Fittingly, “Summer Eternal” doesn’t aim to “outdo or even surpass” the original “Disco Elysium,” as it’s more focused on artistic vision than profit

How do you continue your work on Disco Elysium without simply making something too similar to Disco Elysium to be as innovative as Disco Elysium? It’s a hell of a mystery and also something that Summer Eternal, the new studio with former ZA/UM developers who had their own manifesto, is grappling with.

That, of course, was one of the things I told studio staff Argo Tuulik, Dora Klindžić and Aleksandar Gavrilović about when I spoke to them about Summer Eternal in an interview, the main part of which you can read here and in the next day or so You can find out more about this on this website.

“Comparisons and expectations are inevitable,” Klindíić said of the studio’s approach to the game it will make: “But the origin of our work will be our current conditions, our current team, our current reality, not the past that will never be recaptured and is a stupid task.”

“Ultimately, as we develop and design this game from the ground up, we will only evaluate each element based on whether it lives up to what we as a team want to achieve today. Of course men do, as the great man’s quote goes. “We do not shape their history as we please, so our present will always be shaped by our past. But we want to shed all unnecessary ballast and concentrate on building the future.

“We approach this process with no intention of ‘exceeding’ or even ‘equaling’ Elysium, or of competing with any other company on Earth or in orbit, nor of claiming commercial success. We will leave this business to the profiteers. “We will work like artists, that is, with both eyes on the work, not one on the audience and not one on the competition.”

Tuulik, meanwhile, said: “I think we will just overdo it. ‘No one steps into the same river twice,’ says the obscure Heraclitus (inaudible). Instead of trying to be different for the sake of difference or for the sake of being the same, as if.” There was a formula for it. I will follow the dopamine and trust that what we are doing feels familiar but new.

Gavrilovic, on the other hand, described himself as the very greatest builder of communism in his assessment of the task before us: “When Lenin wrote about how best to climb a high mountain, he outlined an important aspect: the climb when one is already on it Located at a high vantage point, sometimes you have to take a different route and descend. This descent is often more dangerous and is always accompanied by the evil gloating of those who, above all, wish that you do not succeed. But if we want to achieve our ambitious plan, we must take our time and descend the mountain first before climbing an even higher peak, no matter how long it takes.”

Summer Eternal isn’t the only new studio to see former ZA/UM developers take on this sort of task with a new game – Longdue and Dark Math Games, announced in the same week earlier this month, need to figure out how they want to step up Lenin’s mountain.