“This is not Disco Elysium 2, this is C4” ZA/UM announces its next game, a spy RPG about “doing the work you love, even if it doesn’t get you any fame or parades”
Disco Elysium studio ZA/UM has officially thrown its hat into the kinda DE successor maelstrom, announcing an upcoming spy RPG codenamed Project C4, which its developers explicitly say isn’t a Disco sequel.
Instead, it’s a gritty sounding game that’s more Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy than James Bond. In the first part of a presentation announcing it with a teaser, C4’s writers were introduced as Siim ‘Kosmos’ Sinamäe and Jim Ashilevi, who worked on the original Disco Elysium as a producer/writer (citing Idiot Doom Spiral as a character he had a hand in) and lead voice over director respectively.
The pair stated that over the past five years, among other things, ZA/UM has been “settling in a wider, expanded team, with many new faces bringing in their skills and fresh perspectives”, adding that these devs have “learned how to work together and iterate, so we’re able to make games for the long term”.
It’s worth pausing here to note that, as you may well know, a lot of former original DE devs have departed ZA/UM in different and sometimes acrimonous ways since that game came out, including the likes of key writers Robert Kurvitz, Aleksander Rostov, and Helen Hindpere.
As for this new game, it looks and sounds quite Disco Elysiumy. “As an Operant serving a questionable global power, the player finds themselves locked in a vicious, clandestine struggle for truth and influence,” the plot summary reads, “Yet it is the mind that takes centre stage in Project C4. More vulnerable and more powerful than the physical world, it can be erased, changed, reordered, and of course significantly altered through regular use of psychoactive substances amongst other means.” Gameplay-wise, amid all they spying, C4 “blends player introspection, deep character-driven dialogue, and high-stakes encounters steered by dice rolls”.
However, Sinamäe and Ashilevi said the game is explicitly “not Disco Elysium 2”. “We have learned a lot,” Ashilevi explained, “Most importantly, we’ve discovered what we didn’t want to be or do as a studio. We want to build on what we’ve done before, but not simply by repeating it, or rehashing it.”
In terms of the game, Ashilevi later outlined that Project C4 is “all about spy games, allegiances, and betrayals, adding: “It is not 007, with his hero complex, the Bond girls, and the gadgets. It it more like Slow Horses – doing the work you love, even if it does not get you any fame or parades. No heroes, only the stench of failure”.
More details about the game will seemingly be shared at GDC, so we’ll have to see what they look like. For now, let us know how you feel about Project C4 below. Are you intrigued by it, or have the messy and controversial events that’ve followed the original Disco’s release become hard to look past?