Disco Elysium-inspired steampunk RPG Sovereign Syndicate is getting a director's cut

Image for Disco Elysium-inspired steampunk RPG Sovereign Syndicate is getting a director's cut
(Image credit: Crimson Herring)

In 2021, less than two years after its release, Disco Elysium received a Final Cut update. As well as adding four quests, two songs, and some additional art and animations, it made the whole game fully voiced—bringing in an audience put off by the amount of reading Disco Elysium originally demanded. Sovereign Syndicate, a steampunk CRPG quietly released a year ago, is planning something similar.

Sovereign Syndicate is set in a version of Victorian London where creatures from mythology walk the streets and steam-powered airships fly overhead. It has you play as multiple protagonists, with multiple mysteries to solve, like finding the identity of the Courtesan Killer and tracking down missing orphans. Each of the three main characters has skills that interject in the stream of narration and dialogue, and that's where it most resembles Disco Elysium.

In a celebration of Sovereign Syndicate's one-year anniversary, developer Crimson Herring explained that the studio is currently working on a fully voiced director's cut, which will also have some new quality of life options and "additional comic panels" for the action sequences. Those scenes, which play out in sequential art, double as Sovereign Syndicate's combat system—though they use the same skill system as the rest of the game, which is based on tarot cards rather than dice.

Elsewhere in that post they mention working on more localizations as well, with "Turkish, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese" to come and possibly more, as well as console ports, "with the intention to bring the game to Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch platforms in 2025."

Currently the plan is to release Sovereign Syndicate's director's cut either late in 2025, or early in 2026. And, as clarified on the Steam forum, "Director's Cut upgrade will be free to owners of the original."

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Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.