Disco Elysium was wonderful — so wonderful, in fact, that several studios have sprung from the smoldering wreckage of original developer ZA/UM in an attempt to cash in on its prestige. One such studio, Longdue Games, shared a single screenshot and some advertising text on March 6 for Hopetown, its ostensible spiritual successor to Disco Elysium, and what do you know, it looks and sounds like pretty much the same game.
“Hopetown is a game where words are weapons, and every choice leaves its mark,” the project’s Kickstarter reads. “Set in a mining town teetering on the edge of collapse and reinvention, you play as a rogue journalist — a chaotic, self-destructive provocateur uncovering buried truths, exposing fragile systems, and unravelling a world shaped by ambition and decay. Will you spark chaos as a gonzo journalist, twist events as a conspiracist, or reveal brutal truths as a calculated investigator?”
Longdue has also been quite coy about who from the Disco Elysium team is working on Hopetown. So far, the studio’s only given one person major billing: Piotr Sobolewski, an engineer who refers to himself as “co-creator of the highest rated PC game of all time according to Metacritic” on Linkedin. That game, just to be clear, is Disco Elysium.
Disco Elysium’s credits, however, simply list Sobolewski as providing “additional development” as part of a 15-person team from outsourcing studio The Knights of U. As such, his self-assigned role as “co-creator” comes off as a bit of a stretch, especially when compared to the contributions of high-profile figures like writers Robert Kurvitz and Helen Hindpere and designer Aleksander Rostov, the trio most commonly considered as being behind the bulk of Disco Elysium’s genius.
Sobolewski also has a doctorate in artificial intelligence and works as a contractor with OpenAI. Based on the Kickstarter, it’s unclear how or if the team Longdue games might employ the controversial generative AI technology in the making of Hopetown.
It feels like Hopetown is taking a lot of its design cues from Disco Elysium while both not employing any of the key creatives responsible for its popularity and overstating the contributions its team members made to the original game, at least by omission. Dark Math Games, a studio founded by Disco Elysium producer Kaur Kender currently developing another potential successor called XXX Nightshift, appears to at least be trying something new. As it stands, everything I’ve seen of and learned about Hopetown leaves me ?.
Source：https://www.polygon.com/gaming/535127/disco-elysium-successor-looks-just-like-disco-elysium
