As we reported last week, the guys from ZA/UM took Disco Elysium to the annual EGX conference in Birmingham this weekend. Since the team relocated from Estonia to the UK, Disco Elysium become quite popular with the British games journalism literati. I'll assume that explains the rather flattering title of the developer session that lead designer Robert Kurvitz and co-writer Argo Tuulik participated in yesterday. The session is hard to summarize, but basically they talked about the game and its inspirations - personal, cultural and political. There was much discussion of its unique skill system, in which skills are autonomous beings that talk to the player. Robert considers this an important evolution of the roleplaying genre, and essential to making character development feel like it matters.


The discussion is about 28 minutes long with another 10 minutes of Q&A. Robert's answer to the final question from the audience regarding the game's art direction is pretty cool. Once again, however, there's no gameplay footage in sight. Maybe they're saving it for Christmas?