If you’ve been following the news saga of Disco Elysium and its spiritual successors, there’s a chance you’ve seen a specific image of Hopetown, the would-be Disco successor from Longdue Games.
It’s what looks to be a screenshot showing the main character engaging in pretty Disco Elysium-looking conversation with an old lady surrounded by pigeons, aptly-named Pigeon Lady Prudence. Lines like “I’d rather lick the bin [knock the bread from her hands]” and “Yeah, feed the masses! So let it be done. EAT UP, SKY RATS! (Take the bread)” are among what can be said. The screen’s been dissected with surgical precision by Disco fans like you and I, all asking one main question, the main question all of these studios have faced: does this feel worthy of being considered Disco-y?
“Leading up to the Kickstarter, it’s really hard to get that message out to say, ‘Here’s what we’re about, here’s what the game is going to be, here’s why you should be interested in it’,” Hopetown narrative director Grant Roberts tells me. “We had an image that was showing a sample, like an example conversation in the game. The original purpose with that was for it to live on the Kickstarter page [and say] here’s what this looks like.
“Before it, there’d [be a bit] talking about all the ways the conversation system is going to work, afterwards [a bit] talking about some of the skills, and in the middle here’s this [image]. But that image was also used for promotion, for marketing, and so the first example of the writing of Hopetown out in the world is basically this – it wasn’t a screenshot it was basically still a concept image [showing] here’s what a conversation would look like. Is that the best representation of what the writing is going to be ultimately [in] what we ship?
“Probably not, but we won’t be able to get to that point of ‘here’s what the writing is going to be, here’s why you should consider backing us or consider joining us on this journey’ until much later. So, we’re considering doing things like Early Access. We’re considering doing something like a demo to give people an idea of what they could be getting into, but until we get to that point, all we can do is show you the kickstarter and show you what else is out there.”
Roberts doesn’t blame folks for dissecting that image (and Hopetown’s other marketing and promo material) to the extent they have. “It’s been simultaneously hard and not,” he says. “When we’re making a game that’s so clearly inspired by this legacy of CRPGs up to and including Disco Elysium, when people look at something like that – and I would do the same thing – what I have in my head is my memory of the most amazing moments from those games. When I’m comparing that to a concept image that’s styled as a screenshot, because that’s the phase of development that we’re in right now, nothing is going to hold up to that level of comparison, that level of scrutiny. I’m in no way saying that it’s unfair for people to make that comparison. We put it out there, judge it for what you will.”
Roberts joined Longdue as narrative director on Hopetown in October 2024, meaning he’s only been in the post for roughly five or six months. He tells me he was “one of the first people [brought on] full-time in the company”. By that time, as detailed in an extensive report from IGN in November last year, former ZA/UM developers Argo Tuulik and Dora Klindžić had already parted ways with CoGrammar, the company tech entrepreneur Riaz Moola founded Longdue through. This resulted in a dispute over release contracts that led to a court case which left Tuulik and Klindžić facing a six-month wait before commencing work on the kinda Disco Elysium spiritual successor studio they’d since announced, Summer Eternal.
What Roberts and Hopetown technical lead Piotr Sobolewski tell me of the game’s development so far seems very much to reflect the effect you might expect such a situation to have on a game’s development.
“When I started,” Roberts says, “There had been a little bit of work done on an original concept, before I got there slash right as I got there. But a lot of that work – the setting, the main character and stuff – has all been made obsolete by the work that we’ve been doing since then. So, there’s still a kernel of what was there in the original concept, but it was the seed of an idea basically, and now over the last few months it’s grown into what you’ll see on the Kickstarter.”
“The people who are here early on, being ex-ZA/UM people, they were passionate about specific themes and specific settings and specific time periods and specific things that could happen in the world,” he says slightly later in our conversation, “As they moved away from the studio and other people started to come in, while we’re still extremely passionate about making something true and making something great and putting our blood and our passion into it, the things that were initially explored, that setting and those themes, they’re – not that they’re less interesting to us, but they’re someone else’s themes, someone else’s passions. With the dev team as it stands now, we have different passions, and we’re making a game about something different.”
So, the kicker. What is the game about as it currently exists? Well, it casts you as a rogue journalist in a Northern English mining town that’s “steeped in corruption and power plays”. The journalist part of the equation has a direct link to Roberts’ past.
