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

When Disco Elysium was launched in 2019, started to accumulate awards. The game won awards at The Game Awards, DICE, GDC and BAFTAs. Despite the success of the RPG, the developer ZA / UM has always wanted more to Disco Elysium. This does not mean that Disco Elysium, as released two years ago, was an unfinished game; instead, ZA / UM had yet to see the success needed to fully fund everything else its designers wanted to build.

“The final cut it was the plan from the start, ”writer Helen Hindpere told Polygon, referring to the extended release of the detective game. “In many ways, this is the Disco Elysium we dreamed of launching when we started development in 2014. ”

Disco Elysium it is not a traditional RPG video game. It is similar to pen and paper RPG games, without combat; decisions are made through dialogue and skill checks. Players take on the role of a detective who has no memory of his past, but has been tasked 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 these decisions send the detective and his personal politics down one of four main paths: communism, fascism, moralism or ultraliberalism.

Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, which is scheduled to be released 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 place More inside Disco Elysium: The Final Cut: new stories, characters and cutscenes, plus a full narration in English. The final cut will be available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and as a free upgrade for existing players on the Windows PC. (It will arrive on the Nintendo Switch and Xbox Series X later this year.)

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

“We didn’t hear a Beethoven symphony and we said, ‘You need more flugelhorn,'” said Hindpere. (Although, perhaps, Beethoven felt that way!) “I think it’s because the games are bigger in their promise. It is an absolute thing. The human ear can only hear a few notes in 40 minutes, but all the senses in four days? We can perfect this experience for the kingdom to come. “

She continued: “The ability to expand games, especially RPGs, is a testament to how great an art form is. People are still improving Fallout: New Vegas until today!”

More to import

For The final cut, ZA / UM focused its efforts on a few different areas: recording voice overs of the entire game (1.2 million words, Hindpere said) and expanding the scope of its policy choices, both requests for Disco Elysium fans.

“Before launching Elysium, I always thought that ‘listening to our fans’ was just small talk, ”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. One million people accessing your game go have smart things to say about it. Most it’s still hot garbage – but part of it is very smart. “

Hindpere said that some people criticized Disco Elysiumpolitical choices that don’t “matter enough” in the game. ZA / UM went through this type of criticism, analyzing where the players really wanted to go. The team wondered what it means for their policy to “import” in an RPG?

“Disco Elysium it’s a politically realistic game, ”said Hindpere. “A drunk policeman will not start the World Revolution. This kind of ‘I choose which side will win’ power fantasy would never be part of Disco Elysium. But we had extra content planned – political content that we couldn’t get into the original release. “

Inside The final cut, each major ideology will have its own unique mission line, called a political vision mission, to follow – something to explore, even if it is going straight to failure.

The new content is adapted to each ideology, different from a “more classic expansion area that is also available for all buildings”, according to Hindpere. That’s what makes Disco Elysium single; it is ridiculous and strange in its tone, although it still tells an important and political story. The character, and what the players do with it, is where the conflict is created, with everything revolving around the player’s choice – whatever.

Giving the world a voice

Disco Elysium builds a complex world around the central character. It changes based on the player’s choice. The game world is illustrated by a series of non-playable characters, but when it was first released, it was not fully expressed. There were many voiceovers, but not nearly the entire game. ZA / UM undertook an immense challenge in expressing the totality of Disco Elysium for The final cut, and this is something that will be worthwhile for all players. (Especially the comforters, who will not have to rely only on reading large pieces of text.)

To put those voices in the game, ZA / UM searched internally for a dubbing director, something that major RPG game studios tend to outsource for this task, Hindpere said.

“The number of lines is very large, I think,” she explained. “With us, the performance must 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 work and joined writer Cash de Cuir and original dubbing director Mikee Goodman.

“The characters of Disco Elysium they are real people to us, ”said Hindpere. “We wrote them believing sincerely that they truly exist. That they have souls that demand dignity. This means that we could not in any way make an ironic VO video game. We didn’t have to resort to that. “

Revachol, where Disco Elysium it is defined, it is “a world capital”, she said. “Broken and broken, but still – it represents, in its own way, the whole world. The people of Revachol need to sound as if they come from a myriad of different cultural backgrounds. In essence, this means many accents. “

The focus was on creating a world that came to life with different voices. “In this babel of voices, birds singing, a crazy chorus dawn,” said Hindpere. “It’s beautiful.”