At this year's Game Developers Conference, I had a chance to see a first gameplay preview of Studio ZA/UM's RPG follow-up to Disco Elysium, codenamed C4, and speak to two developers on the project: writer Siim "Kosmos" Sinamäe, and artist/producer Ruudu Ulas.
Setting aside the controversy, the labor and creative disputes, the ownership of Elysium, and who gets to lay claim to having "made" Disco, C4 looks interesting—potentially a good or even great RPG—and a lot like Disco Elysium. After six years and a new flowering of indie RPGs, C4 is going to need to deliver in scope or sheer quality of its writing—two things difficult to determine from a short preview—to make that wait feel worth it.
Let's start with a topline breakdown of the gameplay, art, and story: Everything I could glean from the footage and surrounding conversation.
C4 Gameplay
- It looks like Disco Elysium: 3D characters in painterly, pre-rendered, isometric environments.
- The basic gameplay and presentation is the same: Text in the lower right scrolling upwards like a social feed, succeed at 2d6 skill checks to get past obstacles in the environment as you explore.
- The skills still talk to you, and are all new, but with understandable overlap. For example, it's not called "Physical Instrument" anymore, but there's a brute force skill. Another seemed to echo "Espirit de Corps" as your sense of pride and loyalty to your employer.
- C4 has an "exertion" system that reminded me of advantage in Dungeons & Dragons: Add an extra die to your roll at the cost of penalties on future rolls, with those penalties disappearing after rest.
- The Thought Cabinet has been similarly tweaked in a clever way: Instead of waiting for a thought to internalize, you choose whether to embrace or suppress each thought for mutually exclusive bonuses.
- The devs described a "dissonance" system where you'll be penalized for making choices that contradict the thoughts you've internalized—they used the example of lighting up again after quitting smoking, and I was reminded of how there was no real penalty to relapsing after getting sober in Disco.
C4 story and aesthetics
- C4 takes place in a new setting, but has a similar analogue, alt-history, mid-20th century feel to Disco—I had heard this was a new setting before, but felt like I had to triple-check after seeing the environment's resemblance to Martinaise.
- You play a seasoned (or washed up) spy who has been brought in from the cold after an indeterminate amount of time for a critical mission.
- This spy has a set gender, physical appearance, past, and prior characterization much like Disco Elysium's Harry DuBois—At first glance she reminded me of Klaasje from Disco.
- C4 has full narration and voice acting like The Final Cut. The new narrator has a very different voice to Disco narrator Lenval Brown, but they nail a similarly dry, "feigning disinterest but you know they actually care" delivery.
- Anton Vill (Disco's Thought Cabinet artist) returns for much of the game's art, including surreal designs overlaid on top of regular gameplay, showing the protagonist's imagination or analysis at work.
- Quest entries in the journal have unique key art that changes as the quests progress and to reflect their different outcomes.
- A minor detail that I really like: The equip screen of your inventory has a high-quality, concept art-style paper doll of your protagonist and all the gear she can equip, rather than Disco's zoom-in of Harry's character model.
What do I make of it?
I think C4 has promise: Its mechanical tweaks to Disco's formula particularly intrigue me. The exertion dice, for instance, are a thoughtful way to encourage more active, risky play and strategy, rather than aggressive save scumming at checks you just don't have the juice for.
C4 is also, by all appearances, the closest game among the main cast of Disco-adjacent studios to release. The successfully Kickstarted Hopetown and XXXNightshift both appear to be in some stage of pre-production. Elysium setting creator Robert Kurvitz's Red Info has not shown its hand yet. Disco writer Argo Tuulik has been on ice since last fall following a court injunction won by the founder of the studio behind Hopetown.
![PROJECT [C4] - Teaser Trailer - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/kz9apwrMKi8/maxresdefault.jpg)
Ulas and Sinamäe characterized C4 as being in full production, with the gameplay I saw representing a pre-alpha build of the game. After having been on the post-Disco Elysium beat for some time, I've often wished someone would actually play a hand—it's mostly been posturing, accusations, and lawsuits for years now—and ZA/UM actually has a game to show, one that looks pretty good, and maybe has the potential to be great.
I was told development on C4 started three years ago, which lines up with the departure of Kurvitz, as well as Disco's lead artist Aleksander Rostov and writer Helen Hindpere, alongside the cancellation of a direct sequel to Disco Elysium. Kurvitz et al famously accused ZA/UM executives stealing the IP from them through financial malfeasance, while ZA/UM management claims the three were fired with cause.
