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Incline Disco Elysium - The Final Cut - a hardboiled cop show isometric RPG

undecaf

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Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2
I love this game.

It’s moody, it’s darkly funny, it’s interesting, it’s mundane and fantastic at the same time. And more than that, even with it’s weirdnesses, it’s relatable. That sets it far apart from the high fantasy schlock of PoE’n friends.

It’s been a while since I’ve had this much fun with a cRPG; I don’t even seem to mind that it’s purely a ”storyfag” game, which I had some mild concerns about. When things are done well, they just work.

:love:
 

AwesomeButton

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Tho it was not a surprise,you could see that outer worlds will be massive garbage months ago. It is really easy to spot when a studio have a bunch of good writers and when it is filled with political demagogues. Which is very ironical since Disco guys were pretty political themself,still they managed to curb their opinions and deliver a good writing,shame that they couldn't curb their homosexuality...
True, the signs have been fisible for months.
 

fantadomat

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Tho it was not a surprise,you could see that outer worlds will be massive garbage months ago. It is really easy to spot when a studio have a bunch of good writers and when it is filled with political demagogues. Which is very ironical since Disco guys were pretty political themself,still they managed to curb their opinions and deliver a good writing,shame that they couldn't curb their homosexuality...
True, the signs have been fisible for months.
Same shit will be the new vampire game. I do have some hopes for BG3 because there is no news about it outside of some old french people are making it.
 
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Silentstorm

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So, we are in agreement, we should annoy people who haven't bought this game yet into buying it?

Or hope some famous Youtuber/Streamer plays it and talks about it, though i don't think the truly massive ones would play this, unless Pewdiepie has a lot of RPG Let's Plays i don't know about because i refuse to watch him.

I just want this game to succeed so we get DLC or a sequel, i really want more Disco Elysium in the future!
 
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Do you guys think DE's approach would work for a small scale open world game?

What I mean is, imagine instead of a city block in DE, you have a small island or something like that, with different factions, and you get plunged into that situation as some regular character (same as DE, not some hero but some past-his-prime soldier or disappointed-by-life knight or whatever), but this game would be more outward than DE, instead of a journey of self-discovery and investigating one case and talking to yourself, you will talk to other NPCs more, who will have their own stories within a some kind of tight political plot. And what would remain the same is super deep dialogue, down-to-earth touching writing, , in-dialogue interactions and combat. But the skills again would be more outward: maybe more actual combat skills, stealth skills, etc.

I absolutely loved DE, but I would also love to see what Za/Um can do with their writing/worldbuilding talents in the context of a more traditional RPG. Plus this approach might net their excellent work a bit more moneys. Kasparov What do you think?
 

CappenVarra

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I bought a box of cigaretten and I chose to smoke later in the first-time dialogue with Electrochemistry. Now, when I'm outside, I click on the cigarettes but I nothing happens. Is this a bug? I'm under effects of drinking beer right now. Could this be that I'm not allowed to have two bonuses at the same time, in some twisted Sawyerist logic?
had the same thing happen, and no - you can stack all 4 drugs (booze, cigs, speed, and rad-away) at once and get +1 to all stats - however, for some damn reason you can't smoke until the first cig is chosen through dialogue with Electrochemistry

i'm pretty sure the other 3 stimulants can be used directly, so it's probably a bug
 

CappenVarra

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btw, the 30ish hours it took me to finish the game once were spread out over almost two weeks, and the only way i could manage it was playing late at night when i should've been sleeping, propping myself up with copious amounts of caffeine and booze - thematically appropriate i guess, but now i have to lie low a bit as i'm developing chest pains ffs (and am not ready to grow muttonchops of electrochemisty +3 yet); damn, to have the amount of free time some of you guys do...

played 5 2 4 1 ultraliberal moralist cop, verdict: best disco game with rpg and adventuring elements yet

the ending is not bad and i understand it on an INT level, however my PSY found it oddly deflating; i guess the realization that it's the end and how small the game actually is (and that i won't get to sail between isolas and surf the pale) plays a role

moreover, I consider that the person who included "open-world" in the game store description must be destroyed
 

AwesomeButton

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had the same thing happen, and no - you can stack all 4 drugs (booze, cigs, speed, and rad-away) at once and get +1 to all stats - however, for some damn reason you can't smoke until the first cig is chosen through dialogue with Electrochemistry

i'm pretty sure the other 3 stimulants can be used directly, so it's probably a bug
Yeah, I reloaded an earlier save, and this time picked the option to smoke when the skill made me the offer.

