Disco Elysium Was Made Under "Mega Crunch", Say Devs

thegamer.com:

Disco Elysium was released to rave reviews in 2019, but developers say that it only made its release date at all because they were under "mega crunch". The game's lead director even says that the development of Disco Elysium "destroyed lives", with another writer saying that it "changed" people and hurt relationships.

This comes from an extensive documentary into the development, release, and aftermath of Disco Elysium, courtesy of the YouTube channel People Make Games. In the two-and-a-half-hour video, almost everyone involved discusses Disco Elysium's troubled development, and the even more troubled development of its sequel. And even if many writers and developers can't come to an agreement on ZA/UM's legal drama, they all agree that the production of the first game was unhealthy for everyone involved.

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"The last nine months of working on Disco... this was mega crunch," says Argo Tuulik, a writer at ZA/UM. "For nine months, I think I didn't sleep at least one night [every week]. After this, everyone was so broken and burnt out."

This version of events is shared by others who worked on the game, including Robert Kurvitz and Aleksander Rostov, who were terminated from the company after the release of Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, prompting ZA/UM's current legal issues. Even if they don't agree with ZA/UM about the events leading to their firing, they do say that Disco's development was "utterly relentless." They blamed "totally unrealistic deadlines" for this crunch.

"This created a really hellish rhythm of production," says Kurvitz. "You know that it's not going to be possible to release this really complicated CRPG in 11 months' time. You