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Game News Disco Elysium - The Final Cut Released

Absinthe

Arcane
Joined
Jan 6, 2012
Messages
4,062
Ah, Disco Elysium. For some, a new all-time classic on par with Planescape: Torment. For others, a game to be hated because so many people think that.
Are you trying to be a faggot, Infinitron? You know that's not why people criticize or disapprove of it. A lot of the strong criticism and disapproval isn't even "I hate DE" but "stop fucking calling DE a RPG" or "DE is too fundamentally lacking to even be a game." You also have people who obsess too much about politics though. But painting the criticisms as just butthurt over the fact that some people apparently call this a classic now is some disingenuous and dumb shit and I know you know better than that, so I really have to ask if you're being a faggot on purpose, playing stupid passive-aggressive games like this.

It's just a larger than usual update adding new content, full voice acting and other stuff. Livestreamers have been playing the Final Cut since yesterday and the voice acting (particularly that of the narrator, who voices all of the game's skills with the same tone) has been controversial, but apparently that can be disabled.
Is it possible to stick to the old voice acting then? I don't really have anything against full voice acting on principle, but VA for VA's sake is dumb, particularly if the new voices are just underwhelming.

Before Disco Elysium Final Cut there was Disco Elysium
Please stop acting like you invented stats in Visual Novels, interactive fiction games, or CYOAs. And those games pretty much all feature more branching than Disco Elysium does. I know that the world is full of True Artists who are all misunderstood geniuses convinced they have done a totally new thing (even if it has been done 10,000 times before) and that all the criticism is just regressive luddities unable to handle progress/evolution/innovation and how avant-garde you are (and not, say, practical complaints on subjects of quality and mechanical and narrative merits), but please never stoop to that level of burying your head up your ass and sniffing your own farts.

sensible people know it's nothing but a poorly written light novel
Eh, wouldn't go that far. Writing's decent enough for a VN. The introspections are interesting anyway. It's just that as a game and even as a detective story it's obnoxious. As a game the mechanics, gameplay challenges, and potential for reactivity are all obnoxiously deficient. As a RPG the entire character development system is more window dressing than anything with serious gameplay ramifications, as there basically is no form of gameplay challenge at all. Even adventure games have more gameplay challenges than this (usually in the form of puzzles). As a detective game there's no real way to book progress outside of the fixed dimensions the story is intended to go or go about pointing fingers. You progress at the story's pace, not your own. As a detective story it violates a whole slew of rules on how you should do detective stories (and is basically total fail as a whodunit), including "no revealing a brand new character as the culprit in the end," "no using supernatural elements to explain the murder" (at least not without making the supernatural element something the reader can reasonably predict and factor into the nature of the murder), "no revealing necessary evidence to figure out what happened at the end," and the crime must overall be something the reader can logically problem-solve before the story hands you the answer. As a murder mystery in general the story is also hot garbage. The murder mystery is more just a vehicle for the character's introspections, misadventures, and journey of personal discovery rather than a proper murder mystery where the mystery will genuinely draw you in and feel compelling in its own regard.

At the end of the day, you're mostly just fucking around in town poking at people and things, and yeah, there's a murder mystery going on, but you don't really need to worry about that just because you're the detective. It'll sort itself out anyway.

Yes, Disco Elysium doesn't do politics well. But no, that's not really important. Just take DE politics for some theme park shit, because it basically is. I don't get why some people get worked up about this crap.

There's a legitimate complaint to be had that its portrayal of fascism seems to be mixing up too much different shit together that should reasonably be turned into separate meters/paths of the morality system, but that's about all there is to it, really.
 
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Kasparov

OH/NO
Developer
Joined
Jun 10, 2016
Messages
930
Location
ZA/UM
Before Disco Elysium Final Cut there was Disco Elysium
Please stop acting like you invented stats in Visual Novels, interactive fiction games, or CYOAs. And those games pretty much all feature more branching than Disco Elysium does. I know that the world is full of True Artists who are all misunderstood geniuses convinced they have done a totally new thing (even if it has been done 10,000 times before) and that all the criticism is just regressive luddities unable to handle progress/evolution/innovation and how avant-garde you are (and not, say, practical complaints on subjects of quality and mechanical and narrative merits), but please never stoop to that level of burying your head up your ass and sniffing your own farts.
I'm shit at acting. I don't act.
 

