![]() I was never going to get these people inspired enough to work or give four or five years of their lives away if it didn’t have real human relations, or reflect on the world we’re in. That group wouldn’t normally work well in a software company, but we knew immediately that if we wanted to put this together, it couldn’t be cyberpunk or high fantasy or dark fantasy. But we managed to compose a group of people who had mad ambitions for culture, for painting, for music, for poetry. ![]() “We were mostly left-wing people, not very popular nowadays in Eastern Europe.” recalls Kurvitz. ZA/UM Studio started out as a cultural movement, and a fantastically unsuccessful one by their own admission. To understand the setting of Disco Elysium, you need to understand the background of its creators. So yeah, we had to rename it to something more commercial and take a swing at cracking America with it.” I really feel we have a once-in-a-lifetime story hook, which isn’t easy to come up with for a role-playing game. But as we got further into development, the game really started jiving with people. “We thought was going to be a first road test to share what we’ve been building for, well, most of our adult lives. “The level of detail or realism that we’re going for tends to, it turns out, sort of explode things.” Kurvitz muses. It has undergone numerous changes - not least the wise decision to change the title from No Truce With The Furies to something more bizarre and memorable - but once the writers started getting their ideas onto paper, things snowballed rapidly. However, the game was never intended to grow as quickly as it has done. It was this need to transport organic world-building outside of verbal narration which influenced Kurvitz’s own novel - and this in turn led to the success and significant funding required to create Disco Elysium.Ĭoncept art shows a meticulous level of detail in even the smallest aspects of the game. As the likes of BioWare’s games developed from the homely isometric feel of Baldur’s Gate to the bland Mass Effect: Andromeda, more and more of that tabletop personality dissipated. Capturing that moment of tension in a video game has still not fully been realised. For anyone familiar with tabletop role-playing, whether it’s Dungeons & Dragons, Cyberpunk or any one of the countless settings and scenarios available, there’s nothing quite as magical as achieving something seemingly impossible with a character of your own making by simply forming an idea and executing it with a dice roll. I shudder to think of all of the hundreds of really, really good pen-and-paper games which just evaporate, so we decided to build our own world and ended up dedicating a large part of our lives to try and encapsulate this in a video game.” ![]() I think it’s as good as storytelling and culture gets. ![]() I was playing it with my young artist friends back then and we went really highbrow with it. “I’m something of an evangelist, and I started pouring into it my ambitions as a novelist. “I’ve been playing pen-and-paper since I was fifteen or sixteen,” says lead designer Robert Kurvitz. The prose in Disco Elysium has a very organic lilt which seems borne of tabletop role-playing games, though it turns out that this is no coincidence. We spoke with some of the talented studio’s team to learn more about the development of this hugely ambitious title. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this is the most exciting, atmospheric and accessible writing to grace a text-based RPG since Black Isle’s masterpiece and - dare we say it - could possibly be even better. If that sounds like a tasty crumb to lure you in, a delicious huge cake awaits you from the moment you sit down and start reading the gorgeous reams of dialogue and descriptive text slathered over every element of the game. Disco Elysium is a detective game which casts you as a barely functioning alcoholic pulled onto a case, where your wits are required to battle facets of your own mind as often as the characters you encounter. You see, Estonia and UK-based ZA/UM Studio has been grafting away at a title which could very well turn the entire RPG genre on its head. The quality of the writing is immediately apparent.
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