‘No one else writes things that long!’: This cult classic game had so much text that it broke the narrative design software

The critically acclaimed RPG Disco Elysium had so much text that it completely froze and broke the narrative design software the developers were using. This was revealed in the third episode of Noclip’s documentary that goes over the game’s development history.

The developers at ZA/UM had to use Articy, a specialized tool designed specifically for handling branching stories and complex dialogue trees. It turns out that the amount of content the team was generating was far beyond what the software was built to handle. Helen Hindpere, who was a writer on the original game and served as the lead writer for the Final Cut, explained just how excessive the word count became.

She noted that while previous writers on the team often struggled with not writing enough, the problem quickly reversed itself on Disco Elysium. “The problem became that we were writing too much,” Hindpere stated. The volume was so intense that they had to cut parts, yet the quality was so high that they were constantly fighting to keep everything in. “We’re gonna just have to find the time,” was the recurring sentiment, and this dedication was what ultimately strained their tools.

Disco Elysium is known to be text-heavy, but it’s still shocking to hear the extent ZA/UM writers went to, to make it all work

This dedication wasn’t without technical hiccups, though. Hindpere confirmed that due to the massive amount of dialogue, the software started getting “quite janky” and eventually froze entirely. It simply wasn’t built to manage that scale. When the ZA/UM team reached out to the Articy developers for help, the response they got was almost unbelievable.

The Articy team admitted that they had never encountered a problem like this before. The Articy developers were essentially telling them, “Yeah, you know this is the first time anyone’s coming with those problems to us, so we don’t really know what to do.”

Märten Rattasepp, who worked as one of the writer/editors on Disco Elysium before moving on to work on Obsidian Entertainment’s Pentiment, shed light on why the text volume was so monumental. The team spent an almost unheard-of amount of time crafting each character. “Some characters took a month or two to write,” Rattasepp recalled. “No one else writes things that long! You need to be done in like three days, what are you doing?” he said, capturing the sheer insanity of their development cycle.

This insight into the writing process was revealed during a recent documentary series about the making of the game. The first episodes of the series detailed the early foundation of ZA/UM as a collective and how the setting of Elysium was originally developed through extensive tabletop roleplaying sessions and a novel written by Robert Kurvitz, titled Sacred and Terrible Air.

Clearly, the final game inherited that deep, expansive history, resulting in the incredibly rich narrative we all loved. It sounds like the secret formula to creating a masterpiece like Disco Elysium is simple: ignore all industry conventions, spend an insane amount of time writing, and just cook up so many words that you literally break your own software.