Dodging In The Callisto Protocol Doesn't Work

Or if it does it sure is weird

I played The Callisto Protocol and I have a lot of thoughts about the dodging mechanic. It’s unintuitive, it doesn’t fit well in an action game, and, at the risk of spoiling the conclusion: it doesn’t work. I don’t mean I don’t like it - I mean it doesn’t function correctly.

How Callisto Protocol Dodging Works (In Theory)

This explanation is easy to understand but reading it makes me a bit nervous. This is a game with action combat but this sounds like a very “cinematic” approach. The timing doesn’t matter. The direction you dodge in doesn’t matter except in a mini-game style way. Good action combat includes timing, reaction, anticipation, observation and mastery of systems, and this mechanic includes none of those. You don’t have to time, react to or anticipate enemy attacks, nor do you have to observe their incoming direction or range. You just hold left. There’s no system to master here because there’s no system - this is effectively a QTE.

Dodging In Games (And In Real Life)

Arguably jumping over a Goomba is dodging, but let’s consider video game dodges as a separate verb. Mega Man 3 had the slide. King of Fighters 94 has the sway dodge. Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! had a dodge in 1987. Dodging has been common in 3D action and adventure games since Ocarina of Time.

These dodges consist of two parts: moving out of the way of attacks (sliding under a projectile as Mega Man, slipping an uppercut as Little Mac) and using invincible frames (i-frames) to pass through an attack. (The KOF sway)

Real life has no i-frames but you can still dodge by moving out the way. In boxing this is “slipping a punch.”

Typically you slip a punch to the outside, as in this gif. (Towards the incoming direction)

This is also how you use i-frames to dodge attacks in games: you dodge into the attack, not with it, to minimize the time your hurtbox overlaps the enemy hitbox.

Video game dodges are nearly always systemic - you enter the command, your character performs the dodge, and the outcome is the result of interacting systems. If you dodge late and have many i-frames you’ll be safe. If you dodge late and don’t have i-frames you’ll be hit. If you dodge too early and in the wrong direction your i-frames may run out while the attack is still intersecting you. If you act early and your dodge has a lot of movement you may be safe simply from the space created, regardless of i-frames.

There’s no confusion about what happens when fighting multiple enemies. If those attacks don’t reach you or they only reach while you’re invulnerable you’re safe. Otherwise you get hit. If two enemies swing at you maybe you can use i-frames to avoid one and use the space created to avoid the other. Maybe you can pass through both attacks at once, or if the attacks are spaced out dodge one then dodge again to avoid the other. If you understand the basics of the system you understand how it applies to multiple opponents, and typically to projectiles and other damage sources as well.

Dodging In Callisto Protocol

Dodging in Callisto Protocol doesn’t work like the dodging in anything I can think of. I’ve seen people compare it to Punch-Out!! but that game is all about timing. (And in Super Punch-Out!! the direction you dodge sometimes matters) When making a game you don’t have to stick to what other developers have done; I dislike the game design school of thought of “we’re going to copy/paste from existing games and add our small twist.” But if you’re going to deviate from a well-established element - to break the rules of video game grammar - you need a good reason.

It’s very easy to technically describe what happens when you dodge in Dark Souls or Bayonetta or hundreds of other action-adventure games. Your character moves and/or is invincible for some amount of time. It’s hard to describe what actually happens when you dodge in Callisto Prototocol. Do dodges have invincibility or is it more that enemies are coded to pass through you if dodged in the correct direction? Put another way, if you successfully dodged an enemy attack and halfway through that dodge a fireball from someplace else passed through your body would you get hit?

Does the movement of your character matter? Can you dodge the wrong direction but still avoid getting hit because the hitbox flat-out missed your hurtbox? Does the game have hit and hurtboxes? Maybe not every gamer knows that terminology but they know that if an enemy sword intersects your head that’s a hit. If you dodge the correct way in Callisto but the enemy limb still intersects your body is that a hit? If you dodge the wrong way but the enemy limb totally misses your body is that a miss?

In Super Mario Brothers you press A and Mario jumps and where he lands is up to you. In games like Assassin’s Creed you hold the stick and your character sorta jumps around on his own. The Callisto Protocol dodge is a lot like the latter. You hold left and your character chooses when to dodge on his own, in a way that feels suggested rather than direct.

Is that fun?

In Dark Souls you have to choose precisely when to dodge and what direction to dodge in - that’s a major element of mastery in the action portion of the game. In Callisto Protocol you hold left.