“I was a journalism major for a while in college, back in the olden times,” he tells me. “I used to write for a video game magazine, Next Generation magazine back in the late 90s, so I’ve got a bit of a journalism background. There are other people on the team who have journalism backgrounds, other people’s families who have had backgrounds in journalism. We’re talking to all of them about the craft of journalism about what it meant to be a journalist during [certain times], what it means to be a journalist in modern times, what it will mean to be a journalist in [Hopetown’s] world.”
He brings up the current state of the profession, how much things have changed for it in recent times with “a lot of more traditional journalistic endeavors, no longer having the support both from the public or from benefactors”, and the need for a “robust” press in 2025, when the world is undergoing a “sometimes slow, sometimes rapid slide into authoritarianism”.
Meanwhile, he says that creating a fictionalised town in the north of England being the setting is something that Longdue’s art director has been looking into visual reference-wise. “The north east of England and the Yorkshire area is where I think we’ve looked for inspiration. The vibe up there, or at least the vibe around the time period that we’re looking at [for inspiration], as well as some of the visuals.”
Roberts’ team also plan to use the real world UK’s long history of coal mining to “help inform the game”. “Not that we want it to be dry or a history lesson or a documentary or anything,” he says, “but we’re setting it in a world that [you] will recognise on purpose, so we can dig into that stuff, so to speak.”
On the other hand, both Roberts and Sobolewski cleared up one thing that the game won’t involve: generative AI. Some speculation about this had been ignited by Sobolewski’s LinkedIn profile, which cites his Ph.D qualification in AI, as well as several roles involving the tech.
“This is my other passion next to game development,” Sobolewski responds when I bring this up, “but I’m not mixing these two at Longdue. These are things that are my personal stuff that I’m doing for a living, and for my own personal growth. I’m not shy about it and not hiding anything. Yes, I am an AI consultant for various companies. For me, I think consuming art is kind of like consuming food, and if it’s not done by a human, it doesn’t have soul. It’s kind of like eating plastic.
“I think that AI is great because it understands human language and can turn unstructured data into structured data, so it can actually extract some information from documents, etc,” he continues, “I don’t think AI should be used as a replacement for human creativity. I don’t think it’s a good direction.”
“Our writing is from writers in everything that we put out,” Roberts adds, “Our art is from artists, and that will continue to be the case. Even if we wanted to use generative AI to make content for the game – which we don’t – the technology isn’t there to pull off good writing. It’ll write dialogue that sounds like good writing, but the people who appreciate good writing can tell the difference.”
The narrative director, meanwhile, has a CV that’s not attracted as much attention from Disco fans. Throughout a long career in game dev, he’s worked as a writer on the likes of Bungie’s Destiny 2 and Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. He tells me that having seen how the development process works at large studios on triple-A projects like those has helped give him “a really zoomed-out view into how to do it well, while still leaving room for that passion” that he’s applying to the smaller-scale Hopetown.
“It was still really satisfying to find new stories to tell with characters that people already loved and the worlds that people already loved,” he adds in terms of how incorporating the personal into writing can differ between larger games with established lore and a new IP like Hopetown. “But being able to build something new, a new world with new characters that people will love is, I think, exciting in a different way.”
At the end of the day though, as that aforementioned non-screenshot has proven, this freedom for Hopetown is coming with one measuring stick Longdue has taped its game to. For better or worse.
“There’s a lot of ways that it will be similar and a lot of ways that it will be different,” Roberts says when I ask him directly how Hopetown will set itself apart from Disco Elysium. “We’re not specifically honouring the legacy of any one game, it’s more about the history of the genre. While we did use that messaging early on, based on the people that were working on that early concept who are no longer with the company it made sense to say that it was a spiritual successor.
“So, there are parts of Disco Elysium that we are inspired by and that we want to make in this game. Psychological complexity and storytelling, that is intelligent and modern and mature, but not in a dark and gritty way, but like an adult way. Really enormous, hugely impactful conversations with characters in the game, both inside and outside of your head. Disco inspired us a lot in those ways, and a lot of games over the last few decades have looked like Disco, they’ve got this camera perspective, either isometric or diametric, or however you want to think of it. We’re going to look like that, we’re going to have conversations with ranging dialogue and with skills that will speak up during conversations, and that will guide you during conversations.
“So, it is for people who – I think the other day I described it as – if you like Disco Elysium, then you’re probably going to like Hopetown. And if you didn’t like Disco Elysium, then you might like Hopetown anyway.”