Absinthe

Arcane
Joined
Jan 6, 2012
Messages
4,062
That's a hopelessly vague statement. Anyway, I'm guessing you're just fucking around, but you know DE is some prime bait for pretentious masturbation.
 

fork

Guest
Before Disco Elysium Final Cut there was Disco Elysium
Please stop acting like you invented stats in Visual Novels, interactive fiction games, or CYOAs. And those games pretty much all feature more branching than Disco Elysium does. I know that the world is full of True Artists who are all misunderstood geniuses convinced they have done a totally new thing (even if it has been done 10,000 times before) and that all the criticism is just regressive luddities unable to handle progress/evolution/innovation and how avant-garde you are (and not, say, practical complaints on subjects of quality and mechanical and narrative merits), but please never stoop to that level of burying your head up your ass and sniffing your own farts.
I'm shit at acting. I don't act.

You're shit at everything, why not kill yourself?
 

cvv

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 30, 2013
Messages
18,071
Location
Kingdom of Bohemia
Codex+ Now Streaming!
I downloaded this a few months ago, then learned the game was made by a bunch of filthy fucking communists. Haven't touched it since. Commies get the flamethrower.

Didn't have to buy it.

You'll get to play it for free in the re-education camp you'll soon go to.
 

Dr Schultz

Augur
Joined
Dec 21, 2013
Messages
492
Eh, wouldn't go that far. Writing's decent enough for a VN. The introspections are interesting anyway. It's just that as a game and even as a detective story it's obnoxious. As a game the mechanics, gameplay challenges, and potential for reactivity are all obnoxiously deficient. As a RPG the entire character development system is more window dressing than anything with serious gameplay ramifications, as there basically is no form of gameplay challenge at all. Even adventure games have more gameplay challenges than this (usually in the form of puzzles). As a detective game there's no real way to book progress outside of the fixed dimensions the story is intended to go or go about pointing fingers. You progress at the story's pace, not your own. As a detective story it violates a whole slew of rules on how you should do detective stories (and is basically total fail as a whodunit), including "no revealing a brand new character as the culprit in the end," "no using supernatural elements to explain the murder" (at least not without making the supernatural element something the reader can reasonably predict and factor into the nature of the murder), "no revealing necessary evidence to figure out what happened at the end," and the crime must overall be something the reader can logically problem-solve before the story hands you the answer. As a murder mystery in general the story is also hot garbage. The murder mystery is more just a vehicle for the character's introspections, misadventures, and journey of personal discovery rather than a proper murder mystery where the mystery will genuinely draw you in and feel compelling in its own regard.

At the end of the day, you're mostly just fucking around in town poking at people and things, and yeah, there's a murder mystery going on, but you don't really need to worry about that just because you're the detective. It'll sort itself out anyway.

Like in Borges's Death and the Compass, Durrenmatt's The Pledge, Gadda's That Awful Mess on Via Merulana or Eco's The Name of the Rose? AKA contes philosophiques disguised as detective novels, which, by their very nature, don't need not care to adhere to the genre conventions?

Aside for that, I think you've missed the last 15+ years of Talltale adventure games if you still believe that puzzles (or any other form of challenge) are a staple of the genre. Nowadays you can easily have and adventure game with no challenge whatsoever...

But, honestly, I don't even think that DE is an adventure game. I think it's a full fledged CRPG with a different source of inspiration than the usual D&D/Pathfinder/GURPS, aka the holy trinity that CRPG players wrongly mistake for the totality of the tabletop systems out there.
 
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Zed Duke of Banville

Dungeon Master
Patron
Joined
Oct 3, 2015
Messages
11,756
But, honestly, I don't even think that DE is an adventure game. I think it's a full fledged CRPG with a different source of inspiration than the usual D&D/Pathfinder/GURPS, aka the holy trinity that CRPG players wrongly mistake for the totality of the tabletop systems out there.
There are two types of RPGs: Dungeons & Dragons and games derived from Dungeons & Dragons. :M

Disco Elysium is even less of an adventure game than it is an RPG, and clearly is inspired in its conception by RPGs, but the designer discarded the majority of RPG elements. Virtually nothing of exploration or combat remains in Disco Elysium, which instead relies heavily on scripted dialogue sequences, and even the character stats and thought cabinet ideas impact the game chiefly by providing the player with additional or alternative flavor text.
 

Dr Schultz

Augur
Joined
Dec 21, 2013
Messages
492
But, honestly, I don't even think that DE is an adventure game. I think it's a full fledged CRPG with a different source of inspiration than the usual D&D/Pathfinder/GURPS, aka the holy trinity that CRPG players wrongly mistake for the totality of the tabletop systems out there.
There are two types of RPGs: Dungeons & Dragons and games derived from Dungeons & Dragons. :M

Disco Elysium is even less of an adventure game than it is an RPG, and clearly is inspired in its conception by RPGs, but the designer discarded the majority of RPG elements. Virtually nothing of exploration or combat remains in Disco Elysium, which instead relies heavily on scripted dialogue sequences, and even the character stats and thought cabinet ideas impact the game chiefly by providing the player with additional or alternative flavor text.

