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

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

Really enjoying my first playthrough of this, even if it is making me feel like a hopeless dumbass (much like point-and-click games always do). Just survived the shootout and it was an absolute shitshow.

I forgot about this game. I haven't played any games for ages, I didn't really have a clue what I was doing when I played this though so I probably already fucked it up. I don't even think I've got to a shootout tbh. I already got shamed to death by Cuno

Cuno is a little punk. Brilliant game though. Want to go back and replay it with different stats and politics. I recall playing it on Windows, curious if there's a Mac version now

There is

It is a little difficult to make progress sometimes - I guess I mainly resolved that by talking to people a lot.

I love the little details of the alternate Earth, reminds me of Wings of Honneamise a little

I Think maybe my only complaint about this game is that it's too easy and tempting to "game" it so you can exhaust almost all the dialogue options. I have only really played through it all once, and then started a new game with a totally different kind of build (a big unga-bunga strength build that let me lay-out Measurehead in one go), but ultimately I wasn't finding too much difference in the two playthroughs. Would anyone with more experience say that's not true?

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/game-development/for-a-while-it-seemed-like-miracles-were-possible-and-with-them-redemption-a-follow-up-to-the-legendary-disco-elysium-might-have-been-ready-to-play-within-the-next-yearzaums-devs-loved-it-management-canceled-it-and-laid-off-the-team/

The ongoing clusterfuck that is ZA/UM post-Disco Elysium, the money people messing with the structure, etc. means we'll probably never get anything as intriguing from that entity, but who knows?

This part is interesting:
That last canceled game, described as "a spin-off about one of the most beloved characters in Disco Elysium" and spearheaded by one of the first game's principle writers, wowed other teams at the studio in an internal demo at the end of last year.

Sad that we'll never get Cuno: The Game now

Haha

I bet it was the other cop. Who else?

I am impressed by that URL

unique urls are important

my brain has been ruminating on the "who else?" question and I keep thinking
MEASUREHEAD

(oh no)

Haha oh no indeed

not a fan of the real time mechanic, the game isn't real life. I want to just digitally chill by the waterfront

Evret Claire undoubtedly the best character in this game full of best characters

I'll have to replay this in a while as I obviously missed out on stuff - I never got to meet the light-bending guy or the strange lady who bought my gun. Anyway what an amazing game. I'm surprised at how sad I felt about that cranky old soldier...

Who the fuck is evret Claire

I can't spell.

Mega Rich Light-Bending guy was great. Nice little dialogue telling Mr. Claire about it too