Disco Elysium: The Final Cut Interview

In less than a week, ZA/UM Studio will be launching The Final Cut of their detective RPG Disco Elysium. This sizable content update is going to feature new quests, new art and animations and full voice-acting, and this GamingBolt interview with ZA/UM’s lead writer Helen Hindpere goes over all of those things and more.

For example:

Can you tell us about the circumstances that arose that led to the cuts that you had to make for the original release?

The political quests are exactly that type of a luxury content that’s easy to cut if you want to look like a sane and trustworthy designer for your producers. All four quests are mutually exclusive, which means that players will only see 1/4th of it in a single playthrough. And these are expensive quests – there are new characters and complex animations, and one of the quests even takes you to a completely new secret location. Super exciting for the player, but goes totally against the market logic when you’re struggling to get your debut out. So yeah it just didn’t make sense to make content most players are going to miss just to show off that we’re able to do that. We weren’t in our Witcher 2 phase yet (Witcher 2 has two different mid-game areas that are mutually exclusive; it’s a very impressive show off in that regard!).

That’s not the only content we cut. We’re putting back other tiny things too. Let’s just say there’s a surprise to those who say we messed up with a certain must-do Shivers check on a certain coast.