Disco Elysium had so much text it broke the branching narrative software: ‘we were writing too much’
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Noclip’s documentary about the making of Hades is a favorite of mine, but their current series on Disco Elysium is shaping up to be another all-timer. The third episode is out now, and while the first two dealt with the foundation of Za/um as a collective and how the setting of Elysium evolved through tabletop roleplaying and Robert Kurvitz’s novel Sacred and Terrible Air, episode three is an anatomically thorough dissection of how it was written.
Honestly, I could have watched another hour breaking down the themes and influences of Disco Elysium. Calling it a rich text is like saying Bill Gates has a couple of dollars. According to Helen Hindpere, writer on the original game and lead writer on the Final Cut, Disco Elysium technically has too much writing—at least for Articy, a tool for writing branching stories that Za/um used.
“I think every one of the writers that we had on the team previously had a problem with not writing enough,” Hindpere says, “and then for the first time ever the problem became that we were writing too much. Like, there wasn’t enough time to edit it, to go over it, we would have to cut some parts. But then everything written was so good that you were like, ‘We’re gonna just have to find the time.’ And that was all because of Articy.”
It’s not all good news for Articy, however. “There was a lot of dialogue so it got quite janky—at some point froze completely, because it definitely wasn’t built for it,” Hindpere goes on. “We contacted them as well, and they were like, ‘Yeah, you know this is the first time anyone’s coming with those problems to us, so we don’t really know what to do.'”
Märten Rattasepp, another of Disco Elysium’s writer/editors (who went on to work on the excellent Pentiment), says the amount of time they were given to write characters was extraordinary. “Some characters took a month or two to write,” he says. “Which is insane for RPGs. Like, ‘Oh no, no one else writes things that long! You need to be done in like three days, what are you doing?'”
So there’s the secret formula. Spend so much time writing that people think you’re crazy and cook up so many words it breaks your software, and you too could craft a masterpiece like Disco Elysium. Good luck!
