now, we’ll need to make do with “nods” to PUBG in Callisto which is… effectively, it’s higher than nothing, I assume, however barely.

Will it cease me from taking part in The Callisto Protocol? Ha, as if. It has house and weapons and aliens and, if it’s even half as terrifying as the unique Lifeless House was, it could simply give me a coronary heart assault. However even mid-scream, I’ll nonetheless be listening carefully for a point out of Sergei Kalimnick…

What else?