Hopetown and C4: Two projects from former Disco Elysium developers are being revealed at the same time. We have all the info on the upcoming RPGs.
It happened again: Do you remember when three unofficial successors to Disco Elysium were suddenly revealed on an October day in 2024? Two of them are now sharing a reveal again, simultaneously to the exact hour – there’s definitely collusion behind this.
Hopetown and C4 are now both vying for your attention. The former comes from the newly founded studio Longdue, while the latter comes from ZA/UM – the studio that released Disco Elysium in 2019.
We’ll give you an overview of who has just announced what. If you want to read up on why the follow-up to Disco Elysium is causing heated debate and a lot of resentment among fans, check out Peter’s background article. In it, he explains, among other things, the legal disputes between the various studios.
Longdue unveils first scenes from Hopetown
Hopetown offers a first real insight. At least in teaser form. The new video announces the start of a Twitter
Longdue has since deleted a tweet in which the upcoming start of crowdfunding was announced. However, the fact that they wanted to ask fans for financial help had been public knowledge for some time.
⛏ A town built on secrets. A mine swallowing the past. A journalist walking the line between revelation and ruin.
We’re crowdfunding soon for Hopetown – follow our campaign on Kickstarter and access a limited-set of rewards, before it’s too late.
Sign Up Here:… pic.twitter.com/SCZan5fXkn
— Longdue Games (@longduegames) February 14, 2025
The developers describe Hopetown as a “journalist RPG” and a “psycho-geographical” game. This means that the game world is supposed to change depending on the emotions, thoughts and motivations of your character. You navigate through your fragmented psyche and manipulate the events around you with it. A follower of wild conspiracies should find a different reality than someone who approaches all questions with a cool head.
Sounds like an exciting and unique concept, but it’s still pretty unclear how exactly this works in practice. What about the skill system? How much creative freedom do you have? What exactly is your job as a journalist?
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Who is on the Longdue team? Two names will be familiar to disco connoisseurs: Martin Luiga co-founded ZA/UM and wrote several characters in Disco Elysium. Lenval Brown was the voice of the narrator and most of the inner voices.
A release date for Hopetown is not yet known.
ZA/UM is now working on C4
Disco Elysium was the first and so far only game from the Estonian studio ZA/UM (which the developers themselves pronounce “Saum”, in case you’ve always wondered). Now C4 is following suit, also introducing itself with a fresh teaser trailer:
C4 will also be an RPG, but it’s about espionage instead of journalistic investigations. You are sent into a world full of warring factions and tasked with uncovering important secrets. Your own psyche plays a major role here as well, but as with Hopetown, we know little of substance so far. No release date in sight yet.
But there is one detail left in the press release: there will be a dice mechanic. The game with the random factor is of course even more reminiscent of Disco Elysium.
The original creators of Disco Elysium left ZA/UM a long time ago and were involved in bitter legal disputes with the studio. So it is now a new team working on C4. However, some of the people who worked on Disco Elysium are still there.
Now that you have all the important information, it’s time for your opinion: What do you think of the spiritual successors to Disco Elysium? Are you looking forward to more content in an unusual genre or do you think that nothing will match the original anyway? We’d love to read your thoughts in the comments.
