Disco Elysium: The Final Cut is the ultimate version, coming to console

When Disco Elysium released in 2019, it started to rack up rewards. The game has won awards at the Game Awards, DICE, GDC and BAFTAs. Despite the success of the role-playing game, developer ZA / UM always wanted more for Disco Elysium. It doesn’t mean that Disco Elysium, released two years ago, was an unfinished game; on the contrary, ZA / UM had not yet seen the success necessary to fully fund whatever its designers wanted to build.

“The final cut That was really the plan from the start, ”lead writer Helen Hindpere told Polygon, referring to the police game’s upcoming extended release. “In many ways, this is the Disco Elysium we dreamed of getting started when we started development in 2014. ”

Disco Elysium is not a traditional role-playing video game. It looks like role-playing games in pen and paper, without a fight; decisions are taken through dialogue and skill checks. Players take on the role of a detective who has no memory of his past but has been charged with a murder mystery. The mystery itself is almost secondary to the player’s choices in the story; you can decide what kind of person you are, and those decisions send the detective and his personal politics down one of four main paths: communism, fascism, moralism, or ultra liberalism.

Disco Elysium: the final cut, due for release in March, is still that game, but with “more beauty, more freedom, more things to do,” said Hindpere. After all, she continued, “there is always more room for virtue in the code.”

With the success of Disco Elysium, ZA / UM was able to put more in Disco Elysium: the final cut: New storylines, characters and cutscenes, plus a full English voiceover. The final cut will be available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and as a free upgrade for existing players on Windows PC. (It’ll arrive on Nintendo Switch and Xbox Series X later this year.)

Games like Minecraft, Overwatch, and Stardew Valley are never really finished. It’s something that makes games unique – people don’t expect them to be quite finished when they are released; there is always something that can be fixed.

“We don’t listen to a Beethoven symphony and say, ‘We need more bugle,’” said Hindpere. (Although, maybe, Beethoven felt that way!) “I think it’s because the games are just bigger in the promise they keep. It is a large scale thing. The human ear hears only a limited number of notes in 40 minutes, but all the senses in four days? We can perfect this experience for the kingdom to come. “

She continued, “The scalability of games, especially RPGs, is a testament to the greatness of their art form. People are still improving Fallout: New Vegas nowadays!”

Most important

For The final cut, ZA / UM focused their efforts on a few different areas: recording voiceovers for the entire game (1.2 million words, Hindpere said) and expanding the reach of their political choices, both of which were demands of Disco Elysium Fans.

“Before launching ElysiumI always thought ‘listening to our fans’ was just lip service, ”said Hindpere. “You shouldn’t listen to anyone, especially with an uncompromising story like ours. But it turns out that there is also wisdom in the masses. A million people through your game will have some smart things to say about it. More of this garbage is still hot – but some are pretty smart. “

Hindpere said some people criticized Disco Elysiumpolitical choices, that they “don’t matter enough” in the game. ZA / UM spotted these kinds of criticisms, analyzing what the players really wanted. The team wondered what this meant for your “count” policy. in an RPG?

“Disco Elysium is a politically realistic game, ”said Hindpere. “A drunken cop will not start the world revolution. This kind of ‘I choose which side wins’ power fantasy will never be a part of Disco Elysium. But we had some additional content planned – political content that we couldn’t fit into the original version. “

In The final cut, each major ideology will have its own exclusive questline, called Political Vision Quests, to follow – something to explore, even if it heads straight for failure.

The new content is tailored to each ideology, different from a “more classic expansion zone which is also available for all versions,” according to Hindpere. This is what makes Disco Elysium unique; it’s ridiculous and bizarre in its tone, while telling an important and political story. The character, and what the players do with him, is where the conflict is created, it all revolves around the choice of the player – what he has to be.

Make the world heard

Disco Elysium builds a complex world around the central figure. This changes depending on the player’s choice. The game world is illustrated through a series of non-playable characters, but when it was first released it wasn’t fully voiced. There was a lot of voice acting, but not nearly the whole game. ZA / UM took on a huge challenge in voicing the entirety of Disco Elysium for The final cut, and it’s something that will pay off for all players. (Especially consoles, which won’t have to rely solely on reading large swathes of text.)

To put those voices into the game, ZA / UM has been looking internally for a dubbing director, which major RPG game studios tend to outsource, Hindpere said.

“The number of lines is just too big, I guess,” she explained. “With us, the game has to come from the same place where the rest of the game comes from. Our ambition, our risk. Jim Ashilevi, a classically trained theater director, was put in charge of the job and teamed up with writer Cash de Cuir and original director Mikee Goodman.

“The characters of Disco Elysium are all real people to us, ”said Hindpere. “We wrote to them with the sincere conviction that they really to exist. May they have souls who demand dignity. That means we absolutely couldn’t make an ironic video game VO. We didn’t have to fall back on that.

Revachol, where Disco Elysium is defined, is “a world capital,” she said. “Broken and shattered, but still – he represents the whole world, in his own way. The people of Revachol must seem to come from a myriad of different cultures. In essence, it means a lot of accents. “

The emphasis was on creating a world that comes to life with different voices. “In this babel of voices, birds tweeting, a mad dawn of refrain,” said Hindpere. “It’s beautiful.”