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

[Heroic Liberator]

Game could've really benefited from a more branching storyline.

 

[Rieser]

Could've had the way you reinvent the main character affect his background as well (like whether he was a bozo or straight-laced etcetera), and through that have various characters view him differently, offer other ways to solve quests as well as entirely new (different) quests depending on said background. Would've been an interesting way to build on the central aspects of the narrative design while offer more replay value without changing the core narrative.

 

[Ivan]

Game could've really benefited from a more branching storyline.

I'm satisfied with how often the game doubles down on offering branching retorts. Sure, there are many interactions where you can repeat the dialogue tree to hear all replies, but I OFTEN find myself savescumming just to hear alternate responses. That's made this quite special for me.

edit: thankfully had a save JUST at the moment of the dance, so I was able to savescum and test this branch..."IRRETREIVABLE HUMAN CATASTROPHE"

 

[Ivan]

the more I unravel the game's mystery:

also, encountered my first bug:

SHEEET may have to reload an old save, this locks up the game. maybe I may have to trigger a scene by walking the other way...

 

[Ivan]

Spoiler

 

[Red Hexapus]

Game could've really benefited from a more branching storyline.

I'm satisfied with how often the game doubles down on offering branching retorts. Sure, there are many interactions where you can repeat the dialogue tree to hear all replies, but I OFTEN find myself savescumming just to hear alternate responses. That's made this quite special for me.

edit: thankfully had a save JUST at the moment of the dance, so I was able to savescum and test this branch..."IRRETREIVABLE HUMAN CATASTROPHE"

I love this part when repeating a dialogue option

 

[Larianshill]

Disco Elysium has literally zero replayability, and it's actually depressing how little different solutions to quests there are. I think I talked earlier about the Racist Lorry Driver, maybe in this thread, maybe in some other, but in a better RPG (or some would say, in an actual RPG) there would be multiple ways to fish information out of him and proceed with the drug trade quest. In Disco Elysium, you can only let Kim take the lead and then use Half-Light to intimidate him.
In fact, the only variety I can remember is in how exactly you get the corpse down from the tree.

 

[Grunker]

the more I unravel the game's mystery:

I disagree here. The game is rather wishy-washy in terms of taking a political stance (it mostly just takes the glorious piss out of everything), but it *definetely* has very concrete things it wants to say, chiefly about nostalgia and the way it affects everything from personal relationships to the geopolitical landscape of the world. Two main storylines of the game are about you letting go of your ex and

Spoiler

an old soldier who is the main spark and "antagonist" of the game by virtue of his absurdly outdated worldview and inability to break with his anachronisms.

 

[Terenty]

Disco Elysium has literally zero replayability, and it's actually depressing how little different solutions to quests there are. I think I talked earlier about the Racist Lorry Driver, maybe in this thread, maybe in some other, but in a better RPG (or some would say, in an actual RPG) there would be multiple ways to fish information out of him and proceed with the drug trade quest. In Disco Elysium, you can only let Kim take the lead and then use Half-Light to intimidate him.
In fact, the only variety I can remember is in how exactly you get the corpse down from the tree.

Well, there's another way to proceed with the quest, by talking to another driver Tommy Lee and making him spill the beans instead of passing the Half-Light check with the lorry driver

 

[Grunker]

Disco Elysium has literally zero replayability, and it's actually depressing how little different solutions to quests there are. I think I talked earlier about the Racist Lorry Driver, maybe in this thread, maybe in some other, but in a better RPG (or some would say, in an actual RPG) there would be multiple ways to fish information out of him and proceed with the drug trade quest. In Disco Elysium, you can only let Kim take the lead and then use Half-Light to intimidate him.
In fact, the only variety I can remember is in how exactly you get the corpse down from the tree.

I agree that the game's biggest weakness is that it has too little variance in solutions and outcomes, but if that's the only thing you remember, you don't remember much. There's multiple ways to pass most "iconic game encounters", such as getting past Measurehead or getting what you need from the union boss.

In fact, I'm tempted to say that anyone who claims to have played the game and says that there is literally only one path through everything except the tree is bullshitting.

(like I said, I agree with the core viewpoint; and the suboptimal design is reflected in the fact that it's actually possible to end up in softlocked gamestates - as in: you can almost brick your game - when you arrive to main quest beats with only one solution and fail the check)

 

[Ivan]

replayability: so I just rolled credits on Day 7 and feel satisfied with the outcomes of the journey.

Now I'm thinking of loading a save before sailing on the boat to tie up loose ends. I've read that there are 10 TOTAL days in which you can complete/unlock new quests. Looks like I've got some exploring to do.

 

[KVVRR]

replayability: so I just rolled credits on Day 7 and feel satisfied with the outcomes of the journey.

Now I'm thinking of loading a save before sailing on the boat to tie up loose ends. I've read that there are 10 TOTAL days in which you can complete/unlock new quests. Looks like I've got some exploring to do.

In-game days don't actually affect anything besides the stuff with Renée, the bridge, and a couple of checks.

