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Former employees were dismissed for “egregious behaviour,” according to the Disco Elysium studio

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It appears that Disco Elysium must now start and conclude each of my working days, which feels quite Disco Elysium. The studio that created Disco Elysium, ZA/UM, disclosed the reasons why a number of staff were let go last year in a statement to GamesIndustry.biz. These consist of “little to no engagement in their responsibilities,” “creating a toxic work environment,” “verbal abuse and gender discrimination,” as well as making an effort to sell ZA/intellectual UM’s property to other businesses.

The departure of game director Robert Kurvitz, art director Aleksander Rostov, and writer Helen Hindpere from ZA/UM before the end of 2021 was made public last month. The studio’s response mirrors, in more formal language, remarks made by ZA/current UM’s CEO Ilmar Kompus to the Estonian newspaper Estonian Ekspress as well as points made in a blog post by Martin Luiga, who was a former employee of ZA/UM and the initial source of information regarding the firings.

Although particular employees are not mentioned in the official statement, Kurvitz and minority shareholder Saandar Taal are mentioned in Kompus’s comments in the Ekspress article (as translated by Google), where he claims that they were “humiliating colleagues and intending to steal IP.”

Taal, who left her position as a director of ZAUM UK LTD in 2021, has not yet made an appearance in this narrative. According to Kompus, Taal and Kurvitz visited other video game firms “secretly and in breach of existing contracts” in order to gain ownership of intellectual property, including Disco Elysium. Disco Elysium’s setting is derived from a lengthy personal D&D campaign that Kurvitz later used as the basis for his novel Sacred And Terrible Air.

Additionally, according to Kompus, Kurvitz and Taal “treated their coworkers very terribly” and Kurvitz “had a history of belittling women and coworkers,” respectively. According to GI.biz, their own sources have made assertions that corroborate these charges. One unnamed source claimed that long-tenured employees were unwilling to criticize Kurvitz’s behavior.

In a statement published yesterday on Medium, Kurvitz and Rostov claimed that Kompus and fellow businessman Tnis Haavel had obtained control of ZA/UM through fraud with the aid of another shareholder, writer Kaur Kender (with whom Kurvitz had previously collaborated and who served as Disco’s executive producer).

According to ZA/response UM’s to GI.biz, “the vast majority of proceeds from Disco Elysium have been invested back into the studio in order to fund our next projects, which are now in development,” and “any charge of financial misconduct or fraud that is being held against us” are denied. Additionally, the studio admits that legal documents have been filed (Kurvtiz’s company Telomer filed last month to “get information and study documents”), but they are certain they “will succeed in court once all the facts are heard.”

Anyone might theoretically be saying the truth at the same time. According to sources cited by GI.biz and Ekspress, the conflict was between the business team and the artistic team, who weren’t as focused on making a profit, and was described as “CEO corporate maneuvering on one side, a poisonous auteur on the other.” The only thing I can be certain of is that I’ll eventually need to make another news post on all of this. On GamesIndustry.biz, you can read the complete statement from ZA/UM Studio.

As Editor here at GeekReply, I'm a big fan of all things Geeky. Most of my contributions to the site are technology related, but I'm also a big fan of video games. My genres of choice include RPGs, MMOs, Grand Strategy, and Simulation. If I'm not chasing after the latest gear on my MMO of choice, I'm here at GeekReply reporting on the latest in Geek culture.

Gaming

Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made

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As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.

Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”

You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.

 

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.

The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.

The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.

The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.

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This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive

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Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.

For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”

Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.

Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.

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