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

[Shadenuat]

nice try but that was a successful check that happened after picking an option saying 'Take the pry bar'

i'm not surprised nobody noticed that because people are by and large dumb

and who knows, because of that mayhap they need to have it spelled out verbatim what a pry bar does, so they treat it as amazung gaemplayz

Don't excuse your authism with us being dumb mate. Also you do know that you play as character with full on amnesia,that doesn't even know the concept of money?! The game doesn't explains that shit to you but to the character,that is why it is filled with all those dialogues with different aspects. Maybe you are getting dumb with old age roxor,you liked deadfire,then you went on and liked druid stone....what is next,liking outer worlds?

i honestly think it's a joke. Perception does this all the time: some important dialogue, and if your Perception is very high, then just like it states in description, it notices unnecessary things and states obvious things: dialogue dialogue dialogue buzz is buzzing outside 66 degrees to the left dialogue
Encyclopedia does the same, but really, it's a thing about any skill taken to very high - it does absurdy things.

 

[Quillon]

character with full on amnesia,that doesn't even know the concept of money?!

I thought that was just playing dumb to get out of paying Garte/mess with him...

 

[fantadomat]

nice try but that was a successful check that happened after picking an option saying 'Take the pry bar'

i'm not surprised nobody noticed that because people are by and large dumb

and who knows, because of that mayhap they need to have it spelled out verbatim what a pry bar does, so they treat it as amazung gaemplayz

Don't excuse your authism with us being dumb mate. Also you do know that you play as character with full on amnesia,that doesn't even know the concept of money?! The game doesn't explains that shit to you but to the character,that is why it is filled with all those dialogues with different aspects. Maybe you are getting dumb with old age roxor,you liked deadfire,then you went on and liked druid stone....what is next,liking outer worlds?

i honestly think it's a joke. Perception does this all the time: some important dialogue, and if your Perception is very high, then just like it states in description, it notices unnecessary things and states obvious things: dialogue dialogue dialogue buzz is buzzing outside 66 degrees to the left dialogue
Encyclopedia does the same, but really, it's a thing about any skill taken to very high - it does absurdy things.

It could be,it is a game that everyone have a different experience. I don't know what happened to him to get that butthurt so...

 

[Shadenuat]

nice try but that was a successful check that happened after picking an option saying 'Take the pry bar'

i'm not surprised nobody noticed that because people are by and large dumb

and who knows, because of that mayhap they need to have it spelled out verbatim what a pry bar does, so they treat it as amazung gaemplayz

Don't excuse your authism with us being dumb mate. Also you do know that you play as character with full on amnesia,that doesn't even know the concept of money?! The game doesn't explains that shit to you but to the character,that is why it is filled with all those dialogues with different aspects. Maybe you are getting dumb with old age roxor,you liked deadfire,then you went on and liked druid stone....what is next,liking outer worlds?

i honestly think it's a joke. Perception does this all the time: some important dialogue, and if your Perception is very high, then just like it states in description, it notices unnecessary things and states obvious things: dialogue dialogue dialogue buzz is buzzing outside 66 degrees to the left dialogue
Encyclopedia does the same, but really, it's a thing about any skill taken to very high - it does absurdy things.

It could be,it is a game that everyone have a different experience. I don't know what happened to him to get that butthurt so...

well it kinda written right in every skill description.

hmm i dk


Electrochemistry:


savoir faire:


encyclopedia:


etc. continue im not great at this

 

[frajaq]

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Wrong pills, bröther.

Spoiler

 

[Will Zurmacht]

If those are the criteria then take the Pale Pill. Paledriver is so twisted by the Warp Pale that she can engage in full virtual reality escapism without even needing the requisite hardware.

 

[Prime Junta]

Huh, looks like somebody done and made No Truce With The Furries, for real.

https://af.gog.com/game/blacksad_under_the_skin?as=1649904300

 

[Tigranes]

Is Roxor trying to pass as edgy again? What is it this time?