 

[Harthwain]

In-game days don't actually affect anything besides the stuff with Renée, the bridge, and a couple of checks.

There are some quests that are time-sensitive. But there aren't that many of them.

 

[vota DC]

Disco Elysium has literally zero replayability, and it's actually depressing how little different solutions to quests there are. I think I talked earlier about the Racist Lorry Driver, maybe in this thread, maybe in some other, but in a better RPG (or some would say, in an actual RPG) there would be multiple ways to fish information out of him and proceed with the drug trade quest. In Disco Elysium, you can only let Kim take the lead and then use Half-Light to intimidate him.
In fact, the only variety I can remember is in how exactly you get the corpse down from the tree.

Well, there's another way to proceed with the quest, by talking to another driver Tommy Lee and making him spill the beans instead of passing the Half-Light check with the lorry driver

I always play with red skills low and I always used this path.....so the racist lorry driver isn't that useless if I use another type of cop.

 

[Kjaska]

Shivers is the tits though. IMO do at least one playthrough with that one maxed.

 

[Grunker]

Shivers is the tits though. IMO do at least one playthrough with that one maxed.

I did a Shivers Electro playthrough and Shivers was fun, but I was sorely disappointed by Electro. It feels like that skill should do way more in this particular game.

 

[Ivan]

Loved this game's literary combat encounter. Would love to see more of this, actually with more player responsibility. I guess what I'm craving is the drag and drop system we saw in the adventure game Resonance. It would be cool to chat folks up by pointing to things in our inventory/notes/journal.

Anyway, I loved the combat encounter and definitely don't miss any of the triditional combat, which was always my least favorite part of the CRPGs I've played (at least the RTWP ones). This will stand in my memory as one of my favorite combat encounters, next to the first time I faced a deathclaw in Fallout 1.

 

[Grunker]

Loved this game's literary combat encounter. Would love to see more of this, actually with more player responsibility. I guess what I'm craving is the drag and drop system we saw in the adventure game Resonance. It would be cool to chat folks up by pointing to things in our inventory/notes/journal.

Anyway, I loved the combat encounter and definitely don't miss any of the triditional combat, which was always my least favorite part of the CRPGs I've played (at least the RTWP ones). This will stand in my memory as one of my favorite combat encounters, next to the first time I faced a deathclaw in Fallout 1.

The combat encounter was great, but also clearly very ressource-intensive to make. A game with a lot of those type of encounters would be fantastic, but prolly not realistic given the budgets of these game?

 

[MF]

Loved this game's literary combat encounter. Would love to see more of this, actually with more player responsibility. I guess what I'm craving is the drag and drop system we saw in the adventure game Resonance. It would be cool to chat folks up by pointing to things in our inventory/notes/journal.

Anyway, I loved the combat encounter and definitely don't miss any of the triditional combat, which was always my least favorite part of the CRPGs I've played (at least the RTWP ones). This will stand in my memory as one of my favorite combat encounters, next to the first time I faced a deathclaw in Fallout 1.

The combat encounter was great, but also clearly very ressource-intensive to make. A game with a lot of those type of encounters would be fantastic, but prolly not realistic given the budgets of these game?

Where did you get that idea? Scripting a sequence like that is much easier and less time consuming than having an actual combat system with any degree of complexity. Once you have a combat system it still takes more time and effort to set up an encounter than it does to script something like Disco's scuffle. Granted, if you compare it to games with heaps of trash combat, you have a point, but even then time spent building a system from which to spew forth heaps of trash encounters is enough to make at least a thousand of those sequences in Disco.

The fight in Disco is born out of a lack of resources, not the opposite. I think I even heard Kurvitz say at one point that they have an actual combat system on paper that they couldn't properly implement but wanted to do it in the sequel. Early concepts of No Truce with the Furies showed rudimentary combat UI elements here and there.

Also, having a bunch of those encounters would probably be tedious for players. The writing on the one in Disco is great, but it already straddles the line. You can only stretch tension so far before the lack of agency starts frustrating players.

 

[Grunker]

Loved this game's literary combat encounter. Would love to see more of this, actually with more player responsibility. I guess what I'm craving is the drag and drop system we saw in the adventure game Resonance. It would be cool to chat folks up by pointing to things in our inventory/notes/journal.

Anyway, I loved the combat encounter and definitely don't miss any of the triditional combat, which was always my least favorite part of the CRPGs I've played (at least the RTWP ones). This will stand in my memory as one of my favorite combat encounters, next to the first time I faced a deathclaw in Fallout 1.

The combat encounter was great, but also clearly very ressource-intensive to make. A game with a lot of those type of encounters would be fantastic, but prolly not realistic given the budgets of these game?

Where did you get that idea? Scripting a sequence like that is much easier and less time consuming than having an actual combat system with any degree of complexity.

