I doubt it. AoD's my favorite filthy disgusting pervert fetish RPG currently, and I'll be really fucking surprised if Disco can top it. It sounds like it has the potential to on paper, because the whole skills/stats system sounds bananas and the kind of thing I'd absolutely love, but the actual execution of it is where I have a hard time imagining it'll meet my hype. I'll be happy to be wrong about that though, since if AoD's dropped down to second place for me that's a good fucking problem to have.
Look, I love AoD. It distills most of my favorite CRPG elements into a highly concentrated mixture—the game deserves all the praise it gets. But they had to make it on shoestring with, what, five guys? Disco Elysium has an even bolder vision with a lot more manpower.
Codex Intelligence has already told us something about the execution:
Prime Junta’s preview in 2017:
https://rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=10564
Tigranes’ preview a few months ago:
https://rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=11127
I’ve been following this thing religiously. Pretty sure I’ve read every preview, every interview, every devblog post, maybe even every random tweet from someone who got a chance to play No Truce with the Disco at a convention. Responses ranged from totally blown away (the Prime Junta end of the spectrum) to totally blown away but cautiously reserving judgment (the Tigranes end of the spectrum). That’s pretty encouraging.
Granted, you’re right, the risk here is all in the execution. They’re trying to do something insanely ambitious, so achieving those ambitions must’ve been insanely difficult. Kurvitz talks a really good game about how they’re revolutionizing the genre for the first time in twenty years—he says everything I want to hear—but that kind of hubris could also be a red flag.
I get the concern. Time after time, developers with great ideas promise us the moon and then fuck everything up. So I can’t blame anyone for being skeptical, or at least hesitant to jump on board the hype train at full speed.
When a studio’s ambition verges on hubris like this, we’re used to ending up with lots of broken promises, or, at best, a partially broken game that has some powerful redeeming qualities—the classic flawed gem. Of course, some of the best CRPGs of all time were diamonds in the rough, like everything from Troika.
But I’m convinced Disco Elysium will be a polished diamond. Why? Because the dudes and dudettes at ZA/UM appear to have spent a year or two refining and polishing this fucker, trying to make it as close to perfect as possible. They sound like extreme perfectionists. IIRC
Prime Junta called them Stakhanovites—look it up, my benighted capitalist brothers.
My info is all second or third hand, but I don’t think they’d release this thing unless it’s great.
tl;dr these ZA/UM guys are too crazy to release a game that doesn’t live up to the hype. Kurvitz and Kender would probably just keep postponing the release until they properly executed their vision.