Relevant Basically Homeless video.

Hey, it’s Harry DuBois’s car!

Thank you for that, I might have to watch this whole thing.

A lot of the details do unsurprisingly sound rather derivative, and it will be very, very difficult to reach the bar of writing set by writers who are no longer around. But the absolute worst part of this is that some of their ideas do sound interesting. A more elaborate thought cabinet is something I assume most Disco fans have wished for at some point, especially knowing the initial concepts floated around that had to be cut.

Also I didn’t know Anton Vill still worked there.

Kurvitz, Rostov and Hindpere are working together for a company called Red Info, but there has been no further info at this time. I think rumours are they might be ready to announce something this year.

Argo Tuulik is heading up Summer Eternal, so that is another one to keep an eye on. Sadly his work got halted by a legal injunction made by the people at Longdue.

Longdue themselves though have managed to recruit Martin Luiga. Whether he will actually contribute much or is there to lend credence to the project by virtue of his name remains unclear.

Even less abridged, but the 41st Precinct channel has a 16 hour ZA/UM - The Inside Story interview with Argo and Dora.

His interview with Martin Luiga is also great.

No. This is not a Disco Elysium dev, and especially not a writer. Everyone who worked on Disco Elysium has left the studio by now as far as I know and ZA/UM is nothing but an empty husk trying to exploit the reputation and name of the genius of others.

That C4 trailer was completely shameless. “We brought you Disco Elysium”… No you fucking didn’t. Now give the IP back to its creators you evil, soulless capitalistic pieces of trash. Fuck all the way off.

Don’t hold your breath. Any hope of getting the true sequel died with the firing of Brian Mitsoda I think. Doesn’t even look like Rik Schaffer is involved in the project anymore either.

I’ve never really thought of it as one, but I guess Disco Elysium could technically qualify as a point and click adventure. It just doesn’t have the object combination based puzzles I normally associate with the genre.

I plowed a solid month into Stalker 2 when it came out and loved my time with it, but it has it’s fair share of problems. Not having proper A-life alone makes me very reluctant to nominate it for GOTY.

I really hope they come back eventually and do a full remake for the sequel as well. But maybe the SS1 remake didn’t sell enough that another similar effort would be profitable?

Yeah if you come from modded Anomaly S2 will feel downright casual, but it’s not even necessarily the challenge that would turn off mainstream players though I think but the pace. Stalker has always been a very slow game (and we love it for it!), but that’s a tough product to sell in today’s attention economy.

On a side note, if you’re into GAMMA etc and truly hate yourself you can check out Stalker A.R.E.A… I was playing around with it a bit just before the release of S2. Disgusting stuff.

The nature of the game is also not necessarily mainstream friendly at it’s core. Fans of the series love the lack of fast travel and the long, tense walks between locations for literally 20 minutes at a time with nothing much happening (I am one of those fans). But I can’t pretend that’s not an acquired taste at the very least.

Tuulik is more than a lead writer, he is one of the co-creators of the setting as one of the players of the original Elysium tabletop sessions alongside Martin Luiga (with Robert Kurvitz being the DM).

It’s extremely puzzling to me that Martin Luiga jumped onto this project when I’ve heard so many bad things about Longdue, not least their ongoing feud with Argo Tuulik. I thought the bad blood was primarily between Kurvitz and Tuulik, not Luiga. But yes, Martin being involved in this project does legitimise it somewhat. I’m still more optimistic about Summer Eternal and Red Info, as far as the splinter studios go.

More about Roblox predator problem, as reported by Bloomberg last year.

I mean, to me those examples feel a little unfair. It’s easier to be groundbreaking in a nascent medium, and those came out thirty years ago - way before the term AAA was even used in the games industry. The bar for interesting and groundbreaking can’t be “literally invent a new genre à la Wolfenstein 3D”. That’s a little bit like saying “I feel like the blockbuster movie climate is so stagnant these days. When was the last time someone did something groundbreaking like The Jazz Singer?”

For my money what Remedy is doing with both their mixed media, their connected universe and their storytelling is pushing the boundaries of AAA gaming, but if that is not enough for you then how about Half-Life: Alyx (2020)?

For the record, I do agree that the overall AAA landscape has become stagnant and risk-averse, much like blockbuster movies. But it’s also unfair to say literally nothing interesting is happening.

Depends on what you’re counting as nowadays. Only two years ago we had both Alan Wake 2 and BG3 come out in the same year.

On top of that I’ve heard this particular game described as “9/10 combat trapped in a 3/10 game” which does not make me thrilled to suffer through a horrendous port.

I need to watch more but at first glance it doesn’t even look that much more visually impressive than Ghost of Tsushima, which makes the poor performance even more unacceptable seeing as GoT was a PS4 title.