Our Interview with a Vampire: the Masquerade: Eternal Whispers Developer.
After out initial impressions of VTM: Eternal Whispers, we reached out to developer FLYOS games with a few questions about the upcoming game, how their history with the franchise informs the future, and the comparison to Disco Elysium. Below is the edited transcript of the email exchange with Gary Paitre, Cofounder and Creative Director at FLYOS Games
Several observers, including myself, have noted a similarity to the visual language and premise of Eternal Whispers to Disco Elysium, with many going so far as labeling it a ‘Disco-like’. What does that comparison mean to your team, and would you consider it accurate?
Paitre: Being compared to Disco Elysium is both a privilege and an honor. It’s a masterpiece that has inspired countless narrative designers, and we’re certainly among them.
That said, while there are similarities on the surface, I think the comparison only goes so far. Disco Elysium is fundamentally a story about a broken man confronting his own trauma, identity, and past. Eternal Whispers takes a different approach. Our focus is less on internal psychological reconstruction and more on the external forces that shape who we become: ideology, faith, loyalty, power, and the societies we choose to belong to. As a vampire awakening after decades of torpor, the protagonist is drawn into a conspiracy that threatens the future of Montreal’s undead community. Rather than asking “Who am I?”, the game increasingly asks “What am I willing to become?”
What we do share with Disco Elysium is a commitment to meaningful narrative choice. We want players to face difficult decisions, experience real consequences, and explore uncomfortable moral territory without being judged by the game. Vampire: The Masquerade is, at its core, a setting about temptation and monstrosity, and we want players to have the freedom to embrace that darkness, resist it, or find something in between.
Our goal was never to recreate Disco. Our goal is to build a CRPG that feels uniquely rooted in the World of Darkness and in the political, philosophical, and personal conflicts that make Vampire: The Masquerade such a fascinating universe.
You are making the transition from tabletop to video games with Eternal Whispers. While there are obvious differences, in what ways does your previous experience shipping products in the World of Darkness setting prepare you for this undertaking?
Paitre: While our previous World of Darkness board games gave us years of experience working with the IP, Eternal Whispers was never conceived as a direct adaptation of Chapters. From the very beginning, we envisioned it as a CRPG. The tabletop game served more as an exploration ground where we could develop Montreal, experiment with factions, politics, themes, and better understand how players engage with the narrative and mechanics. When development on Eternal Whispers began, we went back to the drawing board. We selected some of the strongest narrative foundations we had built over the years, but every system was redesigned specifically for a video game experience. No dialogue is being copied from one project to the other. Each line is unique. We wanted Eternal Whispers to stand on its own while still feeling deeply connected to the universe we had been building.
What Chapters gave us was something incredibly valuable: a rich and detailed version of Montreal. Both games take place in the same city, which means we already have years of worldbuilding behind us. We knew its factions, its history, its power structures, its secrets, and the kinds of stories that emerge from them. That foundation allowed us to spend less time defining the world and more time creating meaningful choices within it.
I think players who enjoyed Chapters will find a lot to appreciate in Eternal Whispers. They’ll recognize locations, references, characters, and pieces of the city’s hidden history. At the same time, someone discovering our work through Eternal Whispers could go back to Chapters and see many of the building blocks that helped shape the world they’re exploring. The two experiences complement each other, but each tells its own story in its own medium.
