Disco Elysium

ok I know this forum is more or less moribund but I can't hack it around Serious Gamers, I can't, but I happened to hear about this game called Disco Elysium and it intrigues me. Mostly because I thought it might actually involve disco, which it seems not to? But it sounds interesting anyway. Some kind of Estonian no-combat RPG, this seems kind of up my alley honestly... I don't know how I feel about the Chapo Trap House cameos but they are cameos at least?

it seems like a game for people who like the Meaningful Dialogue Choices part of crpgs and wish they'd throw everything else away to focus on that

me personally i don't care about Meaningful Dialogue Choices but I do enjoy walking simulators and the style of the game intrigued me. so i took a chance and i'm enjoying it so far! it reminds me of Gate's version of Saturday Night Fever.

does look cool actch

it reminds me of Gate's version of Saturday Night Fever.

dang now i want in

It has it's own thread! So yeah 20% at the moment, due to it winning an award, if yer interested

https://kotaku.com/disco-elysium-developers-shout-out-marx-and-engels-1840403603

Man someone finally got round to making that video game with 'good writing' huh

It also has the prettiest title screen to date

it seems like a game for people who like the Meaningful Dialogue Choices part of crpgs and wish they'd throw everything else away to focus on that

― ciderpress

Well, I know that's meant to be disparaging but it's pretty much me, yep, and the more I read about this the more desperate I am to play it.

The text is as advertised, but the game also looks great. Some of the character animations are very funny.

Man someone finally got round to making that video game with 'good writing' huh

What's with the scare quotes?

its good writing in the sense that it's super adaptive without showing a lot of seams. i'm not a huge fan of the style

i don't know what that means

What's with the scare quotes?

― Camina Burana Drummer (Leee), Monday, 6 January 2020 22:56 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Idk just that a lot of games touted to have good writing do not

I was fully ready to find DE grating or too self-conscious but I'm frequently quivering with mirth at some of the dialogue options it offers you, and the skills-as-internal monologues thing is handled well

its good at adapting to your dialogue choices and stats without being obvious about whats going on behind the curtain is what i mean

I liked the writing a lot more as a low int high physical character. Which I think is an achievement.

MINOR SPOILER MAYBE

the v pretty title screen is the view the shooter would have had of martinaise

this game rules

yep

Still waiting for PS4 version ;_;

Still waiting for it to go on sale, but I very much look forward to my first playthrough.

Hardcore!

Hardcore to the mega!

Internally coherent!

hurry up and release this shit on PS4 ok

Have there been any status updates? These dudes and Team Cherry re: Silksong have been pretty quiet. I guess they've been busy!

this game is amazing

I know a few of us just started playing this business, so I’m bumping

I'm just waiting for it to go on sale again, which is bound to happen by mid-December at the latest.

waiting for switch/pS4

I really want to go back and play this again using a significantly different character roll and political direction, but man is it addictive and I'm not sure I want to get sucked back in

Still waiting for PS4 version ;_;

― emil.y, Wednesday, July 8, 2020 3:07 PM (four months ago)

hurry up and release this shit on PS4 ok

― Specific Ocean Blue (dog latin), Wednesday, September 23, 2020 12:48 PM (one month ago)

waiting for switch/pS4

― Four Seasons Total Manscaping (forksclovetofu), Tuesday, November 10, 2020 7:20 PM (three hours ago)

Still waiting, waaaaa.

put a few hours into this over the last couple of days and i’m very much enjoying myself, although my character’s tendency to die of despair after touching some stuff in a car or kicking a trashcan is... confounding

I have died zero times, but I feel like you’re still playing it a correct way

i have worked out that my character's pitifully low volition was what was causing him to regularly die of the vapours when confronted with a petanque ball

another hour or so into this now, enjoying it even more now that i've decided to become solely responsible for reviving communism

One thing I didn't realise early on is that if it warns you your volition is dangerously low in response to some traumatic humiliation, you can click one of the healing items in the bottom left to get it back immediately

yeah, i didn't realise that until a few hours of embarrassing deaths - i should have mentioned it here to spare others the same miserable fate

How does this game compare to something like, say, Oxenfree (which is fun enough but basically a story-based game where you pick dialogue options and they slightly affect what happens in the end)

never played that one, nor the often-mentioned Planescape: Torment which is mentioned in hushed tones as a parallel experience

worth noting that the conversation trees (and the Thoughts that come to you while conversing) can be very engrossing and wordy. many words

PS:T is the watershed, a verbose dark fantasy Memento avant la lettre. Very much worth playing if you enjoy DE.

Feels kind of weird to me that they're announcing some sort of definitive special edition of this before it's come to any of the consoles in the first place. Supposedly PS version comes out in March 2021, and Xbox/Switch version in summer of 2021, though I wouldn't put much faith in those latter two, which is too bad, since I'm sure this could be a good Switch/portable game. I'm still super intrigued, though.

