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

i'm only here for the top 10 video game betrayal reaction video notifications

Okay this game

Only played about an hour and already LOL'd several times. "It doesn't have to be murder. It can just be sex"

The PS4/5 version is extremely buggy - to the point at which, when you can’t complete plot elements, it’s effectively unplayable by day three. There has been one patch already but it hasn’t fixed the key issues. They’ll have to patch again but, unless it’s on sale, it might be worth holding off purchasing until they do.

Oh no. That sucks. Not encountered anything yet myself. But I did die from kicking in a door and giving myself a hesrtattack and the game started me back quite far before that point. I had to dolefully go back through several conversations I'd already had because I was worried I'd miss something important if I skipped them. Have resolved to save my game a bit more often

If you’ve made it over to the other side of the bridge and collected items from the car, you might be lucky. It’s not clear whether the bug affects every player, but it’s a substantial proportion at least.

thanks for the heads up here, will wait.

The only bug I’ve encountered on PC (using a controller might be part of it) is getting locked on dialogue where the “next” prompt doesn’t show up.

It appears to be an issue where you’re close enough to trigger the dialogue but it fails the check to continue the conversation. The workaround that was effective for me the first time was to make sure I kept walking even after the dialogue prompt showed up until it actually stopped me.

That didn’t seem to help when it happened a second time, but I’m basically at the endgame already so I’m willing to sit it out until the patch or, god forbid, plug in my mouse and see if it’s a controller-specific glitch

I also encountered the glitch where the zoom-out after an interaction goes extreeeemely slowly before the game returns control. That can be alleviated by closing and reopening the game.

Only played one "day" of DE and I'm really enjoying it so far. There's so much to love about this game. The internal and external world-building are mindblowing, and with any luck I'll be playing this through multiple times in order to get different outcomes.

Have encountered a couple of glitches and mild frustrations - nothing game-breaking, but still just enough to affect suspension of belief and grind me down whilst playing:

- Sometimes audio dialogue plays late, doesn't play at all, or occasionally the wrong audio dialogue plays*.
- Can be a bit confusing when character dialogue text appears with narrative interjections, but only the character audio plays
- Text is small for a game that requires a lot of reading, even on the largest setting. Coupled with conversations that can take several minutes' worth of dialogue trees, it can be exhausting. As such, I found I couldn't play for long bouts without starting to fall asleep and lose track of some of the longer conversations. At this point, I would have saved my game and gone to bed, but you can't do this if you're in the middle of a lengthy interrogation. If I had a Switch and this were on it, I'd much rather play Disco Elysium in bed on a small screen than sitting on my sofa squinting at the telly.
- UI is very fiddly. The way dialogue options are highlighted in white, red, ever-so-slightly paler red etc, isn't intuitive and on several occasions I've made the mistake of choosing the wrong option to the one I wanted
- I'm finding the object menu really hard to use. It's not entirely obvious what I'm highlighting or what direction I'm meant to press to highlight the thing I want. Could be a bit clearer.
- I like the way there's no manual or instructions whatsoever; it complements the main character's amnesiac nature, but I did have to look up how to interact with things in my hostel room when I first woke up as I was just staggering around clutching my head and trying to press every button. I swear I fucking pressed the R3 stick a bunch of times along the way, but yeah, first little stumbling block.
- I still don't really understand how the Thought Bank works. If I stop thinking about something after I've finished the Thought, will I be able to retrieve the Thought later? Like, does it disappear once I've finished internalising it or is it stored in my memory bank? The first Thought I completed was my way home, but the instructions were long and prosaic and didn't really help a lot. I figure I'll just stumble into my house one day on my travels.
- A quirk of the isometric viewpoint is that it's not always obvious how to get from one point to another. There'll be a narrow passageway which I can spend a long time navigating into without luck before simply letting the computer do it for me by selecting an interaction point on the other side of the screen and letting my character walk there by his own volition.

*The acting is brilliant though. Quite interested in the accent/dialect choices here. Only a handful of US accents here and there; lots of Francophone accents; while the rest seem to be a mishmash of regional UK accents. Nevertheless, a lot of the dialogue is US-centric and it's a bit strange hearing Cuno and Cunoess employ slang terms like "pig" and "ass", which I wouldn't associate so much with the UK.

I think the thoughts confer status bonuses as long as they're in the bank. You can unlock new slots by spending skill points or use skill points to remove thoughts that you no longer want to have.

Thoughts have a before/after state where they have one effect while they’re internalizing, and a different effect when complete.

The tip I recently read that hadn’t occurred to me is that you can pause them during the process, which is great for the couple that actually give a nice bonus during that phase. It’s also worth noting that, while it spends a point, you can forget thoughts after they’re internalized but no longer useful. In case you don’t want to permanently get race realist dialogue options.

Yep, I'm experiencing the same small glitches as dl but no big bugs. Not got through a day yet but I've already started rebuilding communism!

