When Disco Elysium came onto the scene in 2019 it completely shook up RPG storytelling, spearheading new ways to immerse players and build worlds. Surely it was just the start of something new, bold, and exciting. Instead, things got very messy, very quickly. Now, multiple teams made up of former staff are racing to build a spiritual successor and it’s only getting more confusing.
Disco Elysium was created by ZA/UM, an art collective turned game studio that now appears to be in a very rough place five years later. Some of the original creators, including lead writer and designer Robert Kurvitz, were forced out or fired. Others were laid off in mass cuts earlier this year. Amid exposés, workplace issues, and allegations of fraud, a direct sequel to Disco Elysium, expansion, as well as a multiple unrelated side-projects, were all reportedly cancelled.
Today, three groups of developers formerly associated with ZA/UM and Disco Elysium all announced new studios working on RPGs that sound 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 other places, and is teasing a “psychogeographic RPG” mechanic were players’ choices reshape the world around them.
“While Longdue’s debut project draws from the creative energy and legacy of Disco Elysium and other beloved RPGs, like Planescape: Torment, it’s also crafted to stand independently as a meaningful addition to the RPG genre,” the studio wrote in a press release. A lone piece of concept art shows shadowy figures in a cave pointing to golden rays of light.
Then there was Dark Math Games. This studio is working on a “true detective RPG” called XXX Nightshift. There’s a Steam page and an actual trailer. It claims a headcount of roughly 20 people, about half of which reportedly worked on Disco Elysium. Its art director is Timo Albert, who is credited under publishing for the original game. The studio also lists Kaur Kender, an executive producer on Disco Elysium who was also at the center of the controversy of ZA/UM founders leaving the studio, as a director who resigned last year.
Now there’s also Summer Eternal, the third studio announced today whose main distinction is that it’s led by two of the original writers on Disco Elysium, Argo Tuulik and Olga Moskvina. It also includes ZA/UM writer Dora Klindžić, who had been working with Tuulik on the direct sequel at that studio up until the mass layoffs earlier this year.
“I’ve seen good work done at ZA/UM,” she told Sports Illustrated at the time. “I’ve also seen management and production staff terrorizing creatives, lying, playing power games, turning people against each other, destroying relationships and people’s self-esteem.” She added, “The mask has slipped from the face of capital. What remains at ZA/UM is a cold, careless company where managers wage war against their own creatives, where artistry is second to property, and where corporate strategy is formed by an arrogant disdain for their own audience.”
In keeping with that sentiment, Summer Eternal is also launching as an art collective and seeking to re-engage with artists, designers, and others who previously worked on Disco Elysium as well as others. The group’s website lays out its manifesto, artistic vision, and studio setup which is a worker-owned co-op. It sounds like it’s still in the earliest stages of figuring out what its first RPG will be.
“I believe that the last time around we made something genre-breaking,” Tuulik wrote in a press release. “Discipline-transcending. Something completely new. I am not ready to give up on that. The lessons learned, skills developed, experience forged — for five fucking years I’ve been waiting to put them to use. So we went back to the drawing board with one goal in mind — let’s do it fresh from the start, but this time let’s not fuck each other the moment the checkered flag drops. It makes the entire mankind look bad.”
It’s unclear how this will all shakeout. We likely won’t see finished games from many of these teams for at least a couple of years. At ZA/UM, meanwhile, the only remaining projects appear to be a Disco Elysium mobile spin-off and a completely unrelated RPG set in an entirely new fictional world. Robert Kurvitz, the original creator, seems to have his own studio, Red Info, but it’s unclear what it’s up to at the moment. He delivered a talk over the summer on how to build worlds in video games. Hopefully, we see one like Disco Elysium’s again some day.