Is full voice acting really necessary for such a reading-intensive game? I hate how it's become an absolute must these days.

you can turn it off! I do when playing dragon quest xi

Sure, but it's not a binary. I like partial voice acting to highlight key narrative moments.

a lot of jrpgs still do the "main story scenes are voice acted, incidental dialogue and sidequests are not" thing but people always complain about it so apparently it is necessary

i suspect its usually more a budgetary than directorial choice

switch performance will likely be dogshit : /

Which sort of makes me more intrigued. There have been some downright magical Switch ports (Ori, apparently Witcher 3, a lot of the Bethesda stuff). Then again, speak of the devil, Doom Eternal clearly ran into a million problems on Switch. But they got Control running on the Switch, right? Granted, it's on a server, iirc, but that's a game that doesn't even always run well on more powerful consoles, maybe they will do something like that?

Am I right, though, that this seems like a big open-world game that might benefit from portable Switch play? I've been avoiding spoilers, because the praise has been so fervent, but I kind of get the sense the PS4 might not be the right fit for this. I could be wrong, though.

Some beautiful art in this game, seems reason enough to play

The church/club section was definitely my favorite bit. Once that peaked I honestly would’ve been totally satisfied if the game ended right there. But there were some great things to come. Loved the phasmid stuff.

I picked the brainy path, seemed like the obvious choice for a dialogue driven game, but I am super curious about how this plays out as a physical character. Probably run through it again down the line.

yeah, it would be nice to just run over the big racist dude who blocks the bridge pretty early on.

that reminds me, though, that the only way the writing/story occasionally lets me down is the caricatures of the different paths you can go down, communism, fascism, the union, etc, are sometimes just a little too exaggerated and oversimplified. i think it works for the most part, though, because in general, the game does a great job of making you feel a little bad about every decision you make, like everything you do is both kind of a good decision but also clearly not what you should be doing, all the time. it's so fucking good

Measurehead (lol) is just very committed to his race realist ideology

did anyone else play the shameful way i did? if there was some kind of important skill check and i had a reasonably good chance of passing but instead failed, i'd re-load and do it again until it worked

:(

Oh totally. I was rarely onboard with any of the didactic political paths and the game makes a point of calling out the dangers of centrism and/or not choosing sides all the same. Like there aren’t really “good” options most of the time, it’s a big mess, everything’s challenged. It kinda rules.

I still ended up as a maybe half assed communist, apocalyptic art cop.

That was an xp to Karl’s previous post, but yes, I scummed and reloaded constantly to pass a check.

Why I mentioned how great it was that load times were zippy on PS5 lol.

I wouldn’t be able to stomach it, but seriously interested in how the game plays out as a full on fascist, racist meathead. Surely all points lead to some same-ish kinda endpoint, but I wonder what kinds of divergence are built into this thing.

What’s great is I can perfectly imagine Kim hating your guts in that scenario and constantly talking shit in the most moderate way

Kim is one of the best sidekicks in game history, although it is difficult to directly compare them to like, Luigi

Haha, for real, I was bummed on the days Kim wasn’t around. Dude was my ROCK.

I know it's possible to offend Kim and he disappears for the rest of the day, but I'm not sure if you can keep doing that

Playing this and really enjoying it. I’m on day 4 and haven’t had a drink yet - is that bad? Anyway I love everything about this game. Just resolved the church disco situation.

Recently finished this, it absolutely rules and is one of the most engrossing gaming experiences I've ever had

So it turns out that most of the original creators of Disco Elysium have been involuntarily pushed out of the company, including Robert Kurvitz, the lead designer and writer(!)

This is super fucked up, but unfortunately not particularly surprising for the indie games industry. https://t.co/Op1R46drgJ

— Joachim (@JDespland) October 1, 2022

Every week I have a moment of sadness realising there is no game like this and that I cannot play it again for the first time.

Church disco situation is a classic in a game of classics. I think Evrart Claire saying “Harry” is the best part of the game though. An Evrart Claire x Phoenix Attorney type crossover would be my dream game.

A friend gave me this game as a gift (PS4 hard copy that I'll play on PS5), so I guess I'll have to play it now. Hoping it will be a fun game to go through with my wife, after we finish Inscryption (been taking that verrry slowly, only just got to act 2).

Excellent wife game. Wish I could rope mine into single player games

Just got this to play on my 8yo's Switch when she's asleep. Very barely into the game but enjoying it greatly, though I have died numerous times already because I didn't understand how to raise my health from 1 point and thus keeled over after kicking heavy curtain, etc. I do feel it could restart you after death from just before the thing you did that killed you, though maybe I have taken more of the arcane backstory onboard by clicking around every point of interest in the bookstore four or five times.

I absolutely love the fact that if you min/max your character, you are vulnerable to some of the absolute silliest ways to lose a game imaginable (at one point I lost the will to continue because I put on a cost that was too dirty)

yup!

I hadn't played for a while and tried making a character that was uh, not physically inclined, and managed to accidentally electrocute myself by trying to turn on the ceiling fan in the first 30 seconds

Started this last night, created a mostly average character and in an hour we got as far as the ground floor of the hostel. I think my wife bailed, the amount of dialogue makes the pace too slow for two people (with different reading/processing speeds). While normally dialogue (and especially the process of exhausting dialogue options) is my least favorite part of a video game, and it appears to be the entire game here, it's obviously extremely well-done and I think I'm going to keep playing on my own.

