Disco Elysium

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

Disco Elysium’s map is... not big

It takes a while to walk your ass from end to end because of circuitous paths but there are basically just a handful of areas

I finally picked this up on Steam thanks to the Noah Caldwell-Gervais appraisal, and I'm loving it. It's revealed that at heart, I'm a Moralist Sorry Cop, and that's about right. I do regret terrifying a bookship owner who was minding her own business.

Looking forward to the Final Cut version as well: 150,000+ words of new content, free to all present owners, fully voiced including personality traits. It may not need the additional voice acting, but I'm a fan of most of the current characters, especially the internal monologues, so I'll have something to look forward to for supercop, sad sack, and savior of communism playthroughs...

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut arrives March 30! https://t.co/Lqd6q39QOq

— Disco Elysium (@studioZAUM) March 17, 2021

oh my god oh my god oh my god

I'm glad I waited.

Yesss

xbox this summer....please hit game pass...

when i got my PS5 last week i checked to see when this was coming, definitely on my want list

Tbc I only care about the final cut on PC because I am one of *those* snobs.

the turn of the ending was one of the most emotional experiences I've had playing a video game

Hmm, comes out on Switch this summer, doesn't it (supposedly)? Seems like a good game for handheld, for once.

I am torn between waiting for Switch port (greatly increasing the chance I will actually, ya know, play it) or just biting on inevitable 50% Steam sale. And it's on Mac, which I also like to support.

Lol, by the time it actually comes out on Switch it will be, like, less than $20 on PS4.

Actually, tbh the one potential negative of the Switch I think I've heard is that it is so text based that seeing everything on the small screen could be a real challenge.

if all the text is spoken now, you can just patiently listen!

A small pity that all of the "skills" will share the same voice, but at least will get all of the wit and wisdom of Cuno.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N84rQcnAbaA

just sitting here refreshing the Playstation Store

So, clearly not live, no? Have they stated a price?

not yet. it says it will go live between 3-4pm uk time

I see it now, $40 USD: https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP6758-PPSA03268_00-6401393671841114

still can't see it on the UK store. Disco Elusive more like

ah it's finally popped up. £32.99, not too bad

although now the PS Store keeps crashing

We don’t need a liveblog of this

I do

Update: Got it. Downloading. Don't forget to click and subscribe to hear the latest

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.

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