When Disco Elysium came onto the scene in 2019 It completely messed up RPG storytellingand paves the way for new ways to captivate players and create worlds. Surely it was just the beginning of something new, bold and exciting. Instead, things became very chaotic very quickly. Now multiple teams of former employees are struggling to find a spiritual successor, and the situation is only getting more confusing.
Disco Elysium was founded by ZA/UM, an art collective turned game studio that now, five years later, seems to be in a very difficult position. Some of the original creators, including lead author and designer Robert Kurvitz, were evicted or fired. Others were They were laid off in mass retrenchments earlier this year. In the middle exposed, Problems at workAnd Fraud allegationsa direct sequel to Disco Elysiumexpansion as well as several independent side projects, were all reportedly cancelled.
Today there are three groups of developers formerly associated with ZA/UM and Disco Elysium All announced new studios are working on it Role playThat sounds a lot like spiritual successors. Longdue was first. Led by Grant Roberts, a former senior writer at Bungie, it claims a team of developers from ZA/UM, Rockstar Games and elsewhere, teasing a “psychogeographic RPG” mechanic in which players’ decisions alter the world around them.
“While Longdue’s debut project draws on the creative energy and legacy of Disco Elysium and other popular role-playing games like Planescape: Torment“It is also designed to stand on its own as a useful addition to the RPG genre,” the studio said wrote in a press release. A single piece of concept art shows shadowy figures in a cave pointing to rays of golden light.
Then there were Dark Math Games. This studio is working on a “real detective RPG” called XXX night shift. There are a Steam page And a real trailer. The number of employees is claimed to be around 20 people, of which around half were reportedly working Disco Elysium. Its artistic director is Timo Albert, who is responsible for the original game in publishing. The studio also lists Kaur Kenderan executive producer of Disco Elysium who, as a director, was at the center of the controversy surrounding the ZA/UM founders’ departure from the studio who resigned last year.
Now there’s also Summer Eternal, the third studio announced today, whose main difference is that it’s helmed by two of the original writers Disco ElysiumArgo Tuulik and Olga Moskvina. Among them is ZA/UM author Dora Klindžić, who worked with Tuulik in this studio on the direct sequel until the mass layoffs at the beginning of the year.
“I saw good work at ZA/UM,” she said told Sports Illustrated at the time. “I have also seen management and production staff terrorize creatives, lie, play power games, turn people against each other, destroy relationships and destroy people’s self-esteem.” She added: “The mask has slipped from the face of capital. What remains at ZA/UM is a cold, negligent company where managers wage war on their own creatives, where artistry comes second, and where corporate strategy is shaped by an arrogant contempt for its own audience.”
In keeping with this sentiment, Summer Eternal is also launching as an art collective, seeking to collaborate again with artists, designers and others who have worked on it before Disco Elysium as well as others. The group’s website lays out its manifesto, artistic vision and studio facility, which is a worker-run cooperative. It sounds like we’re still in the early stages of thinking about what the first role-playing game will be.
“I believe we created something cross-genre last time,” Tuulik wrote in a press release. “Cross-disciplinary. Something completely new. I’m not ready to give this up. The lessons learned, the skills developed, the experiences gained – I’ve been waiting to put them into action for five damn years. So we went back to the drawing board with one goal in mind: let’s do it again from the beginning, but this time we don’t want to fuck each other in the ass as soon as the checkered flag drops. It makes all of humanity look bad.”
It is unclear how this will all turn out. We probably won’t see finished games from many of these teams for a few years. ZA/UM seems to be the only remaining projects now Disco Elysium mobile spin-off and a completely independent role-playing game set in an entirely new fictional world. Robert Kurvitz, the original creator, appears to have his own studio, Red Info, but it’s unclear what it’s up to at the moment. He gave a lecture in the summer about how to build worlds in video games. Hopefully we’ll see something like that Disco ElysiumAt some point it will happen again.