If you want to grow as a game designer you should try to understand game design decisions even if you don’t like them. I don’t enjoy the basically automated platforming in games like Uncharted but I understand why it exists and I’ll concede that it may be the best choice for that game given the target audience. But it’s hard for me to understand why this is how dodging in Callisto Protocol works. I’ve heard the game described as a brawler or even a one-on-one fighting game but as someone who enjoys those genres I don’t get any enjoyment out of this system. I don’t understand what’s supposed to be enjoyable, other than that you can get into a certain rhythm and that feels good I guess?

It seems very animation-driven rather than action-game-mechanic driven. For the first 20 minutes of the game you slow walk through corridors, squeeze through tight passages, do cinematic-QTE-style vaults over objects, and lumber like a well-animated Frankenstein¹. The game is full of mini-cutscenes that take away player control. Towards the beginning of the game there's an exciting sequence where you have to crawl towards the cockpit and avoid getting sucked out into space and I'm genuinely unsure if I was controlling my character or if that was just a cinematic. I held up on the stick and occasionally pressed left and right and beat that section - did I have to use the stick? If so I was clearly giving vague suggestions to an almost entirely authored set-piece.

So my suspicion is that the dodge mechanic is also very animation-driven. The animators carefully crafted enemy attack animations and successful and failed dodge attempt animations. In order to look good those animations have to line up in space and time, which is why your character feels stuck facing enemies and why you have no control over the dodge timing - they are synchronized animations, more or less. That’s my best guess because it’s hard to understand what’s appealing about “hold left” as a combat mechanic.

Why Is Dodging In Callisto Protocol Hard?

If you hold left, regardless of timing, you automatically dodge any attack. Then you hold right and automatically dodge the next attack. This sounds trivially easy - really you should never get hit, at least when fighting one opponent. You walk up holding left, then after dodging switch directions and you’re invincible. Before playing the game myself I was ready to complain that the dodging is too easy.

But dodging in Callisto Protocol is weirdly hard!

I think this is because the implementation is just broken. But we’ll get there.

One of my video game design mantras is that a tutorial can’t make something that’s unintuitive seem intuitive. The Callisto Protocol tutorial is well-written and understandable² - that’s not an issue. But the system it’s describing is just strange. It’s just not how dodging works, in video games or real life, ever.

There are also a number of unfortunate decisions that make it hard to understand. When enemies attack their animations often include a very deliberate anticipation pose where they pull their arm way back to one side. If you fail to dodge an attack that clearly swung from left to right you might think “I dodged the wrong way”, because the animation makes the direction of the attack seem important. There’s a ton of animation weight given to a thing that doesn’t actually matter.

In theory the only reason to fail a dodge is you dodged in the same direction twice in a row. So if you fail a dodge should you dodge in the same direction the next time or the opposite one?

Say I dodge left successfully, then dodge left again and fail because you have to alternate sides. Now which direction do I dodge in? In one view the correct pattern was left, right, left - so I should dodge left again to get back on pattern. On the other hand if I dodge left again then I’ve entered left twice in a row (actually 3 times in a row) and the system is supposed to make me alternate. Maybe if I pressed left twice I need to get back on rhythm by pressing right next time - to re-establish the left-right pattern.

Left or right? Neither answer is more logical because the mechanic is so arbitrarily mini-gamey - either answer gets you back in rhythm, depending on your perspective. In most games I would adjust my timing later to take advantage of i-frames, or dodge earlier to create distance, or try to dodge into the attack rather than away. Figure out what I did wrong and correct it. With this mechanic there’s no logical wrong here, I just didn’t do what the game designers wanted me to do.

I have one other question that leads into the final “it just doesn’t work” section: how long does it take for the game to forget your last dodge direction?

What happens if I dodge an enemy attack and then trigger a 30-minute cutscene. When that cutscene ends do I have to dodge in the opposite direction? Ok 30 minutes seems awfully long but what about 5 seconds? 2 seconds? What if I dodge, attack once, then need to dodge again. What if I dodge, take one tiny step, then need to dodge again? In that case do I need to dodge in the opposite direction or have I returned to a neutral state?

Again it’s hard to know because the system has no underlying logic. There’s no reason why I should have to alternate dodges at all - that’s just how someone decided it should work. That same person also decided how long the system remembers your last dodge direction and holds it against you. There’s no way to hazard a guess other than they probably didn’t choose an extreme value like 1 millisecond or 10 minutes.

