Longdue, a new studio formed by former Disco Elysium staff, has revealed a teaser trailer for its new project and announced the inclusion of key Disco Elysium alumni.
The new “psychogeographic RPG”, called Hopetown, will launch a Kickstarter campaign on 17th March where more details will be revealed.
Until then, below is the first teaser trailer, which includes character artwork and an intriguing voiceover hinting at the psychological consequences of the story.
Lenval Brown, who voiced the narrator in Disco Elysium, will return for Hopetown and voice a key character.
“It feels good to be back – to step into something new,” said Brown. “There’s nothing like bringing a world to life, shaping a story that’s been waiting to be spoken into existence.”
What’s more, Martin Luiga – founding member of the ZA/UM Cultural Association who was involved in writing Disco Elysium – has also joined the team at Longdue.
“I am pleased to share my experiences with Longdue to help them craft the narrative and systems for Hopetown, playing to the strengths that the narrative RPG genre has achieved thus far and attempting to innovate upon them to tell a rich story based in equal parts on what has been, what is and what could be,” said Luiga. “I am confident that the team can deliver a worthy addition to the canon of Western RPGs. I call upon the fans of the RPG and adventure genre to back the Hopetown Kickstarter to help us make the game.”
Longdue’s staff also includes Piotr Sobolewski from the Disco Elysium team, though as Polygon reported earlier this month his ties to the game are loose – in the game’s credits Sobolewski is listed as providing “additional development” from outsourcing studio The Knights of Unity.
The inclusion of Brown and Luiga therefore strengthens the ties with ZA/UM’s project. It was first announced back in October last year, with further details on its mechanics provided back in January this year.
However, it coexists with multiple other projects from former Disco Elysium staff, with each announcement seemingly not-so-coincidentally arriving at the same time (notably, the games were first revealed on the fifth anniversary of Disco Elysium).
ZA/UM, the original Disco Elysium studio, has today announced its next game, called C4, which blends dice-rolling gameplay with psychedelic sci-fi and espionage thriller elements. However, many original members of staff who worked on Disco Elysium have since left the studio.
Then there’s the new UK-based studio Dark Math Games creating XXX Nightshift, formed of a “breakaway group from the original development team of Disco Elysium”, which was announced in October.
Shortly after that announcement, Summer Eternal revealed itself as a new studio from Argo Tuulik, who co-created Disco Elysium’s worldbuilding.
Disco Elysium writer and designer Robert Kurvitz has also established a new studio called Red Info with artist Aleksander Rostov.
A report in November detailed the messy drama behind the multiple Disco Elysium spiritual successors in development – it followed multiple lawsuits that are now said to be resolved.
In the wake of this drama, though, multiple studios are now creating new projects vying to be the foremost successor to Disco Elysium – an isometric political RPG that was lauded on its release in 2019.