One day, many years from now, Codexians will learn that not 5O pages full of combat rules not 200+ pages full of character development options are necessary for haing a proper tabletop RPG (heck not even the dice rolls are necessary!!!), and that as long as you have a formal ruleset that allows you and your buddies to roleplay the kind of story your group is supposed to enacht, you have a proper RPG.


P&P players learnt that decades ago. Codexians still struggle with this idea. Usually because they haven't played a single tabletop RPG in their entire life or because they only know the abovementioned holy trinity.
 
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Dr Schultz

Augur
Joined
Dec 21, 2013
Messages
492
why even call it pen & paper? toss them both; just tell each other stories as you french each other with your fetid taste.


You don't even need to play an actual Tabletop RPG to understand why.

Wikipedia suffices:


A tabletop role-playing game (typically abbreviated as TRPG or TTRPG), also known as a pen-and-paper role-playing game, is a form of role-playing game (RPG) in which the participants describe their characters' actions through speech. Participants determine the actions of their characters based on their characterization,[1] and the actions succeed or fail according to a set formal system of rules and guidelines. Within the rules, players have the freedom to improvise; their choices shape the direction and outcome of the game.[2]

Unlike other types of role-playing games, tabletop RPGs are often conducted like radio drama: only the spoken component of a role is acted. This acting is not always literal, and players do not always speak exclusively in-character. Instead, players act out their role by deciding and describing what actions their characters will take within the rules of the game.[3] In most games, a specially designated player typically called the game master (GM) creates a setting in which each player plays the role of a single character. The GM describes the game world and its inhabitants; the other players describe the intended actions of their characters, and the GM describes the outcomes. Some outcomes are determined by the game system, and some are chosen by the GM.[2] Specific tabletop RPGs may have a unique name for the GM role, such as Dungeon Master (DM) in Dungeons & Dragons, Referee in all Game Designers' Workshop games, or Storyteller for the Storytelling System.[citation needed]

The terms pen-and-paper and tabletop are generally only used to distinguish this format of RPG from other formats, since neither pen and paper nor a table are strictly necessary.[2]


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabletop_role-playing_game

One day...Maybe
 
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Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Oct 2, 2018
Messages
17,897
Location
大同
I have to admit that the political vision quest felt a bit underwhelming. Which is not to say that the writing was bad though, just had hoped that it would've gone in another direction (i.e. dealing with the preexisting left-leaning characters like Manjana and Titus rather than introducing two new ones). I get that they were trying to play with the ideology and have ample exposition for its in-setting variants, but I think that could've been done just as well with interactable items (which the quest uses anyway in the form of a book).

That said, I was positively surprised to see that the quest offered some unique dialogue options based on your your thoughts, the items you were carrying and your past actions.

Example with an item:
KXyGm78.jpg
QORyWc5.jpg

Example with a previous choice (tied to an interactive item added in the final cut):
78kNJNO.jpg
gZdPTZY.jpg


I hope I won't be missing any new dialogue choice with the Deserter by giving up the book though, Kasparov.

Overall, it wasn't too bad. I won't spoil the tongue-in-check in-lore references to modern day pinkos nor the silly theorycrafting about infra-materialist proletarian 'science' though. :M

And remember, comrades,
EeL2vMW.jpg
 

Decado

Old time handsome face wrecker
Patron
Joined
Dec 1, 2010
Messages
2,544
Location
San Diego
Codex 2014
That seems dumb to me but you do you.
It's pretty simple: Don't support communists. Especially in their capitalist endeavors. I had already paid for the game and couldn't get a refund, so the next best thing was not playing it.

Don't support communists. Ridicule them, bankrupt them, fight them, destroy them, grind them into dust.
 

Absinthe

Arcane
Joined
Jan 6, 2012
Messages
4,062
Like in Durrenmatt's The Pledge, Gadda's That Awful Mess on Via Merulana or Eco's The Name of the Rose? AKA Contes philosophiques disguised as detective novels, which, by their very nature, don't need not care to adhere to the genre conventions?
"Disguised as" being key, I suppose. Honestly, I don't really know those stories, and I'm not sure I care either. Maybe they are proper detective stories with other elements thrown in, maybe not. Maybe they're just murder mysteries more than detective stories, I wouldn't know. But I can tell you that DE fails to operate as a proper detective story. You can spin examples of other stories that have detective protagonists without really being detective stories (hell, noir genre is full of 'em), but that's not exactly proving anything. I'm just pointing out there that as a detective story the game is fail, which it is.

