Longdue creative director says its upcoming game will be on the "closer to Disco" end of a great Disco Elysium to Baldur's Gate 3 cRPG spectrum
"There's so much room for other studios to come out and make something on that spectrum."
We're gradually learning more and more about the bunch of studios that revealed themselves to be developing not quite Disco Elysium successors earlier this month, with the creative director behind Longdue having now offered a bit more info on how it plans to approach its upcoming game.
If you're having trouble keeping track, Longdue's reveal was first of the sort of Disco-looking things to be fired out of the news cannon earlier this month, just before Dark Math Games and Summer Eternal, the latter of which we recently interviewed folks from. The studio said it was making a debut RPG which "explores the delicate interplay between the conscious and subconscious, the seen and unseen", which sounds cool.
Speaking to TheGamer, Longdue creative director Grant Roberts outlined how he sees the cRPG space, and the opportunity he believes it offers this array of new studios each doing their own thing. "I think of it sometimes like there's a spectrum, and Baldur's Gate 3 is on one side, and Disco Elysium is on the other," he said, "There's so much room for other studios to come out and make something on that spectrum."
Naturally, he then went on to have a crack at placing Longdue's game on this spectrum, saying: "We’re not going to be all the way over here [like] Disco Elysium, because I think that that kind of spirit and the way that they made it, and the politics behind the game and behind the studio - I think Summer Eternal is pretty is filling that space.
"But we're not over here [like] Baldur’s Gate 3, because we're not that size of a studio. Larian is doing incredible stuff, but we're not going to make a Larian-sized game. We're going to make something closer to Disco." So, something in the Disco zone, at least in terms of scope, but not quite in the hardcore disco mould of Summer Eternal's worker-owned project, by the sounds of it.
Roberts also touched on the fact that all of these not-quite Disco projects happened to be announced around the same time, saying: "I don't think it's necessarily a thing where people are trying to lay claim to the legacy or anything. I think it's just more that the game and the politics that it had, and the spirit in which it was developed - when it was being developed in a healthy way - is super inspiring for people, and they want to continue that on."
If you're keen to learn more about the politics behind Summer Eternal's vision that Roberts alluded to, make sure to check out the bit of our chat with Argo Tuulik, Dora Klindžić, and Aleksandar Gavrilović that touched on how their studio's unique co-op structure might influence what its games look like.