Gaming: Why Does Isometric Perspective Suit Disco Elysium? 'you Can Design...

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God bless Aleksander Rostov. The art director has been a highlight of Noclip's documentary about the making of Disco Elysium so far, always chiming in with the kind of insight you get with the real-life equivalent of Disco's "Actual Art Degree" thought cabinet project. The latest episode is focused entirely on Disco's art, which means Rostov gets to talk almost the entire way through, and everything he says is fascinating.

I was most interested in his comments on why Disco Elysium, which bucks CRPG tradition in so many ways, follows genre convention in having a top-down isometric perspective. "The isometric image is wonderful in that it is flat," Rostov says. "There's none of this 3D, like a million viewpoints. It's just this one image, in essence. You can design the entire game as if it was a painting. And that's kind of what we did."

Technical artist Siim Raidma mentions the importance of one Pillars of Eternity video from back when Obsidian's CRPG was still in-development, and which explained how its graphics were rendered. Obsidian wasn't to know at the time, but this video—which has also been referenced in a previous episode of the documentary—became a ground zero for the look of Disco Elysium. Rostov and the other artists took this four-minute lesson in isometric perspective and applied everything they knew about modern art to it.

Source: PC Gamer