It’s not often that a studio’s debut wins multiple game of the year awards, but Studio ZA/UM is not your ordinary studio. The idea that eventually became Disco Elysium came to the collective’s founder Robert Kurvitz in the mid-2000s and spanned tabletop concepts and novels before a decision was made to funnel its dashing steampunk world into the medium of video games in the mid-2010s. Originally titled No Truce With the Furies, a group of like-minded artists came together in an Estonian squat to develop Disco Elysium, which eventually launched in October 2019 to incredulous acclaim from both critics and fans.
And like any game worth its salt, it’s been ported to the Nintendo Switch. Following a PlayStation and Google Stadia release earlier this year, ‘The Final Cut’ edition of Disco Elysium is finally coming to Nintendo’s pocket powerhouse on October 12. Disco Elysium’s text-heavy RPG gameplay makes it a fine fit for the portable platform, as you explore a rich isometric world in control of a hungover detective amid a murky murder.
A deeply complex game with tons of tiny checks and interactions, Disco Elysium was inspired by games like Planescape: Torment and plays similarly to old-school PC RPGs like Baldur’s Gate but with a refreshing quasi-modern setting. Players create their own protagonist, but instead of the typical Dungeons and Dragons skills conventionally used to build characters in the genre, you put focus into your Intellect, Psyche, Physique or Motorics. Skills include Empathy, Drama, Electro-Chemistry, and Reaction Speed, allowing you to flesh out the investigator’s mind as well as their body, resulting in many fascinating conversations and capers that have led to the game being showered in praise.
But given how ambitious and sprawling Disco Elysium is, you can imagine that it wasn’t so easy to bundle it up and bring it to the Nintendo Switch. As part of a recent presentation ahead of the port’s release, Studio ZA/UM artists Kaspar Tamsalu and Siim Raidma dug into how the collective managed the “painstaking re-assembly” process and expanded on the game’s fascinating development cycle.
“The story of Disco Elysium started a long time ago,” says Tamsalu, showing us a floor plan for the Tallinn squat where the ZA/UM collective came together to realize the award-winning game. As we cycled through snapshots from the humble abode, Raidma added that at the time, they were simply a crew of writers and artists with no experience in the industry, trying to kickstart a video game company. Raidma says that the team would conduct interviews in the attic, which housed a dead pigeon as well as plenty of bird poop. “It scared off the right people and attracted the right crowd,” Raidma said.
Tamsalu says that ZA/UM had huge plans at the start which they had to “dial back a notch” as they encountered the realities of modern video game development, but the collective still managed to maintain their vision for the world of Elysium. Concept art shown from the time offered glimpses at early versions of key areas in the game, looking just as inspired as when they eventually shipped in 2019.
Speaking to the initial response to Disco Elysium, Studio ZA/UM was naturally bowled over by the outpouring of love for its passion project. “We had a lot of ambition but very little expectations,” Tamsalu said. As the game of the year awards started pouring in, the team refined the original experience on PC while looking to the future of the game on other platforms, and eventually, ‘The Final Cut’.
“The Final Cut was a chance to add full voiceover and content that was planned but couldn’t fit,” Tamsalu explained. This expanded version of the game launched in March of this year on PC, PlayStation and Google Stadia, bringing new quests, quality-of-life tweaks and as noted by Tamsalu, professional voice-acting for over a million words of superbly written text.
After the release of The Final Cut update, the studio kept chipping away at the game, polishing it with plenty of helpful feedback from the community. But the Nintendo Switch port was, as Raidma puts it, “a great opportunity for us to rework basically most of the game for a second time.”
Described as “a massive undertaking” by Raidma, the Nintendo Switch version of Disco Elysium – The Final Cut involved considerable reworks of the user interface for the portable console, as well as making sure text size was adjustable to fit screens and frame key scenes.
According to Raidma, the team had to dig into optometry concepts like arcminutes to assess sightlines, unify the text and get the tiny angles right to ensure the game was legible, accessible and pleasing to look at across all devices, including the smaller screen of the Nintendo Switch. Understandably, Disco Elysium is now one of the most voiceover-rich games on the Nintendo Switch too, with Tamsalu saying that it was “a squeeze to fit it on the cartridge” thanks to the sheer amount of words being spoken in-game.
Optimizing a game meant for PC on the Nintendo Switch was no small feat for Studio ZA/UM either. Raidma called it an “interesting optimization process,” with a more narrow scope of performance to work with. ZA/UM started with the minimum PC spec version of the game and worked to elevate it until it was “as pretty as it can get” on the Nintendo Switch.
Tamsalu notes that “(Disco Elysium) hasn’t been as smooth running as it is now,” with the game apparently looking and performing better than ever. From the footage we were shown during the presentation, Disco Elysium definitely looks fluid and enjoyable on the Nintendo Switch. I will be very tempted to check it out again on a platform where I can pick it up and put it down with ease, instead of binging it for hours at my desk. I’m excited to roll a new character and check out the voiceover, which will no doubt elevate a narrative that I already adored without spoken words.
However, it is worth noting that assets and characters do appear sharper around the edges on the Nintendo Switch. This is an understandable compromise in the leap from a PC to a portable console, and a similar trade-off to how CD Projekt Red managed to jam The Witcher 3 onto the device. Regardless, thanks to the text size optimizations and UI reworks, it doesn’t get in the way of the art direction or affect the more taxing scripted animations in the game, which were front and center in the trailer.
Tamsalu rounded off by saying that he hopes that the Nintendo crowd, a completely different demographic to the PC RPG crowd, will appreciate the effort and enjoy Studio ZA/UM’s bizarre behemoth of a game in its most portable form.
For those of you who have yet to engage with Disco Elysium, you’ll be able to dig into its atmospheric world on Nintendo Switch this October 12, when Disco Elysium – The Final Cut launches digitally on the Nintendo eShop. You can preorder it now for $39.99. Preorders are also open for a physical collector’s edition of Disco Elysium – The Final Cut, which has been developed by iam8bit and will release in early 2022.
Written by Jordan Oloman on behalf of GLHF.
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