Hopetown studio Longdue confirm original narrative lead on Disco Elysium-esque RPG’s exit, but say its opening is now playable

You might be aware of the great Disco thrupening, or quadrupening depending on how you classify things. Over the past couple of years, a number of new studios have loudly hoovered up various ex-Disco Elysium devs following internal conflict at ZA/UM, and announced games that aim to rebottle the RPG’s lightning. One such studio is Londgue, who recently told me their partially-crowdfunded RPG called Hopetown now has a playable intro, despite quietly switching narrative leads last year.

I interviewed two of Hopetown’s key developers in April last year, around the time Longdue launched a Kickstarter campaign to provide “a small percentage of the total budget” for the game. The campaign’s since more than doubled its original £25,000 goal, amassing £117,924 from just over 2,700 backers. Development is now underway, but the narrative lead I interviewed, Grant Roberts, is no longer at Longdue. Roberts’ LinkedIn profile indicates he left the studio in July 2025, just three months after the Kickstarter’s launch.

The former Rocksteady and Bungie writer’s departure from a project his LinkedIn profile cites him as having “defined, refined, and evangelised the vision for” appears to have happened pretty quietly – so quietly that, as of writing, he’s still listed in the team section of Hopetown’s website.

To be fair, former ZA/UM developer Martin Luiga was acknowledged as Hopetown’s narrative lead in a short developer update posted by Longdue last August, though that update doesn’t mention him having taken over from Roberts. I recently reached out to both Roberts and Longdue about this. The latter responded with the following statement:

We decided to part ways with Grant Roberts – who was narrative lead – after Martin Luiga (former co-founder of ZAUM and writer on Disco Elysium) scaled up his work with Longdue, and took over the role of narrative and creative lead after re-designing the skills system of the game.

The studio also provided a quote from Luiga outlining how Hopetown’s development is going as of January 2026. “We’ve re-designed and extensively tested a new skills system, based on my learnings from the early days of writing on Disco Elysium,” the developer said. “We’ve also made incredible progress on the world, characters, and plot and have defined the opening scene of the game itself that is now in playable form, with variations of the introductory sequence written by myself and our writing team.”

Longdue have been posting monthly short developer updates with different members of Hopetown’s current team since that one with Luiga last August, so here’s hoping on behalf of any folks who’ve backed the Kickstarter that a proper look at all of this apparent progress is released as part of those soon.

Meanwhile, original Disco studio ZA/UM continue to plow ahead with their own Disco follow-up, Zero Parades. Dark Math Games and Summer Eternal – two studios which IGN reported in 2024 are or have been linked to each other and Longdue in various messy ways which occasionally beggar belief – are also working on their own Discoey things. For Dark Math, that’s now a ski resort murder mystery game called Tangerine Antarctic. For Summer Eternal, it’s a mysterious game codenamed Red Rooster, which they announced by way of a book. Finally, Disco Elysium lead writer Robert Kurvitz and art director Aleksander Rostov are reportedly working on their own game at another studio named Red Info, and have remained relatively quiet compared to ZA/UM and the thruple of studios I’ve just mentioned thus far.

I personally remain rather sceptical of any of these shots to the Disco chaser, something which extends to ZA/UM’s in-house attempt to re-ignite the magic following what certainly sounds like a horrible few years to have been a dev on the original.