Aside for that, I think you've missed the last 15+ years of Talltale adventure games if you still believe that puzzles (or any other form of challenge) are a staple of the genre.
Telltale's crud is pretty much its own beast and those aren't really adventure games either. Not to mention the company went out of business because their products sucked and the narratives were shit. Telltale's "Adventures" were extreme cases of fake C&C where their stories suffered from poorly thought-out narrative needs contradicting player choices and creating many scenes where it feels like the character they are responding to isn't the one you're playing as the story goes on with its own tangent, and the novelty of their shit wore off. Anyway, yes, some people use the Adventure genre label as a dumping ground for storytelling "games" without any gameplay, but that doesn't make it an accurate descriptor. Telltale stuff has precious little relation to the genre it claims to share a label with. Just having a story isn't enough to make it an adventure game.

But, in all honesty, I don't even think that DE is an adventure game. I think it's a full fledged CRPG with a different source of inspiration than the usual D&D/Pathfinder/GURPS that CRPG players mistakes for the totality of the tabletop systems out there.
I notice there are some folks who just can't help but get bothered when someone points out that calling a game a RPG isn't enough to make it one, like they're enamored with being able to call something a RPG regardless of whether it fits the description. Look, your "fully-fledged RPG" (Feel free to add some exclamation marks so you can make it even more convincing while you're at it.) just so happens to be missing actual gameplay or a meaningful system of character development. So that shit is neither "fully-fledged" nor a "role-playing game" nor hardly even a "game" at all. Entertainment product, sure. Maybe one you even like or consider good. But not a game. Games, y'see, have gameplay (I know that's hard for some people to comprehend these days, but it's true!). So for example, CYOA books aren't exactly games either. Neither are Visual Novels. (Mind-blowing, I know.) Now, I don't give a fuck about D&D. I think the D&D legacy of computer RPGs is largely stupid as shit, hopelessly derivative, and generally contributed to the wave of retarded RPGs that only feature combat as their role-playing gameplay (because D&D absolutely sucks at non-combat things, being a dungeon-crawling system), and I'm all for RPGs that focus on non-combat gameplay. I want more of that. But the trouble here is that when D&D-ish RPGs are combat slogs that suck at non-combat gameplay, it isn't enough to just remove combat. You need some kind of gameplay to be a RPG, and DE just has dialogue checks, for largely cosmetic dialogues, no less. It has no meaningful system of character building either. Everything just amounts to skill modifiers and those skills are overwhelmingly just cosmetic dialogue shit, really. Sure, it goes to lengths to try to look like an RPG, but it's missing all of the actual needed mechanics under the hood. If I were to show you a car that's missing an engine or the ability to spin its wheels, it would reasonably speaking fail to be a car, even if people insist on calling it one. By the same token, DE is not a RPG. It's just a Visual Novel that calls itself an RPG.
 
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Dr Schultz

Augur
Joined
Dec 21, 2013
Messages
492
Like in Durrenmatt's The Pledge, Gadda's That Awful Mess on Via Merulana or Eco's The Name of the Rose? AKA Contes philosophiques disguised as detective novels, which, by their very nature, don't need not care to adhere to the genre conventions?
"Disguised as" being key, I suppose. Honestly, I don't really know those stories, and I'm not sure I care either. Maybe they are proper detective stories with other elements thrown in, maybe not. Maybe they're just murder mysteries more than detective stories, I wouldn't know. But I can tell you that DE fails to operate as a proper detective story. You can spin examples of other stories that have detective protagonists without really being detective stories (hell, noir genre is full of 'em), but that's not exactly proving anything. I'm just pointing out there that as a detective story the game is fail, which it is.

And I'm just pointing out that it doesn't fail. It just doesn't try, exactly like the novels I've quoted. These are all contes philosophiques that lure the reader with the promise of a detective novel and instead give him/her something different, usually more meaningful.

Aside for that, I think you've missed the last 15+ years of Talltale adventure games if you still believe that puzzles (or any other form of challenge) are a staple of the genre.
Telltale's crud is pretty much its own beast and those aren't really adventure games either. Not to mention the company went out of business because their products sucked and the narratives were shit. Telltale's "Adventures" were extreme cases of fake C&C where their stories suffered from poorly thought-out narrative needs contradicting player choices and creating many scenes where your entire conduct is grossly misinterpreted and the story goes on with its own tangent, and the novelty of their shit wore off. Anyway, yes, some people use the Adventure genre label as a dumping ground for storytelling "games" without any gameplay, but that doesn't make it an accurate descriptor. Telltale stuff has precious little relation to the genre it claims to share a label with. Just having a story isn't enough to make it an adventure game.

