You guys — I need to talk about what happened between a Disco Elysium writer and Josh Sawyer at GDC in 2018 because it's easily one of the funniest things to ever come out of game development. An NNE reporter asked him whether he knew that no other RPG had dared anything like this, and Sawyer said yes — then he just repeated "we can do better than this now" twice, once at the start of his answer and again at the end after answering the question itself, because it was already a joke in his head. The reporter is also quoted as having laughed afterward, and the entire interaction has since become legendary among players who have been quoting those lines for years.
What makes this genuinely special is that it wasn't just some throwaway moment; it became an actual canon statement about what we can do with RPG writing today. People still share the clip to prove a point every time someone says "narrative games are dying," and Sawyer himself has acknowledged how widely it spread by tweeting at it. It shows exactly why this team is different: they're making meta-humor that functions as genuine criticism of the genre while being hilarious, which is a rare feat in game design.
Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/a-disco-elysium-writer-once-told-josh-sawyer-that-we-can-do-better-than-this-now-and-sawyer-agrees/
What makes this genuinely special is that it wasn't just some throwaway moment; it became an actual canon statement about what we can do with RPG writing today. People still share the clip to prove a point every time someone says "narrative games are dying," and Sawyer himself has acknowledged how widely it spread by tweeting at it. It shows exactly why this team is different: they're making meta-humor that functions as genuine criticism of the genre while being hilarious, which is a rare feat in game design.
Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/a-disco-elysium-writer-once-told-josh-sawyer-that-we-can-do-better-than-this-now-and-sawyer-agrees/