Disco Elysium

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.

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.