I'd rather say that the company went out of business because mismanaged too many projects at once. But aside for that, I could have name-dropped Quantic Dream adventures or Dontnod adventures or many other adventure games with no challenge whatsoever.
The idea that you need puzzles in order to have a proper adventure game is simply divorced from the reality of the market.
I would also add that the idea that you need a challenge to overcome in order to have actual gameplay is not reflected in any sensible game design theory, never has been and never will be.

But, in all honesty, I don't even think that DE is an adventure game. I think it's a full fledged CRPG with a different source of inspiration than the usual D&D/Pathfinder/GURPS that CRPG players mistakes for the totality of the tabletop systems out there.
I notice there are some folks who just can't help but get bothered when someone points out that calling a game a RPG isn't enough to make it one, like they're enamored with being able to call something a RPG regardless of whether it fits the description. Look, your "fully-fledged RPG" (Feel free to add some exclamation marks so you can make it even more convincing while you're at it.) just so happens to be missing actual gameplay or a meaningful system of character development. So that shit is neither "fully-fledged" nor a "role-playing game" nor hardly even a "game" at all. Entertainment product, sure. Maybe one you even like or consider good. But not a game. Games, y'see, have gameplay (I know that's hard for some people to comprehend these days, but it's true!). So for example, CYOA books aren't exactly games either. Neither are Visual Novels. (Mind-blowing, I know.) Now, I don't give a fuck about D&D. I think the D&D legacy of computer RPGs is largely stupid as shit, hopelessly derivative, and generally contributed to the wave of retarded RPGs that only feature combat as their role-playing gameplay (because D&D absolutely sucks at non-combat things, being a dungeon-crawling system), and I'm all for RPGs that focus on non-combat gameplay. I want more of that. But the trouble here is that when D&D-ish RPGs are combat slogs that suck at non-combat gameplay, it isn't enough to just remove combat. You need some kind of gameplay to be a RPG, and DE just has dialogue checks, for largely cosmetic dialogues, no less. It has no meaningful system of character building either. Everything just amounts to skill modifiers and those skills are overwhelmingly just cosmetic dialogue shit, really. Sure, it goes to lengths to try to look like an RPG, but it's missing all of the actual needed mechanics under the hood. If I were to show you a car that's missing an engine or the ability to spin its wheels, it would reasonably speaking fail to be a car, even if people insist on calling it one. By the same token, DE is not a RPG. It's just a Visual Novel that calls itself an RPG.

What I've noticed, instead, is that there are folks, especially here, who can't help but distributing patents of "rpgness" without having played a single tabletop RPG in their entire life, which is something between the annoying and the hilarious.

Now, I don't know if this is your case, but it surely looks like it is. A person who is really knowledgeable about the P&P landscape wold know that there is a shitload of systems out there with no emphasis at all on combat or character development. Systems with no dice rolls involved. Systems that make a point of having the less cumbersome ruleset possibile in order to speed up the narrative. Systems more concerned to depict the physical and mental degradation of a character than his growth in power. Systems designed to tell stories for the sake of telling stories (so, again, with no challenge whatsoever involved) and - of course - systems that are the exact opposite, all about power-playing and combat (usually in this order).

Such person would surely know that the only constant in this cornucopia of systems, the thing that really sets apart RPGs from other tabletop games, is the emphasis on improvisation and cooperative storytelling, two things that basically all CRPGs ever made except maybe Divinity Original Sin and a bunch of Immersive Sims utterly suck at.

Armed with this understanding, such person would see that Disco Elysium is no worse no better than many beloved videogame classics in capturing the "real" tabletop RPG experience (so, basically it's bad but it's in good company at being bad) , the only difference being its unusual source of inspiration: Narrative focused systems instead of simulative ones...

But, again, if one's idea of what an RPG is comes from many flawed adaptations or reinterpretation of D&D and GURPS and from the quite juvenile misconception that gameplay = challenges to overcome, is no surprise that said idea is completely divorced from reality.

PS: To be as clear as possible. I'm a Soul-Like enthusiast and I'm currently playing Grimoire and Monster Hunter: Rise. I can enjoy a challenging or a complex videogame like the next man. Point is, I know for a fact that you don't need challenges nor complexity in order to have a proper RPG (or a proper gameplay in general).
 
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