Ehm, what? That's apples and oranges. Disco already doesn't have a combat system, and it (presumably) is what the team could manage with the resources at hand. The combat encounter is vastly more complex than most "encounters" in the game and so logically doing more of those types of skill encounters would take more team resources. I think you might have misunderstood my point entirely.

(To speak on your warped example just a bit, it is untrue in many ways that it is easier than making a combat system. Developing one takes a long time yes, but from then on it's plotting down creatures within that framework, while every. single. one of the DE-type encounters would need entirely unique scripts, writing etc. But regardless, this discussion is moot since the point was that DE's combat encounter took more effort than a lot of the stuff you do *in DE specifically*.)

 

[MF]

Loved this game's literary combat encounter. Would love to see more of this, actually with more player responsibility. I guess what I'm craving is the drag and drop system we saw in the adventure game Resonance. It would be cool to chat folks up by pointing to things in our inventory/notes/journal.

Anyway, I loved the combat encounter and definitely don't miss any of the triditional combat, which was always my least favorite part of the CRPGs I've played (at least the RTWP ones). This will stand in my memory as one of my favorite combat encounters, next to the first time I faced a deathclaw in Fallout 1.

The combat encounter was great, but also clearly very ressource-intensive to make. A game with a lot of those type of encounters would be fantastic, but prolly not realistic given the budgets of these game?

Where did you get that idea? Scripting a sequence like that is much easier and less time consuming than having an actual combat system with any degree of complexity.

Ehm, what? That's apples and oranges. Disco already doesn't have a combat system, and it (presumably) is what the team could manage with the resources at hand. The combat encounter is vastly more complex than most "encounters" in the game and so logically doing more of those types of skill encounters would take more team resources. I think you might have misunderstood my point entirely.

(To speak on your warped example just a bit, it is untrue in many ways that it is easier than making a combat system. Developing one takes a long time yes, but from then on it's plotting down creatures within that framework, while every. single. one of the DE-type encounters would need entirely unique scripts, writing etc. But regardless, this discussion is moot since the point was that DE's combat encounter took more effort than a lot of the stuff you do *in DE specifically*.)

I understand what you meant now. That's true mostly because DE has next to zero simulationist elements.

That said, art and complex programming are far more expensive than scripting. That encounter is one of the deepest sequences of DE and it's still pretty shallow. The reason the fight is interesting is mostly because of the writing and that's gated by talent, not by man-hours.

 

[Grunker]

Loved this game's literary combat encounter. Would love to see more of this, actually with more player responsibility. I guess what I'm craving is the drag and drop system we saw in the adventure game Resonance. It would be cool to chat folks up by pointing to things in our inventory/notes/journal.

Anyway, I loved the combat encounter and definitely don't miss any of the triditional combat, which was always my least favorite part of the CRPGs I've played (at least the RTWP ones). This will stand in my memory as one of my favorite combat encounters, next to the first time I faced a deathclaw in Fallout 1.

The combat encounter was great, but also clearly very ressource-intensive to make. A game with a lot of those type of encounters would be fantastic, but prolly not realistic given the budgets of these game?

Where did you get that idea? Scripting a sequence like that is much easier and less time consuming than having an actual combat system with any degree of complexity.

Ehm, what? That's apples and oranges. Disco already doesn't have a combat system, and it (presumably) is what the team could manage with the resources at hand. The combat encounter is vastly more complex than most "encounters" in the game and so logically doing more of those types of skill encounters would take more team resources. I think you might have misunderstood my point entirely.

(To speak on your warped example just a bit, it is untrue in many ways that it is easier than making a combat system. Developing one takes a long time yes, but from then on it's plotting down creatures within that framework, while every. single. one of the DE-type encounters would need entirely unique scripts, writing etc. But regardless, this discussion is moot since the point was that DE's combat encounter took more effort than a lot of the stuff you do *in DE specifically*.)

I understand what you meant now. That's true mostly because DE has next to zero simulationist elements.

That said, art and complex programming are far more expensive than scripting. That encounter is one of the deepest sequences of DE and it's still pretty shallow. The reason the fight is interesting is mostly because of the writing and that's gated by talent, not by man-hours.

But Disco would be a much, much better game with more variance in outcomes and input (essentially, C&C, though it doesn't even have to be complex branching, just more results of individual interactions would improve it). It's the one thing barring this game's entry to my top ten. I absolutely love it but it just would be improved so much with more of your interactions mattering.

However the sheer amount of writing for each skill makes it a difficult task for a small team, so I don't see how it can happen. Maybe DE2 has a bigger budget? Though I doubt it's a route they'll go.

 

[Ivan]

anyone know what this bit is about: in the Whirling In, Detective sprints and gives Garte or Kim the birds.

 

[__scribbles__]

anyone know what this bit is about: in the Whirling In, Detective sprints and gives Garte or Kim the birds.

I believe it's if you fail the Savoir Faire check with Garte at the Whirling-In-Rags on Day 1.

 

[PrK]

Holy fuck the game is so much worse with full voice acting, and the decision for changes like Cuno's voice actor is incomprehensible.