Disco Elysium’s lead writer and designer Robert Kurvitz and art director Aleksander Rostov are not involved.
They seem like major people to lose considering those were the strongest areas of the game…
Hopefully there’s still enough talent on the team to make something great, but I wouldn’t go in with high expectations at this point.
Kurvitz created the entire Elysium universe. He wrote Sacred and Terrible Air and fleshed out the world through pen-and-paper RPGs. He and Rostov were demoted and then fired following a hostile takeover of the development studio.
If Kurvitz and Rostov are not involved, then Disco Elysium is dead.
I know DE is dead, but I have questions about anything this studio could put out.
It’s not meant as a knock on the game, but what did DE even have besides the universe, writing and art design?
The rest of the game was fairly basic and just supplemented the story and art. Voice acting was the only other thing that really stood out to me.
Then you are not the target audience. Disco Elysium didn’t need to be anything more than what it was: an interactive novel where the narrative reveals itself through your actions. Other gameplay systems, like crafting, combat, or survival, would have detracted from the experience. Asking for more is asking for a different game.
What about the skill dialogues? Having the world revealed through the colored, polarized, conradictory, and often misleading perspectives of two dozen parts of your own fragmented psyche, instead of a single narrator, is genius. I don’t think I’ve seen another game with the protagonist having a conversation with themselves about a tiny detail of the world.
I did try to make a point of saying it’s not a knock on the game… I really like DE.
My whole point is that the story and art are everything to the game, so if you take those away from the studio then there’s not much of note left.
I’m not saying it should’ve been a battle royale instead 😂
Reminds me of Diablo and how in the years after the original you’d see so many clones with “from one of the people who worked on the original Diablo.” I think Torchlight, Titan Quest, and Nox all got advertised this way at one time. I mean it’s pretty common in any industry. How many movies have you seen advertised as being directed by “the creators of hit movie whatever” and its like the 3rd unit DP in charge?
It was a big team that made that game. I know there were 6 full time writers for most of the development, and a pretty substantial art team as well. I don’t expect them to be able to fully recapture that lightning in a bottle that was Disco Elysium, but there was some pretty substantial talent working there. It’s certainly not a given, but it’s pretty reasonable to hope they can do something great.
Selfishly, I hope you’re right, but with the addendum that I hope they don’t try too hard to recapture that lightning, and that they trust in their own ideas. I also hope Rostov, Kurvitz and Helen Hindpere (writer who also lost her job as things fell apart) find success and fulfillment in their future. It’s fucked up that they won’t get to work on Disco Elysium — especially Rostov and Kurvitz.
This is probably a bad example, given how it turned out, but I’m reminded of how it felt to be a Halo fan in 2013 — Halo 4 had recently come out to a mixed reception. It was the first Halo game to be developed by 343 industries rather than Bungie, and some of the disgruntled fans hoped that Bungie’s then-upcoming new game, Destiny, would scratch that itch. Destiny could obviously never be a replacement for Halo (some fans found it easier to consider the franchise to be dead), but jt wasn’t unreasonable to hope for (despite it eventually not working out that way ¯\(ツ)/¯ )
Wishing them all the best and that they take the time to make everything around legal stuff and ownership secure so that bad stuff can’t happen again. It is a shame that Kurviz and Rostov aren’t part of this, but DE had a lot of talent behind it and I trust everyone else too to be able to make something interesting. I also hope Kurvitz and Rostov will keep creating and sharing their creations in one way or the other with the world. It would be a shame if they retreated fully from making their art, because of what happened.
