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There, next to Saint Petersburg, “Revachol sounded like the name of a city that could be the capital of another world. Revachol was first conceived in 2001, and, Hindpere reveals, its name is a misspelling of French anarchist François Claudius Koenigstein’s nom de guerre Ravachol, lifted from the lyrics of Estonian punk band Vennaskond’s lyrics in the song Welcome to America: “Welcome to Saint Petersburg, Emile Henry and Ravachol!”. You’re not passively taking in the lore you’re building up your character with his own internal understanding of the complexities of the world.” This makes each such interaction deeply personal: it brings up memories, stirs up opinions. Now, that type of storytelling isn’t anything new, but our twist has been to add talking skills to the mix. The guy in the uniform tells you about artillery damage – it turns out there’s been a war. You can ask them about the crater you can ask them about the crack. “Maybe there’s a sea-monster on the loose? If you follow the crack, you’re led to a crater where you meet two old men playing pétanque.

#Disco elysium art book crack#

“When you first step out of the hostel, there’s a crack in the pavement – it’s important for you to understand why the earth is cracked,” says Hindpere. Tempting as it is to “throw parts of the world-building out there, without much curation or editing”, hoping players will figure it out, developer ZA/UM tried to use more natural storytelling to open up the world. When it came to storytelling, Hindpere and her team realised that players become more engaged in lore when it’s personal or helps solve a mystery. “How do you describe a world that’s vertically built content-wise, the way city blocks usually are, with characters thrown closely together? One reviewer called Disco Elysium an ‘intricate’ open world – what a beautiful term for what we set out to achieve.” “Players are so used to hearing words like ‘massive’ that saying anything else about your game sounds underwhelming,” she says.

Besides, giant open worlds often end up barren and repetitive, explains Hindpere. And although the setting has been fleshed out with places such as the Scandinavian-inspired social democracy of Vaasa, the team still needed to keep the game’s central location to a reasonable size – which is where Martinaise came in. The wider world of Elysium, meanwhile, spans over 50 states and 8000 years of history. “There’s this feeling of being stuck in the past… You have to dig quite a bit to find the soft core of its people, to get under their skin.” “You can still see artillery damage and bullet-holes in the walls,” Hindpere continues. This poverty-stricken, forgotten area in Revachol’s far west wasn’t the writers’ favourite – “We were more fond of using other districts, like culturally diverse Jamrock,” says Hindpere – but Martinaise is where an attempted revolution failed, and the area bears its scars.

Regarding the choice of setting, the district of Martinaise is, according to Hindpere, not “representative of the rest of the city or the world”, but rather, “works as a microcosm”. Examine their loneliness, their longing.” We truly tried to write every character as if they’re the real protagonists. And then the question: what am I doing here? Every citizen of Revachol is wrestling with that in one way or another. “There’s this sense of something bigger out there the hustle and bustle of human life that has continued for thousands of years. “Cities are inherently existential, melancholic places,” she says.

Hindpere says that city locations are what makes her want to crawl inside an RPG’s world. A character to talk to or an object to examine”. From it, she adds, came the desire to further explore the idea of chasing a suspect through a living city: “Every street corner, every apartment block hides a new clue, a revelation. “There’s a murder quest in the Bridge District of Baldur’s Gate that first showed us the potential of an urban detective RPG,” says Hindpere of one of Disco Elysium’s early creative touchstones.