On October 11, three different studios by ex-ZA/UM developers, previously worked on Disco Elysium, have announced themselves.
These are all three different studios, all claiming to be developing their own spiritual successor to the fantastic politically-charged detective CRPG.
The first to announce of the three was Longdue. This team is already have 12 members comprised of talents that worked on Disco Elysium and “its unreleased sequel”, as well as other industry veterans from Bungie, Rockstar and Brave At Night.
Longdue will be making a “psychogeographic RPG” where gameplay choices changes the characters and the surrounding world. This unnamed game is inspired by Disco Elysium as well as other RPGs like Planescape: Torment, and older RPGs series like Ultima and Wizardry.
As the press release describes this unnamed game:
“In this experience, the lines between the mind and the environment blur, colliding and transforming with each choice, leading players through an ever-evolving narrative landscape.”
So far, only two names are attached to Longdue and that is Grant Roberts (Narrative Director) and Riaz Moola (investor representative). Roberts is previously worked at Bungie among other studios. No ex-ZA/UM members are named yet.
The next to announce was Dark Math Games. Described as “a breakaway group from the original development team of Disco Elysium”, this team of 20 (half of which are ex-ZA/UM) is founded by four people, of which Timo Albert is one of them. Albert worked on Disco Elysium as a motion graphic designer, and now serves as Art Director/Technical Lead at Dark Math Games.
Dark Math Games announced their debut game, XXX Nightshift. This detective RPG has you play as Patrol Op Dinorah Katz who is stranded at a ski resort in Antarctica. And you’ll be solving cases with multiple options in doing so, utilising a role-play system. Screenshots and the reveal trailer show a very Disco Elysium-like presentation. A tall textbox that scrolls downward, a portrait somewhere between the text box and the isometric game world, ethereal narration.
XXX Nightshift will be coming to PC (Steam). No release date was announced.
And finally there’s Summer Eternal. Rather than a press release, this dev team has a website and the first image you see is a house on fire.
And there’s a manifesto that includes these sentences:
“Our art has been dressed down into an industry, and this industry has been pilfered by corrupt executives, by the vulgar profiteering of corporate bodies moving like leviathans in the dark, burning human fuel in their insatiable lust for money”
“Large language models— simulacra, cold comfort, real-doll pocket-pussy, cyberspace freezer of an abandoned IM-chat—which today passes off for ‘artificial intelligence’, will never be able to offer a dialogue with the vision of another human being.”
Summer Eternal has a few names attached to the collective, including Argo Tuulik (writer on Disco Elysium). Tuulik’s blog post on the Summer Eternal site is also filled with the verbose writing you’d expect from Disco Elysium.
These three new entities that are making a spiritual successor to Disco Elysium joins Red Info. This is a company created by Robert Kurvitz and Aleksander Rostov, two of the leading creative figures that founded the ZA/UM collective and created the IP of Elysium, which Disco Elysium is part of. According to People Make Games, Red Info has the backing of NetEase Games. Red Info has not made a public announcement of its existence yet.
Disco Elysium released on October 15, 2019 to critical acclaim. After the release, and the Final Cut version, ZA/UM has been rather rocky, to say the least. The company laid off staff and canceled its third project in two years back in February.
The People Make Games documentary details the mess which has resulted core members of ZA/UM to leave the company. And it also explains why not every ex-ZA/UM employee would want to publicly attach their name to new projects just yet.
While the chance to see Disco Elysium 2 may be impossible with the state of ZA/UM is currently, the chance to see Disco Elysium successors that carries that raw, inspiring writing as well as a clever expression of role-play systems outside of combat, has significantly increased.