Same, comrade!

I bought this game a while back because of the rave reviews and the Planescape: Torment namechecks and the promise of innovation in my preferred video game subgenre (isometric RPGs) but even now that the final cut is out I can't bring myself to play it due to the setting, which, if I'm being honest, doesn't really appeal to me all that much. Guess I played myself.

what is it about the setting you're not into?

The overt poli-sci. Just not my jam when it comes to video games – I only really play them for escapist purposes.

I getcha. Well, I can tell you it's a vastly escapist version of political science which has little-to-no resemblance to the real world beyond a bit of satire. Magic realism in an inveted world through-and-through

Good to know. I'm sure I'll enjoy it, I just need to tune into the right headspace first.

So far it's been a lot less about politics than a surreal Twin Peaks-ish murder-mystery

please shout here when it's patched?

fwiw I was able to finish it (again) on PC without issue when I swapped over to mouse/keyboard for the scenes that had glitched. something to sort out in the pathfinding/dialogue triggers, it seems

I also fucked up and triggered the endgame before doing the new secret communist meeting content, ffs

PS5 patch has released, though people are reporting that it hasn’t fixed some of the plot-curtailing bugs.

The PS4 patch is still pending with no confirmation on when it’s expected. I think there’s more than enough good will towards the developers at the moment that it won’t lead to huge numbers of people demanding immediate refunds, as with Cyberpunk, but it’s not great.

It's a bummer, because I was super excited, so excited I was going to buy it on PS4 rather than wait for the Switch. But now I have the feeling the PS4 version won't be totally fixed until closer to when the Switch version is scheduled (is it even scheduled? "summer"?), and that the Switch version will be delayed or released but buggy and needing lots of patches as well.

Btw, I know this stuff is hard but I don't know enough about how buggy releases happen. Whether Cyberpunk or this or lots of other stuff, it takes just a few days, if not a few hours, for players to assemble long lists of everything wrong. Do developers not see these bugs or glitches, or do developers see those thing but choose to release the buggy games anyway, quietly getting to work on patches before people even start complaining? Or is it a forest for the trees sort of thing, where the developers are so drawn into the details - the coding, tiny aesthetic aspects of the game, etc. - that the big picture becomes almost invisible? Like, so focused on a character's eyebrows that they don't notice its feet don't touch the ground, that sort of thing. It's all kind of mysterious to me.

if i had a Switch, I'd get it on Switch (assuming no bugs and it's legible). Game is similar to reading a book and I'd feel a lot happier playing it in bed or a comfy chair than on my sofa squinting at the TV

i'm waiting for switch bc the amount of time i can use the family tv to play grown-up games without kids trying to watch is negligible

The 1.2 patch was released a few days ago for PS4 and, more or less, gets you to a point at which you can finish the game, albeit without doing all of the side quests.

It's worth waiting for the fully patched version to be released before starting, imo.

Still not crossed the canal yet, but still encountered a few weird glitches, like the game suddenly failing halfway through a conversation. Always seems to happen at a point I didn't save the game, which is mildly frustrating.

I got to Day 2 without having enough Real to pay for my hostel room. The clock stopped at 2am and I couldn't progress the game and it wouldn't let me sleep on the bench (as a few online fora suggested), so I had to sell a bunch of postcards and my shot-put ball to progress the game. Not sure if that was meant to happen or not, but it was a bit puzzling.

Patch 1.3 is now live on PlayStation! This fixes a myriad of bugs, soft locks, and interaction errors. We’re hard at work on 1.4. Thank you everyone. pic.twitter.com/wxBpEgBYKY

— Disco Elysium (@studioZAUM) April 12, 2021

That was quick.

I've still not experienced anything more than those initial couple of minor bugs but glad it's got the patches going now anyway.

I can tell you it's a vastly escapist version of political science which has little-to-no resemblance to the real world beyond a bit of satire...

So far it's been a lot less about politics than a surreal Twin Peaks-ish murder-mystery

Man, I completely disagree with this assessment, dl. It's... very very political. In the most depressing way. In the nihilist "all political ideals are bad because humans are inherently bad" way. It's such a good game but so grim.

the strain of capitalism has been felt by dog latin, I see

I agree with you Emil.y, it's definitely political. I meant that it wasn't rooted in real-world politics and that the politics in DE are a very incisive satire on political factionism. I've only just started the third day, so maybe I haven't quite encountered the grim realities yet, but I've found these caricatures of left/right/centre more funny than grim so far:

The far-right elitists, so convinced of their intellectual and physical superiority that they become engines of unfalsifiabie dogma during any argument.
The radical leftists, so narrow-minded in their doctrinism that they're constantly having to swerve away from all-out genocidal thinking.
But by far the most interesting caricature/parody is of the centrists, who've become so high on the smell of their own farts that they exhibit an almost cult-like belief in the financial structures and institutions they've built up for themselves, often turning a blind-eye to the very idea that these might be their own type of totalitarian brutality.

