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Disco Elysium is lauded as one of the most unique and original games ever made, but it didn't spring entirely from nowhere. In fact, the developers at the original iteration of ZA/UM took pretty explicit inspiration from another RPG, Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity, to help define the game's visual identity.
"I was the first person ever to have touched a games engine in the ZA/UM studio history," artist Siim Raidma explains in a new documentary from Noclip. "Pretty much the first day I come into the studio, I get presented with, 'Check out this rad new game, it looks amazing and we want to look better than this game.' And the game was Pillars of Eternity."
Obsidian was a team of veteran RPG developers best known at that time for developing sequels to other studios' games – titles like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 and Fallout: New Vegas. The company took to Kickstarter in 2012 for Pillars of Eternity, asking fans to help fund a new IP built in the isometric style of classic RPGs like Baldur's Gate.
"The Obsidian guys were just doing their great comeback game, Pillars of Eternity," fellow ZA/UM artist Aleksander Rostov says. "But basically we saw how they made the modern isometric game there. You render out these render passes of height maps and normal maps and then you can use this to do the lighting and stuff. We were like, 'we should steal that.'"
"I think it just launched on Kickstarter, and it had a bunch of backer updates," Raidma adds. "Basically, the first week we went through their vlog video, number 79, frame by frame. That was the graphics update, 'how we render stuff.' Like, 'it's a flat plane and we kind of make it three-dimensional with pixels and stuff.' So we were excruciatingly going through that video and pretty much trying to make a cover band of Pillars of Eternity, having a flat world and 3D characters. All the lighting is basically in shaders with some dynamic lights thrown in."
The direct legacy of Pillars of Eternity lives on in Obsidian's Avowed, a larger-scale 3D RPG set in the same world. But clearly, the game's impact is even broader, helping to shape the core visual identity of what's now regarded one of the best RPGs of all time. Turns out that Obsidian knows its stuff.