Last year, ZA/UM canceled an expansion to Disco Elysium and laid off a quarter of its workforce, including Disco Elysium writer Argo Tuulik. Speaking to Tuulik and 11 other current and former ZA/UM employees, I got the picture of a studio that expanded too quickly in a short amount of time and struggled to define itself amid major staff departures and a reputation-defining controversy. They also alleged that the expansion project was starved of resources, skipped crucial steps in the development process at management's insistence, and was given conflicting, confusing directives like scrambling to make a teaser for The Game Awards that was ultimately canned.
I needed to be dazzled by a first look at ZA/UM's sophomore outing, while I find myself only cautiously optimistic.
I don't think it's a partisan statement to say that sentiment among fans and even casual observers has largely aligned with those departed developers and their own follow-up projects. The comments under C4's announcement trailer on both YouTube and X, for example, are extremely hostile to, and critical of, ZA/UM.
Despite the departures, there's still notable talent from Disco's development still at ZA/UM, to say nothing of the new developers who have been brought on since. Sinamäe was credited with "additional writing" on Disco Elysium, while editor and Final Cut writer Justin Keenan is also working on C4. Artist Anton Vill's work, a major part of Disco's identity, is taking center stage in C4.
But even with those continuities, ZA/UM is in a position where it has to prove itself again. With a wait of six years (and counting) and being at the center of an exhausting, internecine conflict, I needed to be dazzled by a first look at ZA/UM's sophomore outing, while I find myself only cautiously optimistic.
The new hotness
While C4's new setting is a break with the past, the aesthetic and mechanical similarities to Disco make me wonder if ZA/UM is playing things too safe, while also inviting more comparisons to that influential, transformative game. Every year that passes makes an incremental follow up to Disco Elysium—particularly one that doesn't take us back to its world—less and less of an exciting prospect.
I asked if ZA/UM had considered a different perspective (like first-person) for C4, and Ulas had a fair response: They had discussed using a different camera and realtime-rendered environments, but that would have been a big risk, and the team decided to stick with what it knew. But absent a true curve ball in genre or mechanics, that means C4 is tasked with being a game as good or better than Disco Elysium, entirely on Disco Elysium's playing field.
The mechanical advancements are a good start, and there are two primary ways I could see a game as similar to Disco as C4 really running up the score. The first is to tell a better story and/or create a more engrossing fictional setting than Disco Elysium—more scintillating prose, more believable, lovable characters, more reactivity to player builds and actions.
That's a tall order when Disco set a new standard for all of those in modern CRPGs. The description for one of the new Thought Cabinet entries gave me a bit of that old, magical feeling I got from Disco's writing, the sort of prose you'd highlight and dogear in a favorite novel, but otherwise none of the dialogue in the (admittedly short and limited) demo presentation really reached out and grabbed me.
The other thing that could really blow the doors off is an ambitious increase in scale. Elden Ring looks a lot like Dark Souls, and Baldur's Gate 2 can be difficult to tell apart from Baldur's Gate 1, but those are two legendary sequels for how they did so much more with familiar mechanics. C4 could very well hide a full city (or at least a much larger map) of dense RPG exploration and storytelling, and that would clearly set it apart from competitors.
And there's a lot more competition in the independent, narrative-focused RPG space now than there was in 2019. Even as ZA/UM and various artists who helped create Disco Elysium have been feuding, truly thrilling RPGs have been made by small teams on micro budgets in the intervening years.
Forget heavy hitters like Baldur's Gate 3 or Cyberpunk 2077—smaller, more niche RPGs like Dread Delusion, Betrayal at Club Low, and Skald: Against the Black Priory have been combining RPG reactivity, unique world building, and surprisingly excellent, even transgressive writing for incredible results. The upcoming Rue Valley, Esoteric Ebb, and Moves of the Diamond Hand are all promising very exciting, and crucially very different sorts of stories built on similar exploration-heavy, dialogue and dice-rolling gameplay to Disco Elysium.
With ZA/UM's budget, manpower, and, crucially, baggage, my bar for C4 is higher—I would want it to surpass, rather than match similar games from much smaller, resource-limited teams, and it's hard to say if it will do that just from a preview. I am still relieved that, after everything, someone from this milieu is showing off an actual game, but with C4 still in pre-alpha it'll need to be worth a six year-plus wait colored by one of gaming's messiest sagas.
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