Yes, it's grim, but it's darkly comic in every way. No one gets out alive, and I have to concede that the parts where my own beliefs are challenged and taken apart are the funniest bits.

I've finished my first playthrough as a Communist and will start a Radical Centrist 'what would Wes Streeting do' one when everything's patched.

It definitely feels like it gets heavier and darker as the game progresses. The balance between humour and bleak horror isn't always an easy one but it's an incredible achievement overall.

had to sell a bunch of postcards and my shot-put ball to progress the game.

Bought this on xmas sale and haven't tried yet. Can't wait.

So, I finished the game last night. What a ride. I laughed; I cried; I became Dance, the destroyer of worlds. I still think the politics are more grim than funny, for me they're really not that far removed from the real world and the real world is Not Fun. Which is maybe why I alternated between Sorry Cop and Apocalypse Cop so much (with a tiny sprinkle of Art Cop thrown in for good measure).

There were definitely some bugs in the PS4 version that I played but only one that caused me to almost rage-quit (one character refused to show up at the appointed time no matter how many buildings I went in and out of, no idea how it fixed itself but it did eventually).

Somehow, in the middle of playthrough number three, my character became... inadvertently racist? I swear I didn’t internalize the terrible racism thoughts, but at some point — I suspect due to lacking skill points in some of the thoughts that would have warned me — I ended up only having dialogue options that would alienate poor Kim!

Everything ended up OK, though. It was probably payback for choosing to be an ultra-liberal who loves money.

I'm not enjoying this. The pungent voice isn't by itself appealing to me, but where it really feels like a slog is the sheer amount of dialogue I struggle to maintain interest in. Maybe I should try to suppress my min/maxing urge and only pursue dialogue options that interest in me?

absolutely not a min/maxing game, imo. especially not on the first run

you’re meant to fail, mortifyingly and hilariously, at times

Well I'm stuck in this game after several hours and I'm a bit cheesed off about it. Can't seem to progress at all

What bit, dl? The bug I mentioned was with The Pigs not showing up, had to do a bunch of going in and out of locations and reloading the game before it fixed itself. And if it's not a bug but you getting stuck I could maybe give you a hint?

Leee, it's a ridiculously text-heavy game, which is good for me as I love text adventures, but maybe not good for a min/max type. And yeah, you do have to learn to not choose every single dialogue option - definitely go for the ones that interest/entertain you, or the ones that suit the playstyle of the run you're doing.

i def think this looks like the sort of thing where if you like that sort of thing it's gonna be the best thing of that sort of thing but if you don't like licorice it ain't happening

So without wanting to spoil anything, there's a day when Kim goes away to do something and during that time there's a check that fails to appear and you can't progress the game until he comes back. Had to do a lot of digging around Reddit to work that one out

This game is yes, very text heavy. I often find myself playing it till the wee hours and falling asleep. In a way that's cool though cos you can play it at your own pace

Not sure if I'll play it through twice though. can't imagine it being especially different the second time round. Maybe?

I'm playing it through as a Physique/Psyche apocalyptic cop: my failures are the most entertaining part of the game. Next time, high intellect pedant, so I can lecture the characters of Revachol on correct thought. But perhaps I'll wait a year before returning.

Okay so I completed this tonight and uh... well that was... tonally abrupt. It just kind of ended with a grouchy argument and a "well I guess that about wraps it up, let's go home". But disappointed as I felt that, despite having done a he'll of a lot, there were still things I'd wanted to do, things to explore, checks to be tried. But no, you meet the perp, chat to him for ages then meet your colleagues and then go home..
I figures I'd try again immediately with different skills, but there wasn't anything strikingly different about my encounters or conversations beyond a few things. I found myself barrelling through dialogue trees and skipping lots of cues because I can't really be bothered to listen to everyone say the same thing again... I dunno, should I keep going in this way, or is it a waste of time? Maybe give it a while and play again?

I'm enjoying this a lot more now, now that I've figured out some of the mechanics and how to progress through the checks. Also, I've found some tasks where the wiring really does move me. I will say that it's hard to fully commit to role play, and the minmax urge can be hard to resist (thankfully I have the thought that gives you extra XP for Commie responses).

Finished!

As to dog latin's point: I agree that the narrative pace slams into a wall at the end, and as far as murder mysteries go, having the two most damning suspects not even in the picture until lateish in the game is unconventional -- and I had quite a few additional skill points left over that I hadn't spent yet.

BUT, I was still transfixed by the exchange with the Deserter, for reasons aesthetic (that voice) and for the cautionary tale that (I think?) the game was trying to tell? Like, I was trying to be a pinko, but then comes this comrade with revolutionary bona fides, washing away all the ultraleftist posturing that I'd been engaged in prior... but he's basically a fascist, an example of this idealized past, a symbol of Communism done right that's incredibly seductive and evil.

The UI sux though.

lol ah hell the spoilers.