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Of course she is in current year, soon we all will be midget pigmey two-spirit lesbians, its like in USSR where party aparatchik progeny had to fake their proletariat ancestry to enter Unis. Now they and their progeny fake their ancestry to be scions of boyars, nihil novi sub sole Comrade.
Hey Prime Junta, I am very curious about your role / connection with the game and with the Studio. Looks like you know a lot about it from a long time and somehow I missed it.
Can you tell me a little bit of the story? (Maybe you did this already, can you show me where, if you did? - I am in page 148 right now and trying to catch up)
The short version is, Robert invited me to visit their studio in Tallinn back in 2017, and I wrote that visit up as a preview for the Codex -- the very first one of the game, I believe. I really liked what I saw and offered to help out with the software development process related side of it, and spent a day with their programmers and producers there in May of the same year. I kept in touch with them about that sort of thing over the next couple of years, offering advice when asked and just being someone to talk to when they had problems in that department.* I got to know some of them a bit that way. They also invited me to beta test, and I played through the first day quite many times and gave some feedback. And I've been staying in touch with some of them -- Robert and Kaur in particular -- since then.
*It is well known that talking through a problem to a neutral but sympathetic party can help solve a lot of things when dealing with software (and IMO lots of other stuff too). Code review, for example, greatly improve quality, and a big part of it is that they force you to explain your code to someone; that process is really great at bringing up problems you might otherwise have missed. Since it's really fucking boring to listen to someone talk through their code, a known good practice is to supply programmers with a Labrador retriever, who will listen to the explanation with rapt attention, at least if any goodies are expected at the end of the process. In a pinch, a cardbord cutout Labrador retriever also works, although not quite as well. ZA/UM had a dog in this role already, but I served a similar purpose.
What I'm curious about currently if they still will be posting here, now that they are much more popular and have a foot in with the game journos. I have noticed when popularity and success increase, most will leave Codex in the dust.
What I'm curious about currently if they still will be posting here, now that they are much more popular and have a foot in with the game journos. I have noticed when popularity and success increase, most will leave Codex in the dust.
Earlier ITT MRY who actually makes adventure games explained pretty succinctly why this isn't one. Can't be arsed to look it up but here it is from memory:
Items go in inventory slots and modify stats. In adventure games, items are used in puzzles.
The game tracks both character state and world state and reacts strongly to it: stuff you've said or done before affects how interactions play out later.
Gameplay focus is stat checks against difficulty thresholds modified by die rolls, rather than on finding deterministic solutions to puzzles.
The experience is modified by character build, items equipped, and choices made along the way, rather than progressing by solving puzzles.
It's fair to call it an adventure-RPG hybrid. Calling it an adventure game tout court isn't.
The simplest way to explain it is that adventure games are player driven. You, the player, solve puzzles, progress the game, etc. Disco disco is character driven, your stats and skills figure stuff out, determine dialogue direction, etc. Hence RPG.
There are definite similarities between Disco Disco and AoD, but Disco Disco has several huge advantages over it:
1. The quality of writing. Both games are text heavy, but while AoD's writing is not bad or anything, it's mostly merely decent, whereas Disco Disco's writing is very high level (on PST's level).
2. Focus on strengths. There are no bad parts in Disco Disco, because they know what their strengths are, and that's all they focus on. There's a tiny map filled with high quality content, all of it beautiful and full. In AoD, the limited exploration is ugly af (that early 2000s 3D engine), some of the encounters are meh.
3. No meta-frustration. You pick what you want in Disco Disco, and play it how you want, and whether you win or lose skill-check rolls, you get an interesting experience. There are no meta traps. AoD is full of them, on the other hand, forcing most players to play with some skill points saved up for emergencies.
What differentiates CYOA from an RPG is your imagination and a system that governs the outcomes (doesn't have to be strictly combat though. Some people tend to think it has, because they associate RPGs with dungeon crawling, where the main focus is moving around and killing anything that tries to stop you. However, if that were true, then there wouldn't be skills for non-combat related stuff).
I've already heard arguments that "cRPG isn't the same as PnP, because you can't use your imagination!". My response: *Harthwain mimicks shock* O'rly? That's the reason why cRPGs are called cRPG, not RPG, although they are often shortened to RPG for convenience reasons, you know, for the 25% efficiency bonus when it comes to typing. Yes, cRPGs are more limited than tabletop RPGs, which is why they are what I'd call "scenarios" with fixed amount of content (this includes the number of options you have, how what you do is reflected in the world, etc.). So, turning a blind eye to how limited you are to begin with, it's mostly about what you can do. And what you can do is dictated by systems.
Now, there can be various systems. You know, a combat mode, a dialogue interface, etc. the usual works. By the way, I have yet to see an actual "conversation mode" that isn't the regular "pick an option from a number of pre-selected choices and X will happen" that works well (no, Oblivion doesn't count). Where I am going with this? Take Battle Brothers for example. They have a really good combat system and the persistence between fights makes for a really interesting experience, since you feel it isn't just a bunch of random scenarios thrown together. However, it's still not an RPG. Because RPG isn't purely about combat. So you can't just look at combat and say "this game doesn't have combat, so I declare it not being an RPG".
And Disco Elysium has combat. Yes, it has a single instance of it, which isn't amazing, but still. Combat in DE is done via the same interface the dialogue (and interacting with environment) is done. It's like a Game Master who's responding to your choices in the same way he's responding to pretty much everything else. You're presented with a situation, you make your call, you check your stats, make a roll and watch the outcome. It's not very much different from how the actual tabletop RPGs play out (again, save for imagination limitation coming from cRPG part). What makes it effectively different from other "proper" combat modes though? It's less fluid (just a single 2D roll) and less flashy than seeing actual combat animations in action, but other than that? Either you succeed or not. You could also make an argument for degree of success or failure (how damaged in the end you are, etc.). Other than that it's just all about the presentation.
Pretty much the same can be said about the entirety of DE's gameplay (not just combat). You could even turn DE into a DOS-like text-adventure with random rolls and you would get a pretty much the same effect. The funny part? Somehow you're overlooking that your fancy combat systems all boil down to pretty much the same: a bunch of rolls with some modifiers to decide the outcome. A stats' game. Yet it's DE who's worse here? Now, that's the real joke here.
So, yeah, I don't think Disco Elysium is a CYOA because of how it does things.
