Disco Elysium: The Final Cut is the best version that comes to comfort

When Disco Elysium released in 2019, it started garnering awards. The contest won awards during The Game Awards, DICE, GDC and the BAFTAs. Despite the success of the role-playing game, developer ZA / UM always wanted more Disco Elysium. That does not mean that it does not Disco Elysium, released two years ago, was an unfinished game; rather, ZA / UM has not yet seen the success needed to fully fund everything its designers wanted to build.

‘The final track was very much the plan from the beginning, ”lead author Helen Hindpere told Polygon, referring to the upcoming expanded release of the detective game. ‘In many ways it’s the Disco Elysium we dreamed of launching when we started development in 2014. ”

Disco Elysium is not a traditional role-playing video game. It is similar to role-playing games on paper and paper, without fights; decisions are made through dialogue and skills checks. Players assume the role as a detective who has no recollection of his past but who is in charge of a murder spell. The mystery itself is almost secondary to the choice of the player in the story; you can decide what kind of person you are, and the decisions send the detective and his personal politics on one of the four main paths: communism, fascism, moralism or ultra liberalism.

Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, which is expected to be released in March, is still the game, but with “more beauty, more freedom, more things to do,” Hindpere said. After all, there is ‘always more room for virtue in the code’.

With the success of Disco Elysium, ZA / UM was able to sit more in Disco Elysium: The Final Cut: new storylines, characters and cut lines, plus a full English voice-over. The final track will be available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and as a free upgrade for existing players on Windows PC. (It’s coming to Nintendo Switch and Xbox Series X later this year.)

Games like Minecraft, Ear Watch, en Stardew valley is never really finished. It’s something that makes games unique – people do not expect it to be completely done when they are released; there is always something in which you can paste.

“We’re not listening to a Beethoven symphony and saying, ‘Need more fly horn,'” Hindpere said. (Although, perhaps, Beethoven did feel that way!) ‘I think it’s because games are just bigger in the promise they hold. This is a mere thing. The human ear can hear just as many notes in 40 minutes, but all senses in four days? We can make the experience so perfect that the kingdom is coming. ”

She continues: ‘The expandability of games, especially RPGs, testifies to how great an art form it is. People still perfect Fallout: New Vegas to this day! “

More to matter

For The final track, ZA / UM focused its efforts on a few different areas: recording voice recordings for the entire game (1.2 million words, according to Hindpere) and expanding the scope of its political choices, both of which Disco Elysium fans.

‘Before I Launched Elysium“I always thought ‘listening to our fans’ stuff was just lip service,” Hindpere said. ‘You should not listen to anyone, especially not with an uncompromising story like ours. But it seems that there is also wisdom in the masses. A million people come through your game shall has smart things to say about it. The most some of it is still hot rubbish – but some are pretty smart. ”

Hindpere said some people criticize Disco Elysiums political choices, that it does not matter enough in the game. ZA / UM searched through this kind of critique and analyzed what players were really doing. The team asked themselves, what does it mean for your politics to ‘matter’? in an RPG?

‘Disco Elysium is a politically realistic game, ”Hindpere said. ‘One drunk policeman will not start the World Revolution. The kind of ‘I choose which side wins’ power fantasy may never be part Disco Elysium. But extra content was planned – political content that we could not get into the original version. ”

In The final track, each important ideology has its own exclusive streak, called Political Vision Investigations, to follow – something to explore, even if it is straight after failure.

The new content has been adapted according to each ideology, unlike a ‘more classic expansion area that is equally accessible to all buildings’, according to Hindpere. This is what makes Disco Elysium unique; it is ridiculous and strange in its tone, while still telling an important and political story. The character, and what players do with him, is where conflict is created, with everything around the player’s choice – what to be.

Speak the world

Disco Elysium builds a complex world around the central character. This changes based on the player’s choice. The world of the game is illustrated by a series of unplayable characters, but when it was first released, it was not completely pronounced. There were many vocal performances, but not nearly the entire game. ZA / UM has undertaken a major challenge to Disco Elysium for The final track, and this is something that will pay off for all players. (Especially comforters who don’t just have to rely on reading large portions of text.)

To put these voices into play, ZA / UM was internally looking for a voice director, something that large RPG studios tend to outsource this task, Hindpere said.

“The amount of lines is just too big, I think,” she explained. ‘With us, the play has to come from the same place where the rest of the play comes from. Our ambition, our risk. Jim Ashilevi, a classically trained theater director, was given the task and, along with writer Cash de Cuir and original director Mikee Goodman, acted.

‘The characters of Disco Elysium are all right people for us, ”Hindpere said. ‘We wrote to them in sincere faith that they really exist. That they have souls that demand dignity. That means we absolutely could not do the tongue-in-cheek video game VO. We did not have it to fall back on. ”

Revachol, where Disco Elysium is a world capital, ‘she said. “Broken and broken, but still – it represents the whole world in its own way. The people of Revachol must sound like they come from a multitude of different cultural backgrounds. In essence, it means a lot of accents. ”

The focus was on creating a world that came alive with different voices. “In this voice of voices, chirping birds, a crazy dawn of chorus,” Hindpere said. “That’s pretty.”