On the Human Can Opener podcast, Rue Valley’s creative director Marko Smiljanic told an exciting story.

There’s not much chance of a sequel to Disco Elysium, but many are making a spiritual sequel. Rue Valley could be one of them, and Smiljanic is working on it at the Emotion Spark studio. He told how he met with the trio of Robert Kurvitz (Disco Elysium’s lead writer and designer), Alexander Rostov (its art director), and Helen Hindpere (one of its writers).

“Kurvitz and Rostov showed up in Belgrade out of the blue, a mutual friend set up a meeting, but they didn’t want to meet at some restaurant, they wanted to go and look at the architecture of Belgrade. It’s a kind of brutalism in a part of Belgrade… And they said, let’s go for a walk. It’s not something you would expect from any kind of meeting, mingling. No, let’s just walk through Belgrade, which is like half a disaster, but in some places it looks nice. It was very strange. What if I tell them I’m making a game based on their game, will they be okay with that? How will they see it? And I was thinking about what T-shirts to wear. If it has something [weird] on it, what will they think? Who is this guy? What is he trying to say? All these weird thoughts running through my head.

And the first thing Kurvitz said kind of blew my mind because I was expecting some philosophical conversation about these themes in the game or something like that. And he asked me, “Are you guys planning on doing voice acting? And it’s a very direct question. And he’s not asking me from the perspective of some crazy game designer or narrative designer. He’s asking me about a business decision. He’s learned that it’s hard to sell this kind of game if you don’t have voice acting. It’s a lot of text, and even for people who like to read a lot, it’s hard to keep track of. But when you have voice acting, it makes the game much more accessible,” Smiljanic said.

Disco Elysium was first released without full voice acting, and what was included was partly of poor quality (Cuno’s dialog), which was then removed in the Final Cut version of the game. Kurvitz later returned to Belgrade with Hindpere, visited the studio, tried out the demo, and developed a good rapport: “I’m proud to say that we learned from their mistakes. I try to keep things in order. But when I showed them how our dialog schemes worked and how much work it took (we spent like 3 years perfecting this kind of platform so we could make this kind of content), Robert said, ‘OK, we had like a spaghetti monster all over the place. And this is all neat and perfect and we had it all over the place. It’s so weird that you feel at home playing Rue Valley after Disco Elysium. Everything is the same, the tools, the dialog. But the story is new! For them, and I understand it now with Rue Valley, you don’t get that feeling of playing the game. And they didn’t in Disco either. They made it. They weren’t really playing it. But in Rue Valley they felt like they were actually playing. It was very interesting for them that it feels like Disco, but it’s not,” Smiljanic added.

So you can see how much Disco Elysium influenced him…

Source: PCGamer