Disco Elysium's script overwhelmed Articy, writers say

Pcgamer reports that the third episode of Noclip's Disco Elysium documentary reveals the game's writers produced so much text that Articy, the branching narrative tool Za/um used, struggled to handle it.

Helen Hindpere, writer on the original game and lead writer on the Final Cut, said Disco Elysium "technically has too much writing—at least for Articy." She recalled that the team went from worrying about not writing enough to "writing too much," and that "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.'" Hindpere added that the tool "got quite janky—at some point froze completely, because it definitely wasn't built for it," and that Articy's developers told them "this is the first time anyone's coming with those problems to us, so we don't really know what to do."

Märten Rattasepp, a writer/editor on Disco Elysium, said some characters took "a month or two to write," which he described as "insane for RPGs." The episode is out now and documents the team's decisions about cutting or finding time to edit material amid technical limits in their narrative tool.

Key Topics

Tech, Disco Elysium, Articy, Za/um, Helen Hindpere, Märten Rattasepp