btw, the 30ish hours it took me to finish the game once were spread out over almost two weeks, and the only way i could manage it was playing late at night when i should've been sleeping, propping myself up with copious amounts of caffeine and booze - thematically appropriate i guess, but now i have to lie low a bit as i'm developing chest pains ffs (and am not ready to grow muttonchops of electrochemisty +3 yet); damn, to have the amount of free time some of you guys do...

played 5 2 4 1 ultraliberal moralist cop, verdict: best disco game with rpg and adventuring elements yet

the ending is not bad and i understand it on an INT level, however my PSY found it oddly deflating; i guess the realization that it's the end and how small the game actually is (and that i won't get to sail between isolas and surf the pale) plays a role

moreover, I consider that the person who included "open-world" in the game store description must be destroyed
It wasn't easy for me either, had to play late at night and I must have done 2-3 hours a day. Took me seven days to complete, so it must have been a couple of days of over 3 hours per day.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Notable Steam reviews:

MRY

Beauty is Pain
In a throwaway poem, the fantasist Guy Gavriel Kay wonders why it is that airports are so grim and soul-crushing; we have the resources, he notes, to make them beautiful and humane. There are, of course, all sorts of systemic and sound reasons for airports being as they are. The same is true of RPGs. For years I dreamed of quitting air travel, but it has proven impossible. Giving up on RPGs turned out to be easier. The endless grind of dumpster-diving for loot, ping-ponging between NPCs on "quests," prebuffing as a lead-in to challenge-free grinding fights, min-maxing stats to achieve modest incremental changes that yielded merely more points to min-max, dialogue trees that were like administrative checklists (one dare not miss a step, but one hardly looks forward to any of them) ... all of this conspired to make me throw in the towel.

As I've previously written, The Age of Decadence managed to draw me in despite my reluctance to play more in this genre. And I had the great good fortune to work on Torment: Tides of Numenera (in a small capacity), and thus pay homage to one of the games that has defined my own hobby as a writer, Planescape: Torment. But despite these forays, or perhaps because of them, I have not brought myself to play any of the other significant RPG titles of the past decade.

Nevertheless, Disco Eysium (nee No Truce With the Furies) was sufficiently intriguing that I couldn't not play. I'm very glad to have overcome my prejudice. DE answers Kay's question with, "Yes, why not?" And it demonstrates that, with the gusto of delirious and slightly addled humanists, there is no reason why we can't have an RPG that is achingly beautiful rather than crushingly dull.

DE is a game about scars. For most of my life, I believed that scars were a vestige of wound that had healed. But it turns out that scars are patches on wounds that never heal. A scar, like any other part of your living body, must be constantly remade. If you deprive your body of vitamin C (i.e., suffer from scurvy), the collagen that holds scars shut becomes unstable and the old wounds will open back up. That is true even unto our bones; it turns out that there, too, failing collagen can cause old breaks to split apart again. Once we're broken, we never really come back together again.

DE is about a broken man exploring a broken city that plays host to a broken society. Those breaks are mostly scarred over but -- like a scorbutic -- the man, the city, and the society have been starved of something essential to regeneration. The game starts with the parallel bursting of a scar in the man and the society, and you are invited, in a very open way, to decide how you are going to address both the widening wounds and the underlying spiritual malnourishment. If there is a way in which DE is most like PS:T, it is that both of them are about decoding a story of scarrified and tattooed flesh to understand the past and plot a way toward the future.

But DE and PS:T are not really similar games. Both are beautiful (visually and verbally) games in unique settings populated with interesting characters who speak a lot of words. But PS:T is still a fairly traditional RPG (you level up, fight enemies, memorize spells, overcome bosses, etc.), whereas DE is not.

DE's heart is its innovative "internal dialogue" system in which your skills talk to you (and you talk back to them). PS:T really has nothing like this. Where PS:T relies upon a roster of companions who serve as distorted mirrors of the protagonist's virtues and flaws, such that talking to them is in a sense talking to yourself (or, at least, talking through your issues), DE simply lets you talk to yourself outright. It's novel, it's fun, and it's funny. (PS:T had a funny character; DE is a funny game, though the humor is extremely dark.)

This internal dialogue system makes the character creation and development process much more engaging. In most RPGs, your stats and skills come into play fairly sparingly (from a narrative standpoint). In DE, your stats shape every dialogue because even when you aren't employing the Rhetoric skill, say, to persuade someone, the Rhetoric skill is opining on the situation and shaping the player's (and the character's) understanding of what is happening.

Really, I could go on for a long time about these mechanical innovations, but it's enough to say that you should play it for yourself to see a fresh and engaging approach to the genre.

