In a popular post on the Disco Elysium subreddit about a year ago, a fan named u/rTacoDaddy made the following prediction: “The Disco Elysium sequel will have a hundred thousand stories with a hundred thousand creators.”
This phenomenon will be known in the future history of video games as the rise of disco style– A new subgenre that seamlessly combines elements of RPG and adventure through a unique and innovative dialogue system developed by former ZA/UM developers in the innovative detective RPG released on October 15, 2019. Today is its fifth anniversary.
Five years later, the Disco is becoming more than just a burgeoning indie niche. Former ZA/UM developers, involuntarily eliminated by the studio’s corrupt senior management, have banded together to take back two—no, wait, (until now) Three independent independent studios developing their own spiritual successors..
One of these studies, Dark Math Gameshas released an official announcement trailer for her debut title: XXX Nightshift, in which you play a “Patrol Op” named Dinorah Katz, who finds herself stranded at a ski resort in Antarctica set in the year 2086.
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Disco Antarctica: XXX Nightshift is like new wave science fiction
Dark Math Games touts an “original sci-fi setting” in this Antarctic resort that “shouldn’t exist,” where your player character will interact with “people you shouldn’t know” who live in an “endless polar night that covers a multitude of sins.” This setting and setting seem to evoke the dystopian futuristic landscapes of JG Ballard. It seems like the kind of story or novel he might have written during the. SF New Wave Movement in the 1970s, satirizing the rich and powerful techno-elites. It’s finally time for Ballardian Disco.
The trailer seems like an interpretation of a surreal dialogue about how we wake up from sleep. It is a universal animal process in which, to some extent, we are always semi-aware of our surroundings as we move from sleep to wakefulness. We put off getting up and getting to work, knowing that we will have to face our problems and the increasing difficulties of life in a “world devoured in its pain,” as the saying goes. Smashing Pumpkins song. goes. But in XXX Nightshift, instead of waking up to the unpleasant hangover smells of Harrier Du Bois, you wake up wrapped in deliciously smelling chinchilla fur blankets in the biggest bed you’ve ever woken up in. Color me intrigued.
The developers promise a “deep single-player role-playing experience” in a layered game design that appears to closely follow the Disco-like model, according to first impressions of the trailer. They also tout a “unique companion dynamic,” although the writers will probably find it difficult to top the character design and development of the inimitable Kim Kitsuragi, one of the most adored companion characters in video game history. Still, we must keep an open mind, even if we believe these characters cannot be replaced.
Disco Elysium Studios: Longdue and Summer Eternal
The other two Disco development studios announced this Disco Day are called Long standing games and eternal summer. Neither studio has announced a game, but you can now subscribe to their newsletters to find out first-hand when they will do so. Their studio philosophy seems to overlap in several ways: Longdue Games promises “agency-driven storytelling” and “narrative-first and psychologically deep” RPGs where the focus is on depth at all levels: characters, environments, and narrative. Complex moral dilemmas are also on the menu. Options and Consequences (C&C), also known as reactivityThey are at the core of Disco Elysium and its revolutionary approach to speech testing, where failure can be as significant as success and often more entertaining to watch.
Longdue and Summer Eternal clearly intend to respect “the legacy of foundational story-driven RPGs” and hope to step into the shoes of ZA/UM after its official dissolution. The Summer Eternal website includes a manifesto that will literally make you see red; By this I mean the very strong background color used on the website, which made it difficult to read, but the message is powerful and definitely written with passion. A “Game Studio/Art Collective” was also ZA/UM’s overarching cultural project, and it’s nice to see these developers keeping that flame alive.
The most famous writers and art director of the original ZA/UM team, Robert Kurvitz, Aleksander Rostov and Helen Hindpere, are not involved in any of these projects or studies. The last we heard about Kurvitz and Rostov in the news was last year’s announcement of ZA/UM resolves its legal dispute with producer Kaur Kender. This prompted a statement from Kurvitz and Rostov (under the alias Taal, according to ZA/UM), which was followed by a response from the current ZA/UM leadership, challenging them to resolve the dispute in court and accusing them of “refusing to do so.” their jobs, creating a toxic workplace, degrading their colleagues, and attempting to misappropriate Studio intellectual property.” This is unlikely to be the last dispute, but no further developments have been reported since.
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The legacy of Disco Elysium and the promise of a thousand nightclubs
Disco Elysium has been compared favorably to dozens of popular and acclaimed games since its release for its writing and single dialog. Its legacy will continue to influence millions of creators of all kinds, even in the case of a bad sequel made without the original developers. This could be inevitable, and we can name numerous IPs that have been taken hostage by nefarious actors and numerous franchises that may never surpass their original game. As Alan Moore put it V for Vendetta“Ideas are bulletproof.” Disco Elysium is an idea more than a game franchise or intellectual property; an idea and a paradigm for telling stories in conjunction with art and music in a symbiotic relationship.
Other independent studios not affiliated with the original ZA/UM team have already become somewhat popular: Clam Man 2 is on my list of the funniest and most inventive upcoming indie albums, in which you play a stand-up clam man. I also had the opportunity to check out the steampunk Disco style. sovereign union Last January (as an independent reviewer) and I discovered that it has a lot of potential for sequels. Then there is esoteric refluxa comical D&D role-playing game with some wacky skill tests. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are many more Disco-likes in development and still unannounced.
I fully believe that, right at this moment, Disco-likes are being conceived by hundreds of ideators who would be kicked out of pitch meetings for threatening to shoot himself in the head if the executives did not agree to publish their games. But I pray above all for a Disco-type cryptozoology where we can communicate with other species like the Insuldian phasmid, so that we can witness once again the “violent and uncontainable miracle” of such encounters with cryptids and dialogue with other characters who search for them. I still cry when I remember my first encounter with the phasmid, and I don’t think anything can top that feeling.
The future of Disco-style adventure role-playing games is full of potential, almost as if a completely different genre has been conceived from the combination of the previous ones. This potential could also turn into saturation, but independent developers will continue to drive innovation. We all wanted ZA/UM to be successful and develop many sequels with the original team, but perhaps their success was also their downfall. They grew too big, too fast, became too common and commercially viable (including the Amazon Prime deal), confirming his own prejudices about capital’s ability “to subsume all criticism into itself.” What it cannot subsume, however, are the creators themselves.
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Elysium Disco: 10 Best Moments, Ranked
Disco Elysium offers one of the best narrative experiences in video games and, within it, some of the best moments in fiction.
- Released
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October 15, 2019
- Engine
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Unit
- JERS
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M for 17+ due to blood, sexual themes, strong language, drug use and violence
- How long to beat?
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23 hours
- metascore
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89
- PS Plus availability
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Additional and Premium