The Dodging is Fundamentally Broken

The dodging is hard because it’s not governed by any real logic, runs counter to the long-established history of dodging both in video games and real life, and is murky in the details despite the clear tutorial text. But also, even if you accept that the dodging is weird and just roll with it, it simply doesn’t work correctly.

At 4 seconds into this video why do I get hit? At 20 second in why do I die?

At 4 seconds in I’m clearly pressing left well before the attack hits me. According to the tutorial: “there isn’t a timing window. Just be holding left or right before the enemy hits you.”

I have just aggroed this enemy - before that he was doing a little mini-cutscene. Did I get hit because I dodged left before the mini-cutscene started and my new left broke the alternating rule? If so that’s wildly unintuitive. This is, in my mind, a fresh encounter. Maybe the game has horrible input lag and my left press didn’t register? I did press it pretty late but I definitely pressed it well before I got hit - I pressed it with the timing that would give you a perfect dodge / block in many action games.

At 16 seconds in I successfully dodge left. At 19 seconds in I dodge left again and die. Does that count as dodging left twice in a row? That’s 3 seconds later, which is an eternity in an action game. It’s not like the enemy did two strikes back-to-back, or even strike, wait a beat, strike. He swung once, walked backwards, waited, walked forward again, and then swung. This is very clearly (in my mind) a reset to neutral.

Here’s a second clip of the full tutorial encounter:

This is a mess. At 4 second in I dodge an attack and then the enemy grabs me. There’s a ‘Y’ QTE prompt and I hit him a couple times. Then at 11 seconds the next enemy attacks and I dodge the “wrong” way. You can see the game wants me to press right but I press left at first.

It’s been 7 seconds! Did the game really remember that I pressed left 7 seconds ago and hold that against me?

That’s what I thought at first. But it’s even worse than that. When I fight the first enemy I dodge left then right. When the second enemy attacks me it forces me to dodge right again. It doesn’t even register when I press left. So the game is breaking it’s own rules in the very first combat encounter. The game says that which direction you dodge in doesn’t matter, but it will only accept right and not left here. And right is the same direction I dodged in last time, when the system is supposed to make you alternate.

This is the tutorial encounter!

Why do I have to press right to dodge the second enemy? Is the answer that they only animated one dodge direction and prompt, and the one they chose to was incorrect by their own rules?

Halfway through the video I meet the enemy in the first clip. On his first swing I hold left and dodge successfully. In the first video I also held left and it didn’t work. Then I hold right and…get hit. Maybe there’s input lag but my character clearly dodges to the right before taking damage, which is the correct alternating direction. So I hold left and successfully dodge, then hold right, play a dodge right animation…and get hit?

How does this game work?

I get hit by the next attack as well. At this point I have no idea what’s happening. From my perspective the dodging fails at random, and once it fails for reasons I don’t understand I don’t know which direction to press to get back on pattern.

How Does This Actually Work?

The tutorial text says “there isn’t a timing window” and simply hold “before the enemy hits you.” But it also says “before the enemy attacks.” These are two very different things!

In every game I can think of the timing of the enemy attack - as in when the attack animation starts - is irrelevant. What matters is when the hitbox intersects your body. If you want to block or dodge you don’t enter the command as soon as you see the attack animation start up - a common trick in action games is giving enemies very long wind-up animations that fool the player into committing too early.

But I think in this system you have to input the command well before the attack hits you. At a certain point the game decides to play either a “you dodged successfully” animation or a “you dodged the wrong direction” animation. If you aren’t holding the correct direction well before the attack lands the game can also play a “you dodged in the correct direction but too late” animation.

Which would be fine except according to the tutorial that’s not how the game works. That’s also counter to how most games reward you for dodging / blocking as late as possible - with Perfect Blocks, Perfect Dodges, Dark Step³, White Blocking⁴, Just Defense⁵, Parry⁶, Guard Impact⁷, Universal Low Parry⁸, Witch Time⁹ - I can do this all day.

Point being I (and many other players) have years of muscle memory from games actively rewarding late dodging, and i-frame mechanics organically encourage late dodging as well. And here’s a game that specifically states that timing doesn’t matter, then punishes you for using what would be optimal timing in 98% of games.

I think. To be honest I’m guessing. I defy anyone to watch the videos above and explain how it works in a way that meshes with the tutorial text.

