¡ 14 min read
Disco Elysium – Rezzed 2018 Interview
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Edward Price
Community Manager at GameAnalytics
The yearly Rezzed event run by Eurogamer.net is an absolutely fantastic way for indie developers to display their games and get them noticed. One such title on display this year was Disco Elysium, an amazingly inventive and constantly hilarious open-world RPG where you play as a policeman and seemingly every choice you make can change how the game is played.
I spoke to Robert Kurvitz, lead writer and designer of Disco Elysium, about creating a world with so many choices, the consequences of doing so, and the ability to wear cool hats.
Disco Elysium is an absolutely incredible game, where did you get the idea from initially?
We were at a really dark moment in our lives, there were a lot of people who were, I was personally at a dark moment in my life. So, my executive producer came to me and âhey man, we failed at pretty much everything, letâs also fail at making videogamesâ. Now I can say it looks like weâve also failed at failing at making videogames now so, so we really have failed at everything, because itâs looking quite nice already!
The idea, well, weâre really big fans of isometric RPGs and RPGs in general, but at the same time weâve seen them go by and not really go anywhere. Itâs strange how RPGs are such a proud genre of videogames â the idea of what an RPG âisâ is always really fought over â and the definition of what an RPG is well⌠our school of thought really slipped out of our hands. I donât really understand why a lot of games are called that, so we went to set things right.
Itâs a very logical thing to do, and at its essence itâs a very easy pitch. Itâs a Detective RPG, and in every RPG you have detective missions. In Bulderâs Gate 2 you have a good one, and in The Witcher series you have several, and every RPG has this one cool detective person, and those have always been my favourite parts of RPGs.
I get to put down my stupid sword for a moment, it happens in a city, I talk to people, thereâs a twist, theyâve have to write it â really write it â and I get to combine information which is hard to program in stories. I kind of thought that I wanted a game where you only have that. You have shooting too, you have a bit of combat there, but itâs avoidable, and you can move out of it. So we made this one.
We made a setting that really works, thatâs been in work for like 15 years, Iâd say itâs probably my lifeâs work to come up with this urban fantasy setting. So, when we got funding for it, most of it was the art director and I was to be the writer, and we for some reason thought we could do it!
Speaking of the writing, every single decision seems to branch off into something else, into something else, and depending on perception checks you can potentially unlock even more conversation topics and choices â how much of a massive undertaking was this to write?
An incredible one! We use a program which gives us a bit more flexibility and pace than maybe RPG writing was before in terms of visual programming. Itâs very easy for a visual-thinking person as me to handle complex, branching, Lovecraftian-looking, monstrous dialogue trees. I still call it âThe Mind Shattererâ, itâs just so difficult mentally and so taxing that, would I have any other option in life, I would probably not do it because itâs so hard, but I really donât feel at this moment in my life that thereâs anything else in my life that I would want to do.
Thereâs so much opportunity here, but itâs incredibly hard. We have an 8 people writing team, people who have written on this game in general, which is pretty much what Mass Effect Andromeda had, and thatâs a huge game and they had tens of millions to do it. In comparison, we are very, very⌠moneyâs too tight to mention, so weâre really having to outdo ourselves and jump over our saddle here. Itâs not easy, but with the central story, we have a really brilliant synopsis to work around.
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With all the stats and their consequences, like for example the characters can suffer from psychoses, how difficult is it also not just to write but make sure that when the story is done that it can accommodate so many different styles of play? There are so many things the players could never see, but you still have to write around them…
You just have to â I think a lot of RPGs havenât done that, because when you start going down a rabbit hole writing-wise and the player does it too, it drags on and it changes everything. A little joke can change everything.
A lot of RPG writing hasnât gone down this rabbit hole because theyâve felt itâs unachievable, because you have to account for it later, people remember that you said or did certain actions. We kind of just thought âgo for itâ, letâs go down every rabbit hole there is, letâs let you do every stupid thing that you can, and try to somehow to get it together in the end.
It looks like itâs possible, but we still do have sanity checks – we have a lot of moments that tie the game together, unavoidable main storyline moments, but there are also a lot of side quests, and they can also affect the main case. You can start with one main case that youâre solving, and you can start about five others, and some of them are as big as the main one. Theyâre more mysterious, and just as much effort in terms of production and uncovering clues, and some of them can maybe start telling you things about the main investigation and start merging.
For example, you can also become a cryptozoologist, like youâre hunting Bigfoot â youâre not going to be actually hunting Bigfoot but a cryptozoological beast â and then what if itâs real? What if itâs somehow connected? You can really be like â you know that meme? You can really be that guy.
How do you make sure the game is so consistently funny?
Self hurt, self sacrifice, self harm! A lot of this humour is going to come back and bite us in the ass. It has a lot of politically risquĂŠ humour, itâs not PCâŚ
Thereâs literally a line that says âI can get down with racismââŚ
Yeah, you can say that, and then you can actually get down with racism. You can get that thought and you can follow through on it. Weâve had to be respectful in a way towards an idealogy that I personally loathe, but Iâm a writer and I can write as anyone, I pride myself on it. Weâve had to respectfully handle it for that person, and it has to end with something, and it has to turn out that the sorry state that this person is in is because of this. The kind of thing that you mention for instance can be pretty bewildering for some.
The player has to actively pursue those choices for them to happen, right?
How we do it is that, for every scene that happens and every path you go down, we leave nothing in store, we write every scene as hard as we can, and as writers we have every kind of weird or stupid thought. Any hard thing or process, we just have to do it.