He needs a new megahit, of course, it's been far too long since his POE review

 

[Tigranes]

BTW, the difference is that a Fallout "intelligence" check is meant to give you smart and helpful things all of the time by passing increasingly high intelligence checks

Disco Elysium skills are more like one-dimensional autistic NPCs where Perception just wants to Perceive things no matter how profound or moronically obvious and won't STFU

Every player in the universe of course realised this the moment they left the first room and Electrochemistry went OMG SMOKE CIGS PLEASE OH GOD with no regard for whether it is a good idea

Or they realised it in the character creation screen when the game told you literally this is how skills work

But not Darth Roxor, the great heroe of the Codex, for he walks on edges where few dare to tread

 

[Darth Roxor]

that's a lot of rationalisation to excuse this game's intellectual dishonesty

if the chain of events was: dialogue option "1. Take the bent piece of metal" -> "[Perception] This is a pry bar!", i wouldn't bat an eye

but when it's: "1. Take the pry bar" -> "[Perception] This is a pry bar!", then my eye certainly starts twitching

 

[Shadenuat]

For someone who forgives ELEX its flaws you are really focusing on this thing.

intellectual dishonesty

"people like it so it must be shit" is a lot more of that.

 

[bataille]

i'm not surprised nobody noticed that because people are by and large dumb

The observation that the pry bar-related perception check is dumb is of the exact same intellectual caliber as the very check you're criticizing. People are not stupid: they have been pointing out some quite obscure and non-obvious things about the narrative since the release, so I don't think they were so braindead they didn't notice an elephant like this one. It's not smart, it's petty.

If you want to pass some genuinely non-trivial perception checks to brag about (as a player), then don't get hung up on the trivial ones and march on. There's plenty of harder challenges for the curious mind (some of which you must have encountered prior to getting inside the carriage, too).

 

[MRY]

at least shadowrun waifufall doesn't have skill checks that reveal the purpose of a pry bar to me but maybe this is some of that muh dekonstrukshunizm that i've heard so much about

I don't remember the particular thing you're talking about with specificity, but I think it actually is "muh dekonstrukshunizm." Kind of funny to put a trivial intelligence check as the means by which obvious tutorial hints are delivered.

 

[Tigranes]

Come on, roxor, give me something to work here. As if "take bent metal stick" -> "Oh a prybar!" would actually be any better.

You should wait until Empathy tells you "He must be angry!"

Or, rather, you should wait until Empathy starts misleading you towards getting Stockholm Syndrome with the suspect/witness - or when Half-Light focuses more on being aggressive rather than the smart melee attack option until you get fucked in the head.

Roxor won't have a clue about this as he hasn't seen the content, but looking at the game as a whole, I do think there should be more of those moments where the Thoughts are actively fighting against / contradicting each other or leading you down the wrong chute. I think part of the issue is that too much of the dialogue is still built around the "ask questions 1, 2, 3, 4" format, which AOD successfully moves away from, but is perhaps harder here as a detective game.

 

[Popiel]

I do think there should be more of those moments where the Thoughts are actively fighting against / contradicting each other or leading you down the wrong chute. I think part of the issue is that too much of the dialogue is still built around the "ask questions 1, 2, 3, 4" format, which AOD successfully moves away from, but is perhaps harder here as a detective game.

Very much

You remember when at one point Harry falls in love and thoughts not yet incapacitated by this affection start to wage a losing battle against it? When suddenly you can't trust your character? Conceptually the best moment of this game, narratively far from an important one and I know that, don't misunderstand me, what I want to say is that there should be much more of these moments. More in like cubic meters of quantity.

 

[Reever]

Stats having their own "personalities" is definitely one of the best parts of the game. There are many examples of this, as the game likes to play around with the system but one of the ones that stuck out to be was when

Spoiler

Encyclopedia kept giving the wrong answers to the Innocence Quiz. In a standard RPG you'd think a stat like encyclopedia would always be right and whenever it would trigger you would just pick that option, no downsides. Not the case here. And it wasn't the only time either. Same with Logic, a stat which tries to view situations from a rational point, but in a world that is not always logical

Also one of my favorite parts:

Spoiler

 

[MRY]

Come on, roxor, give me something to work here. As if "take bent metal stick" -> "Oh a prybar!" would actually be any better.

I think a more legitimate question/grievance with the crowbar, wire cutter, and flashlight is that it's trivially easy to get them, you get them all at once, their uses are totally predictable, and thus the mechanic of requiring you to swap among them is kind of time-wasting in a bad-adventure-game way (e.g., where a character says, "Give me the cake" and then you have to select the cake from your inventory and give it to them).

 

[bataille]

at least shadowrun waifufall doesn't have skill checks that reveal the purpose of a pry bar to me but maybe this is some of that muh dekonstrukshunizm that i've heard so much about

I don't remember the particular thing you're talking about with specificity, but I think it actually is "muh dekonstrukshunizm." Kind of funny to put a trivial intelligence check as the means by which obvious tutorial hints are delivered.