If it does work the way I now suspect - that you have to input very early - well that’s weird. And what does “before the enemy attacks” mean exactly? Does the wind-up part of the animation count as the attack or is that technically pre-attack?

Maybe the word “hold” here is key and you have to hold (well in advance?) then keep holding?

Let’s not even get into how this works with multiple enemies.

I said before that the tutorial text is clear - I have to amend that. If the mechanic just worked that would be true enough. Maybe “hold” vs “press” is a bit nebulous, sure. “Enemy attack” and “enemy hit” shouldn’t be used synonymously, if you want to be picky. But this is tutorial text not a detailed legal document - I’m only carefully studying the wording because the mechanic doesn’t “just work.”

And again: I don’t understand why you’d use this system in an action game anyway. (And not say in Asura's Wrath) Did they create elaborate dodge animations then realize they looked bad when played late, so the system is a workaround for that? Was the system designed by people who prioritized animation and this was their way to force synchronization? Or did a combat designer genuinely think this was a good system from a mechanics perspective?

I don’t get it. I don’t love how the mechanic reads on paper - even if it worked perfectly it sounds more Dragon’s Lair than anything else, which is not what I’m looking for in an action game. In theory it’s way too easy. I don’t like how opaque the technical details are and how it feels less like a system than a one-off. I don’t like that you can’t ever choose to dodge - instead you tell your character to walk left and he decides to dodge when he thinks the time is right.

But also it seems fundamentally broken. Or maybe the tutorial text (and the tutorial itself) is just wrong.

The section above might strike some as nitpicky, but as a reminder I’m approaching this as a game developer. You have to consider these things if you’re a gameplay programmer or a combat designer, even if they’re invisible to the average player.

In Conclusion: Git Gud?

I’ve seen a lot of complaints about dodging in Callisto and a lot of defenses - but most of those defenses are “it works fine lol game journalists don’t get it. Git gud.”

A developer (not one who worked on Callisto, to be clear) I won’t name shared a video of impressive-looking (in their mind, at least) combat along with this:

This is how The Callisto Protocol's combat is actually supposed to work, btw. For those of you who are passing judgement from footage. Not in any way implying you have to LIKE this, but this is much more accurate than some of the launch day gameplay I've seen.

What does “accurate” mean here?

To claim that your experience is more accurate than someone else’s is like looking at someone else’s photo and saying “what a bad selfie this looks nothing like me.”

Maybe by “accurate” they mean “representative” but that doesn’t seem true - based on the complaints and reviews (including Steam reviews, not just media reviews) the “bad” gameplay seems more representative of the average experience.

As a developer “everyone is playing it wrong” is rarely a wise comment. It’s part of your job to understand what the average experience will be, and to make sure players grasp enough of the game to have fun. Players don’t have to understand everything - the vast majority of players won’t. But they need to understand enough.

Plenty of people will play Bayonetta and never use dodge-offset, the ability to continue combo strings after dodging. When Street Fighter 2 first released players would pick Chun-Li and mash buttons to get lightning legs. You can have fun in Madden without knowing what a zone blitz is. These games are designed to be enjoyable at a variety of skill and understanding levels.

When you say “everyone is playing it wrong” the intent is “everyone but me is an idiot”, but the implication is “the designers failed at their job.” “Failed” is maybe a little harsh but video games are consumer products designed to used, not conversation pieces.

If you’re a professional door designer and everyone is using your door wrong you should ask why, instead of saying “it says push anyone pulling is an idiot.”

To their credit I haven’t seen this argument from the developers of Callisto Protocol, but it’s a common defense of the game. I’m far more receptive to “git gud” arguments than most critics but it’s just not applicable here. In particular I don’t know what I’m supposed to get good at - I seem to be operating the game correctly but it just doesn’t work.

Maybe after publishing this someone will point out that I didn’t understand the tutorial and was simply doing it wrong. I don’t think that will happen but it could. (Boy that would be embarrassing - move over Cuphead guy!) But even if that’s the case you have to ask why so many people get hung up on the dodging - call it “clunky”, declare it “broken”, claim it fails at random.

You don’t have to, I suppose - but as a developer you should.

1. Actually his monster, yes, I know…

2. Or is it? Keep reading….

3. No More Heroes

4. Street Fighter Alpha 3

5. Garou: Mark of the Wolves

6. Street Fighter 3

7. Soul Calibur

8. Tekken

9. Bayonetta