Developers who created the critically acclaimed game Disco Elysium are now embarking on a new project called Longdue. This studio aims to build on the legacy of Disco Elysium, offering players a new ‘psychogeometric RPG’.
Key Points:*
- Team Composition: Several members who previously worked on the original Disco Elysium and its canceled sequel will continue with this project, but notable figures like Robert Kurvitz and Aleksander Rostov are not involved.
- Game Description: The upcoming game introduces a mechanic where player decisions shape both the environment and characters’ psyches. The narrative centers around themes of psychological depth, intelligent storytelling, and complex world-buildings, inspired by classics such as Ultima, Wizardry, Fallout, and Planescape: Torment.
- Inspiration: Longdue is dedicated to crafting a narrative-first RPG that will push boundaries in the market for emotionally rich gaming experiences.
What are your thoughts on Disco Elysium finally seeing a “successor”?
There’s quite a few ex-Disco Elysium studios popping out. My favorite so far is the Summer Eternal. It feels like they didn’t want to announce it this early, but because two other studios (Longude, and Dark Math Games) got announced few days ago, they did the same.
Summer Eternal feels the most radical out of the three studios, I really like their manifesto and how they are attempting to mix art-collective with market-based development. And they have some amazing writers.
Here are few bits and pieces of the manifesto from their website, I really recommend reading it. Also, the website linked above is just stunning.
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As creators and game makers, we have too long been led away from the truth, away from the right to define ourselves as artists in service of the definitive art form of the future, one that has made us dream since we were children.
Instead, the disposability culture operating at the ruthless core of this industry wants us to think of ourselves as cogs in the machine: rudimentary craftsmen, disposable career workers, inert producers of made-to-order marketing-driven “content” — empty calories leaving the soul hungry.
The Profiteer knows that by keeping your dignity low, he will keep you crawling on the treadmill of passion until he lays you off for the sake of the red number in his book.
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Machine-generated works will never satisfy or substitute the human desire for art, as our desire for art is in its core a desire for communication with another, with a talent who speaks to us across worlds and ages to remind us of our all-encompassing human universality. There is no one to connect to in a large language model. The phone line is open but there’s no one on the other side.
Oh hell yeah.
Looking forward to this.
Kinda sucks this is how I find out there wad a DE2 that got cancelled.
With what has happened around the studio, I’d say it’s good that DE2 was canceled. It was to be made by a ruins of a studio that was stolen along with it’s IP from the original developers and artists, who didn’t manage to navigate the landmine of for-profit gamedev industry, and got basically scammed by investors, who robbed them of their IP and studio through various loopholes and bullshit of shares-based companies. (It’s a pretty nuanced story, and I’m not really sure how it ended up, so it’s better to watch the documentary about it if you’re interrested, rather than take my conclusion from it. I also haven’t followed recent developement, so if anyone knows how that turned out, let me know)
It’s quite a sad and infuriating story, especially since ZAUM was IIRC originally a pretty wholesome art collective of punks and anarchists from squats. It must have been devastating to enter the market with such ideals, only to be scammed of your art by the first investor you encounter, who you might’ve even considered a friend.