I think he means a passive interfacing check when the tinker boy expresses his excitement about prying things open with the thingie. But I may be wrong: I hadn't put any points in perception when I got the pry bar.

If that's the check, then I don't think it was supposed to be a tutorial. The game spells out all the intricacies of using a pry bar in a vulgarly decontextualized tutorial message later on.

 

[Tigranes]

Come on, roxor, give me something to work here. As if "take bent metal stick" -> "Oh a prybar!" would actually be any better.

I think a more legitimate question/grievance with the crowbar, wire cutter, and flashlight is that it's trivially easy to get them, you get them all at once, their uses are totally predictable, and thus the mechanic of requiring you to swap among them is kind of time-wasting in a bad-adventure-game way (e.g., where a character says, "Give me the cake" and then you have to select the cake from your inventory and give it to them).

Agreed. There are numerous examples of Disco Elysium taking the easy way out when there is clearly an opportunity for a clever take that would be in line with what makes DE so good elsewhere. There are certain Important Items that you learn in the first day that you should hunt for, and given the interesting rigamaroles around some of the objects/facts you find on the first day, you learn to anticipate the discovery of other such nuggets down the road. It is then a big disappointment when some of those items turn out to be gifted to you once enough time passes.

Spoiler

Best example being the badge: all that buildup around losing it, and oh there it is literally the moment you pass the time-gated bridge. There's no mystery or cleverness in connecting the bridge, either. The gun at least has an interesting character/dialogue associated with it, but the actual process of recovering it is railroaded and boring.

In many places, Disco Elysium indeed resembles a highly ambitious game that should have been not necessarily bigger, but far more layered in its nonlinearity and the exponential combinations of different Thoughts and choices. It is, ultimately, not quite nonlinear/varied enough to truly be a classic. Judged as a first game by a new studio, it's a great game with an inimitable style, but that doesn't mean we can't point out this weakness.

 

[MRY]

The bridge is super weird, and feels quite a bit like the kind of cuts I recall happening in TTON where a somewhat arbitrary late-stage change is made to massively reduce the amount of branching, since it has become apparent there is no way to address it otherwise.

The problem with the bridge is that the bridge being impassable has no thematic weight (as you point out) and the game assigns you, in the very first place you go to (the hostel bar/lobby) a quest that directs you to go the fishing village. The result is that it feels like you ought to be able to cross the bridge from the outset. I can forgive designers for foreclosing sequence-breaking openness for its own sake*, but going across the bridge on the first day wouldn't be a sign of a perverse player. It feels much more reasonable to go to the fishing village on the first day than it does to explore the back room of the book store (for instance), but you are allowed to do the latter but not allowed to do the former.

(* Obviously, "sequence-breaking openness for its own sake" is actually really cool, it's just a huge resource hog for something that a tiny number of players will experience, so I understand why a small team (or even a large team) engaged in triage would lop it off.)

I will add that the content across the bridge wasn't as good as the Martinaise content (not as well integrated, not as dense or organic, too much walking around, lack of a real map more annoying, etc.), so I can sort of see the benefit of blocking it on the first couple days, since a player who (logically, based on the cryptozoologist quest) went there off the bat might well quit the game in boredom / disappointment.

 

[Tigranes]

MRY Yes, the game retains all the ways in which it encourages the player to try and cross the bridge early - and then there is one of those times when your Thoughts come out and say "nah man, can't do this until day 3". Inelegant.

I think preventing the player from crossing the bridge until day 3 is fine - but it should have been possible to try various things around that and have some consequences to it (e.g. ask around about the bridge and use the opportunity for the character to advance their apocalyptic paranoia, open up new kinds of interactions with Joyce and Evrart, break the machine trying to fix it meaning something changes day 3, etc).

Post-bridge content is significantly inferior to pre-bridge.

 

[KK1001]

I can't decide whether the third act is overly linear and too quickly paced or suitably so. Similar thoughts about PS:T here.

 

[fantadomat]

that's a lot of rationalisation to excuse this game's intellectual dishonesty

if the chain of events was: dialogue option "1. Take the bent piece of metal" -> "[Perception] This is a pry bar!", i wouldn't bat an eye

but when it's: "1. Take the pry bar" -> "[Perception] This is a pry bar!", then my eye certainly starts twitching

Don't be pretentious "muh it told me it is a prybar" faggot and play the fucking game. You sound like a dumb film critique when the film flew over his head and he is blaming it!

 

[ItsChon]

I always wondered who'd win in a fight between a Bulgarian and a Polack. Looks like the Bulgarian is coming out on top.