In a new episode of the Noclip documentary series, developers from ZA/UM revealed that at a certain point, the scale of the script exceeded the technical capabilities of the software being used. Helen Hindpere, the main screenwriter of the Final Cut version, admitted that the team faced a problem rare for the industry: there was so much text that control over the material began to be lost, and editing turned into a constant struggle with deadlines.
The main problem was Articy — a professional tool for creating non-linear stories. The program, designed for managing dialogues, began to slow down dramatically with the amount of text from ZA/UM, and then completely froze. When the developers turned to the software creators, they stated that they had never encountered anything like this before: the tool was not designed for such long and complex script chains.
One of the game's writers, Marten Rattasepp (who later worked on Pentiment), noted that working on dialogues with individual characters took up to two months. In the RPG industry, where such tasks are usually allocated several days, this approach was considered extreme. In the end, it was this uncompromising work with the text and going beyond the technical limits of the tools that became the basis for the success of Disco Elysium.