One example is a line that you didnât get in your playthrough, but when you talk to the women outside of your hotel room, if you fail the stat check to flirt with her, you would have been caught in a moment where thereâs only one thing you can say, and it would have been âI want to have f*** with youâ. She says âthatâs literally not how language worksâ, but for a writer to come out and say this sentence, itâs embarrassing. I have to say that in my head, and say âI came up with this, my brain gave birth to this line, Robert Kurvitz, why?â
Thatâs a cool moment, but then there are really dark moments later on, you can do stuff that some of our editors are advising us against, but I think Iâm still going to leave in. I think the trick is that we donât want to leave a good impression of ourselves as writers, we want to entertain and engage the person and accommodate the player and reader at any cost. Make it fun, make it so that they tell the story, they pick these options, they solve these cases. Itâs not about ourselves as writers; itâs about having a really free game where you can do anything in any order and go around. I donât care if â Iâve been hounded for political belief before, so I donât have a problem with that, Iâm just not going to go online!
Ultimately, I guess controversy isnât â itâs not a case of it selling, but when people understand the context around those decisions itâs not as controversial as people think it is.
Weâve already gotten accusations of rampant racism, for example, which is very strange, because I donât think there is a lot of that in the build. I think itâs actually being able to say things like the word âblackâ in the context the build has it, itâs apparently a huge thing for videogames, where youâre usually dealing with racism in terms of elves and dwarves and gnomes, and all kinds of fantastical people.
Thereâs a level of realism to the dialogue that probably makes it more unpalatable for people to experience when playing.
Itâs the setting too, it has to be that because â itâs not our world, but â itâs a modern world. It has very similar problems to our world, but perhaps theyâre greater or more extreme. Itâs something we have to kind of do. I hope a lot of people arenât going to be upset by it. We never force you to do it.
Itâs always your choice, you chose to go down that rabbit hole, you started saying weird things to this person, but you can go down it pretty hard. Youâre playing a cop, so youâre in a position of power, you can do really weird bad things, but you donât have to.
I hope we can signal it before this happens, like if you donât want to talk to a charater to Cuno, because the first thing he says is a homophobic slur, you can just say goodbye and go away.
Plus, thereâs an option to chastise him.
Yeah, weâve even written it into our Thought Cabinet mechanic that, if you become a centrist or a liberal kind of character, or what the alt-right would call a âvirtue signallerâ, it becomes a thought in your head that becomes âThe Kindom of Consciousâ. It can turn you into a really high-horse guy, and if you finish the thought, itâll give you a bonus, but it will make sure that as a knight of this kingdom, that you have to go and tell Cuno that, disregarding his working-class background, he canât use language like that. Then you can go to Cuno and have a long talk about it.
Weâve kind of made it a mechanical thing, so that if you have a grievance with the game, you can air them into the game itself. Or, you can go online and call us whatever you want. Just donât blame me, blame Cuno!
The gameâs about to go into closed beta, how important is it to get that feedback at this stage?
Yeah, itâs going to go into closed beta for streamers and then media and so forth. What we want mostly, is that we want some play-testing. This game could be so much fun if it gets us some people playing it, but we also need feedback on how it is to stream. Itâs a big thing, entertaining people streaming, but Disco Elysium is a great game for streaming, because thereâs so much work weâve done.
For example, if you like to make stupid voices, then thereâs a little VO at the beginning of dialogue, but is isnât fair to do all the work for you. Hopefully, this is going to be a great game to entertain other people with, who wouldnât maybe play Disco Elysium who then get into it.
Plus, the fact that there are so many choices and itâs so open means that people can have a different completely experience from what theyâve seen from streamers.
The different streamers will do different things, yeah!
Dani Woodford, Community Manager: Itâs also that with a lot of games, if you watch it on stream youâre like âoh I donât need to play it nowâ, with this itâs more like you can see it, realise thereâs a lot of replayability, and you havenât really spoiled it for yourself by watching a bit of the stream.
Robert Kurvitz: Also weâre going to have funny hats! Theyâre not in the build right now, but theyâre going to be a lot of hats. Itâll change as we move from early alpha, but thereâs going to be a hell of a lot stupid hats to hear! I love dressing up my little guy with clothes, itâs like especially for boys who are mostly RPG players, I guess itâs some kind of freeing experience that they can finally dress up a doll with cool swords, so you can make yourself a stupid disco kind of hat guy.
Itâs so fun, Iâve done it myself, like itâs strangely fun to dress a police officer with really strange hats. I hope thatâll also be a really big draw for the streamers: the ability to wear hats.
For anyone who wants to do this sort of game and thinks that the scope is too big, and that it canât be done, it seems youâve disproven that, so what advice would you give them?
We havenât disproven it yet! Thereâs a lot of QA and playtesting to do, and we need to edit it and stitch this Frankenstein together, and to get under control all the permutations and things that can happen and make it good, to make every scene good, itâs a hell of a lot of work to go still, but given that we may be able to do itâŚ
My first suggestion would be âdonâtâ. Donât do it. Just do something normal with your life. Go work first, go to a studio thatâs already there, thatâs already nice and produced. Donât make your own studio. None of the 25 of us working on the game have ever made a videogame before. We just got a producer 4 months ago whoâs made one â a really good one â who is going to help us do it.
My second suggestion would be that if you absolutely, totally feel like youâre going to be a bum, that youâre not going to pay your rent and youâre going to lose your apartment and you have to do something, and then your friends happen to want to make a videogame â as it was in my case â if it feels like an existential must and you will die if you donât make it⌠then definitely do it, because itâs very much possible, I think. You have to be really⌠it has to be scary how much you want to do it, because itâs very hard.
Disco Elysium is out later in 2018. Robert Kurvitz can be found on Twitter @RobertKurvitz. ZAUM Studios can also be found @studioZAUM.Â