I'll end somewhat where I started. At the end of your first day in DE, your partner remarks on the strange "shuffle" that detectives from your precinct seem to have, searching every container, and how exhausting it is to run back and forth all the time. And as for dumpster-diving, you literally open a dumpster and sift through its contents, and earn money by collecting and selling empty bottles. This goes beyond lampshading (and slyly winking at) the genre's flaw while still employing a tedious gameplay mechanic for want of creativity. By turning the trash-collection into an explicit part of the narrative, it becomes not a point of "ludonarrative dissonance" (when did Aragorn stop to gather crud to offload at the local Gondorian merchant?) but a point of ludonarrative consonance. DE's nameless, amnesiac protagonist (okay, another point of similarity with PS:T) has been reduced to such a shambles that he is literally recycling trash for pennies in hopes of paying for another night at the seedy local hostel. The dehumanization of the that aspect of the gameplay speaks as eloquently as does the game's writing.

This is a must-play. It has left wounds, not the least to the ego of a proud writer who worked on not one but two games inspired by PS:T (my own Primordia and TTON), and has now seen what a worthy successor actually looks like.

alphyna

Let's start with the simple. Disco Elysium is my GOTY, GO5Y (game of the recent five years), and the spiritual successor to Planescape Torment I've been waiting for for twenty years. It's THAT good, unapologetically. If you can even conceive of touching a game of this genre, buy it.

This is an isometric RPG without fighting (so closee to an adventure, really), with a very heavy emphasis on the plot, so if you're strictly opposed to doing much reading, it won't be your cup of tea. However, if you're only mildly opposed to reading in games, I'd still suggest you give it a try. The writing is very good: succinct, dynamic, engaging, with no purple prose and irrelevant walls of lore. It begins as a sort of Planescape Torment parody with the main character getting amnesia from drinking, yet at the same time the weird and existential aspects of the story also shine immediately. In other words, the beginning is very strong; try the game, and in the first hour you'll see for yourself if it grabs you or not.

The presentation is beautiful, the game's style both gentle and a bit creepy. The UI is slick, the music sad and unintrusive. It's all nice—and not the reason we're here.

The reason is the story.

As a narrative designer myself, I can't for the love of me imagine how they've done it.

Good writing demands empathy—getting in the shoes of every character you create, even when they're not nice people. Good reactive video game narratives demand logic and structural thinking—creating a text that is in a flux, knowing that the player will only see parts of it depending on their skills and choices and making sure each variant is good and interesting. The absolute majority of games, even story-based, only deliver one aspect: you either get a deep, memorable, but linear story (SOMA, The Last of Us) or a very reactive story made flexible by the fact that everyone is relatively shallow, so while you can influence a lot of things, you don't care deeply about any (Divinity: Original Sin 2). Even the story of Planescape: Tormentwas kinda modular—a lot of smaller characters and stories were only there to be there and add flavor to the world.

And then you have Disco Elysium. While its main story has certain fixed beats, you can approach every situation—everysituation, I repeat—in a number of very different ways, depending on what skills you choose. At the early stages it can almost feel like playing different games. You can make big choices.

More importantly though, in my 36 hours of playing, I haven't encountered a single instance of "video game stupidity", like the game gating me from logical actions just because I've done some things out of expected order—which I certainly have (I only got the body down from the tree on Day 3, for example). This is not because you can do anything in this game, but rather because it excels at manipulating you to want to do the things it allows. The lengths the developers went to to make sure Disco Elysium plays smooth, like a real-life LARP, is insane. You might not even notice it—the moments when small remarks, like "as I already told you" or "didn't you mean something else when you asked X before?", are injected into the NPCs' dialogue, making it flow. These are small things, but they make conversations sould like actual long conversations instead of bunches of informations dispersed to you.

And boy, what conversations those are. Funny, interesting, genuinely intellectual, absurd, touching... there's no filler dialogue in the game, no filler characters—every single person serves a narrative purpose, everyone's story or situation comes into play in some way. The fates of people get intertwined, making you come back to them again and again, digging deeper and deeper, discovering new facets of their personalities. Disco Elysium uses its arguably-realistic setting to set character hooks—start off with relatable and easily recognizable real-life problems. We've all met weird people like cryptozoology enthusiasts, drunken artists, communist nutsos or esoteric-minded ladies, we recognize the types and thus get engrossed in their stories—thus getting attached. Yet, even though the quests are intertwined, most are also strong stories on their own, with different moods and styles.

Delivering the news to that woman was one of the hardest things I've ever done in video games, and I play Dark Souls a lot.

I can't remember the last time I've changed my opinion of video game characters several times over the course of a playthough. I can't remember the last time I had to pause the game and seriously consider what choice to make. I'm STILL not sure what to think if Klaasje.

