Hot take: A Sequel to Disco Elysium would have been terrible no matter what.

How do you top a great game? How do you undo the process of catharsis that occurs at the end of the game so you are challenged once more into becoming a fragmented ~~Art Cop~~ ~~sorry cop~~ Communnard.

They would have been told to expand the appeal, dumb down the rhetoric, and trick the masses into buying-in. They would have ultimately sold out no matter what.

Kinda glad to have played the best game and it stays the best.

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My hunch is that people were fired precisely because of this. The direction a person wanting to make Disco Elysium 2 as artistically good as possible would take it is very different from the direction a person wanting to make money would.
The only good artistically good direction is to dump Harry and Kim, and to dump the psyche system. Just have the story take place in the universe, maybe not even as a detective story. But those are all things people love about the first one, so a suit would obviously want them in the next game.
- Second game could have kim and harry as NPCs that you meet/interact with. The psyche system was one of my fave parts.
- i think keeping a version of the psyche system could have been good, but obviously it would have to be significantly different from hdb's mind
- Completely agree with this. I’d keep the psyche system though and just have them be different personalities. Depending on the main character’s life experiences, you could have one that’s a child, obsessed with tinkering, etc.
- I think the Psyche system would have been the only thing worth keeping. You have so much potential with a stat system focused on ideas and aspects of a person's psychology and body. But the problem is that people would not be able to let go of HBD and Kim (with good reason, they are awesome characters) but the pressure was there to taint the entire creative endeavor from the very beginning by appealing to your average nerd.
- What I've heard was a sequel was gonna be a pregnant woman and the psyches were gonna be replaced by versions of her fetus.

I always imagined a sequel would be like how the Nier games do it. DE2 would be best if it took places decades before or after the events of the first game, also in a different part of the world. I really do love it when sequels aren't just straight story extensions. I love when they become something else with the setting and focus on expansion of the core elements.
I'd love it if the entire events of first game were just a footnote of a footnote of a larger history. Maybe you get one passing line about Revachol and its reputation for strike breaking and that's all. Everything you and Kim did felt massive while you were in it, but how do those events seem 120 years later and on another continent? That's what I get into.

Their planned squel was supposed to be pretty different, and not focused on Harry at all. (Klassje was supposed to be the main character, possibly?)

That that kind of game, with so much thematically and artistically bound up within it, could ever have come out at all, that was the real Insulindian Miracle
I came to terms with the inevitability that it was probably never going to get any follow-up, just like how I had to come to terms with the fact that the Song of Ice and Fire series will probably never be concluded. Its the definition of "Dont be sad its gone. Smile because it happened."

I'm hoping we get an Obsidian situation where the creatives behind DE come together with a new IP (then get broken up, and come together again, then get broken up, and come together again to make a spinoff to an old game that recaptures some of the lost magic... etc). It won't be set in the Elysium universe which is tragic but I'm sure they have a bunch of cool ideas that they didn't get to implement in DE that we'll see in the future.
- imagining disco elysium turning into a shooter rpg franchise and the new studio inheriting za/um making the best shooter set in that universe
  
  Original writer comes back for Disco Elysium: New Vredefort, the game is an FPS where everyone constantly comments on how strange it is that you hold your gun right under your cheek all the time and the only quest that actually involves shooting is a sidequest where you shoot some targets with a military veteran in order to befriend them and learn some important backstory that relates back to the main plot.
  The gun is a smoothbore muzzleloader, with authentic accuracy and reloading, because of course breech loaders and rifled barrels are illegal.

Dog, Disco Elysium is just the proof of concept for The Return. The whole point of the game was that they didn't think they could handle making the Return off the bat so they made a smaller game first.

It would have been tough to top, but if the story of the sequel was as good as the first I wouldn't have been too upset if the gameplay itself didn't live up to the first.
I think the biggest issue that people have is that not only was the creative talent behind the first let go, they also seem intent on turning the game into something it should never be, a live service that tries to suck as much money from its player base as possible.

I've given it a lot of thought. Disco Elysium is like a perfect storm of features, themes and tropes and the singular experience of it can't be replicated to the same level of perfection. The skill system only really makes sense BECAUSE of the particular elements that make up Harry. His depression, his self doubt, his amnesia. His amnesia alone is super core to the game and it would be strange to have another amnesiac lead... it would cheapen it. But without the amnesia you lose a huge vein that enables and supplies the absurdity of dialogue choices you get in the game. And without the amnesia you have to find other ways to enable the character to re-evaluate who they are at a fundamental level which is AGAIN core to the experience of the game. If you are a cop in the theoretical sequel then we are forced to tread the same water of exploring what kind of cop you are, how you feel about the power hierarchy, and your complicity in the problems plaguing whatever setting you are in.
I think an ideal Disco Elysium sequel would be so different it would be worth considering a new title so as not to give people a false expectation. You keep the idea of the skill system, and the dialogue as combat sensibility (this really just means you are verbally wrestling with other characters like Joyce and Evrart), but I think you have to figure out who the character is first, you figure out what internal contradictions they're struggling with, and then you choose NEW skills that bring this particular struggle to the forefront.
And I think they could do that again without being part of ZA/UM... and perhaps they are free to take risks they wouldn't be able to if they were still there. But I don't want to end on too positive a note because we don't know exactly how they feel about it or how it'll turn out and it still fucking sucks what happened to them.
- The issue is that the company might own the world. And they spent so much time working on that that a different setting, even if it's the same with the serial numbers filed off, might not work out.
  
  It’s a damn shame and I agree… but I want to believe there’s a shadow of a chance they could pull it off without the IP.

Wait the sequel to Disco Elysium isn't a meme? It's something that's actually happening? :lt-dbyf-dubois:
- The studio ZA/UM is I think keeping their rights to the license but the creative force has quit/fired from the studio.

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