I do like the skill checks/dice rolls, it really gives that feeling of playing D&D without the awkwardness of having to play D&D with people.

Yeah it starts slow but gets weirder and more interesting as you go. Kinda felt like reading a book more than playing a game.

I had a blast playing a character with high Inland Empire and Shivers skills; it heightened the weirdness and gave my investigator a real Dale Cooper vibe, w/r/t strange intuitions and picking up on vibrations.

I also recommend inland empire as a main skill - if you're going to play a game that's heavily influenced by twin peaks and lynch, might as well see what they got imo

to anyone playing the game for the first time, though, i highly recommend starting with an extra point in Endurance, which directly ties into your health. it is not fun to die while looking at a ceiling fan after reading half an hour of text at the beginning of the game

Or… IS IT?

it's one of those things that is very fun in abstract

Lol, at least I made it past the ceiling fan boss. I'll try to play it weird.

i think the bummer about dying to the ceiling fan boss is having to go through all the dialogue at the beginning again, without a way to skip. i get why it works that way - the skills you choose at the very beginning probably change how that opening dialogue goes (?), but holy crap it's pretty demoralizing

it also makes you think that the rest of the game is also going to be filled with gotchas and gamebreaking decisions, but after that it's much more forgiving! (particularly if you're willing to cheat like me and reload a recent saved game when things when failing certain checks)

I made it past the ceiling fan but shortly afterward died of shame because Cuno made fun of me. I had to redo a lot of progress but I laughed the entire time

I blacked out crashing into the wheelchair lady, but I'm not sure if that counts as a death? Also not really sure how saving works yet, I haven't picked it back up since that first session.

why in god's name do you not simply come back to life just before you did the thing that deaded you? haven't had a chance to play it again since my first couple of hours on it, but i must admit the prospect of rerunning all the sections i'd already played through twice before isn't exactly making me salivate.

You can save your progress before you interact with things, in fact I’d say the game goes out of its way to encourage you to do so by murdering you in comically ludicrous ways

Oh, do you start at the beginning if you die without saving? Are there no auto-saves?

I’m pretty sure there are autosaves? I never relied on them, though. After death-by-Cuno I treated the game like it was Microsoft Word circa 2000 and hit save every 5 minutes or so

it's relatively easy to save once the game gets started for real. for some reason, though, they don't give you an autosave just before the ceiling fan boss, and it's sooooo early on, one of the very first non-text things that happens, that it's easy to forget to manually save

I treated the game like it was Microsoft Word circa 2000 and hit save every 5 minutes or so

same here and heavily recommended

you can do a little save scumming as a treat, but anything short of death should be accepted and moved on from imo

there are at least a couple moments where you can really piss off Kim unintentionally because your character is simply incapable of being competent

I’m pretty sure there are autosaves? I never relied on them, though. After death-by-Cuno I treated the game like it was Microsoft Word circa 2000 and hit save every 5 minutes or so

henceforth Dan you shall be my disco guru

Ok I'm fine with failure, I just don't want to die and have to re-do a bunch (this isn't Dark Souls, lol). I'll check out the save system on PS5.

I finished Day 1, and apparently I'm a "sorry cop" (I have a hard time playing these games like an asshole) with a side of paranormal communism. It's certainly an achievement in terms of the writing and style, although some of it still feels a bit like busy work (go talk to everyone, trigger the right thing to progress, etc) in a way that makes me a little antsy. I'll probably keep going slowly throughout the year, it's hard to pick up for just a few minutes (on PS5 at least). And I'll probably get sidetracked by the pure dumb fun of the upcoming RE4 remake.

New update lets you make your own scenes and dialogue? Crazy, I hope that's the hot new meme format.

(midway through Day 2 now, got the body down and finished some side quests, figuring out how to progress next)

(OK now seeing the whole thing going on with the creators and the company, that's too bad)

Dis game got me stressing about virtual rent
I’m not interested in making a living

Beautiful Iraqi review of the beautiful Disco Elysium pic.twitter.com/VVgiE5bQWT

— Zett Jukassa survived and died on Alderaan (@Zett_Jukassa) July 25, 2023

this is really cool. i'm working so hard to try and love this incredibly fucked up life which was, five years ago, my worst nightmare, and the best parts of it just aren't anything i know how to explain to anybody who hasn't lived it.

i love my friend who reaches out to me every day to say "hi", even when she's feeling awful. i love whenever i see another Birdie Wing meme. I love when my girlfriend comes over and we don't talk about our emotions, we just cook dinner together. I love the little ironic catchphrases we have, like Really Good Ally or There Were No Signs. I love girldick. I love the car my girlfriend's next door neighbors drive, a Subaru pickup with two huge trans flags trailing out the cab. I love that the most offensive thing about that car is that the custom plate ("TRNS UWU") is a California plate. I love the trans bus driver who drives the nine. I love how every grocery store clerk here just calls everyone "my friend", not just because they don't know other people's pronouns, but because it doesn't really matter.

I could go on forever. I should play more Disco Elysium.

Picked this up again yesterday. Last save was July... Found a woman to date but was advised to explore the coast first