I can't remember the last time a game would allow me to play as Karl Marx (I mean Kras Mazov, but, y'know) reincarnated. Or imagine the nothingness where all that exists is the swallowing motion in a human throat. Or make a truly HARD-CORE beat by finding

It's this mixture of tones and styles that makes Disco Elysiumtranscendent.

Still, perfect games do not exist. The walking speed in Disco Elysium is torturous and the pathfinding is often painful. It gets annoying to change your clothes each time before a skill check, and the game basically invites you to save-scum.

Those downsides are bearable, compared to the sad and hilarious story of our detective, his partner Kim Kitsuragi, by-the-book yet not cheerless, and this odd backwards corner of the world with its odd backwards politics, drama, love, and insanity.

And a talking necktie.

GOTY.

P. S. The reply font comes directly from Planescape Torment—the shape, the color. It's small and superfluous, but still made me warm and fuzzy a bit.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

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Started a second playthrough with high physique rather than high psyche, and although it isn't terribly different from my first playthrough...

9ef8.jpg


...I found a way to make Cuno care. :M
 

FeelTheRads

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still they managed to curb their opinion

Did they? OK, you might have options to disagree with the stuff said but overall I still feel like the game keeps banging me over the head with "racism bad!!!" and "communism good!!!!"

But maybe it's just me, I'm paranoid, and they did "curb" their opinions. But they certainly didn't curb their interest in babbling about politics. There's way too much political shit and "current year" issues in this that I don't care about in any way. I really have ZERO interest in discussing politics with a bunch of literal NPCs. I also have ZERO interest in reading about it. The writing is good, and often funny, too bad most of the time I simply don't give a shit about anything said.

This would have been hugely better if it was just a noir detective story. No political crap. As far I'm concerned it's a waste, because I can appreciate the originality of the system and the way it's used and how the solving of the murder works.

Guess it's not for me.
 

fantadomat

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still they managed to curb their opinion

Did they? OK, you might have options to disagree with the stuff said but overall I still feel like the game keeps banging me over the head with "racism bad!!!" and "communism good!!!!"

But maybe it's just me, I'm paranoid, and they did "curb" their opinions. But they certainly didn't curb their interest in babbling about politics. There's way too much political shit and "current year" issues in this that I don't care about in any way. I really have ZERO interest in discussing politics with a bunch of literal NPCs. I also have ZERO interest in reading about it. The writing is good, and often funny, too bad most of the time I simply don't give a shit about anything said.

This would have been hugely better if it was just a noir detective story. No political crap. As far I'm concerned it's a waste, because I can appreciate the originality of the system and the way it's used and how the solving of the murder works.

Guess it's not for me.
I get you mate,still i do disagree. But that is more of a subjective thing,you are not wrong,just inclined to your tastes. :salute:
 

FeelTheRads

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Nah, it's not about inclined or anything.

I'm sure people with interest in politics wouldn't mind it, or even enjoy it.

I simply can't give a shit about any of the issues presented in this game. Besides hating commies that is. But I don't play games to hate on commies and this game is not really the game for hating commies anyway. Well, except to make you hate them even more, maybe.
 

AwesomeButton

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I still feel like the game keeps banging me over the head with "racism bad!!!" and "communism good!!!!"
Having finished the game, I think the it merely makes fun of rightoid-inspired prejudice, but is actually seriously harsh on "communism". What it's really critical of is not one ideology or another, but of human nature and the human propensity for self-delusion and dividing into "tribes", two things which go hand in hand with fervently subscribing to a totalitarian ideology.
 
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Tigranes

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The game's not fundamentally about communism or fascism or any of that.

Ultimately it is very simple. Your life is full of shit. The world is full of shit. But how do you keep on living? Do you try to do something good? Can you keep doing this shit? What makes a man when nothing is working out?
 
Vatnik Wumao
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The game's not fundamentally about communism or fascism or any of that.

Ultimately it is very simple. Your life is full of shit. The world is full of shit. But how do you keep on living? Do you try to do something good? Can you keep doing this shit? What makes a man when nothing is working out?

What can change...
...the nature of a hangover?

Portrait_endurance.png
 

HoboForEternity

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.

Got bored and left

Guest

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My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
The game's not fundamentally about communism or fascism or any of that.

Ultimately it is very simple. Your life is full of shit. The world is full of shit. But how do you keep on living? Do you try to do something good? Can you keep doing this shit? What makes a man when nothing is working out?

Yeah, this. This game treats ideologies as nothing but conversation pieces you can use to justify your actions, as the murder mystery unfolds.
 

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