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

[Goose]

I know someone involved with it. As much as I dislike Kender, the hit on him was somewhat orchestrated for other motives. Him writing that garbage was just a convenient tool.

He's in the lucky position of living in a country where being transgressive and controversial can still take you a long way on the road to relevance. Most of the info on the trial including extensive court documentation is freely accecible anyway, just have a look at this monstrosity of a wikipedia entry: https://et.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaur_Kenderi_kriminaalasi

I'm primarily interested in how the financing of this game came together; I cant be the only one who finds it funny that their funding comes from an ultra right wing nationalist party donor slash capitalist oligarch who also happens to own a news agency and media "monitoring group", and an 8chan edgelord novelist that considers de Sade a titan of literature.

dude looks like he's spent 10 years behind bars in an eastern european prison

As much as I dislike Kender,

How can you dislike Kender? He’s a big teddy bear.

dude looks like he's spent 10 years behind bars in an eastern european prison

What do you mean, I'll need this guy's number next time I need a babysitter for my daughter:

Looks like a fat slav jew to me. Is gangster rap popular in Estonia? Oh and he's a Nihilist who writes torture porn erotica? Lol.

 

[fantadomat]

dude looks like he's spent 10 years behind bars in an eastern european prison

As much as I dislike Kender,

How can you dislike Kender? He’s a big teddy bear.

dude looks like he's spent 10 years behind bars in an eastern european prison

What do you mean, I'll need this guy's number next time I need a babysitter for my daughter:

Meh only westerners have babysitters,it is wife's job to take care of the kid! Tho i wouldn't mind him being the little one's кръсник ! Prestigious Slav genes in this one!

 

[Egosphere]

Marketing: "unprecedented levels of freedom with "revolutionary dialogue system".

Reality: Heavily railroaded game where almost everything is fixed and player has no agency. The ruleset is not even a ruleset, it's a decoration designed to look complex to clueless casuals. To draw a comparison to Codex favorite CYOA by Vault Dweller, AoD gives you large number of builds that can produce countless different paths, while DE gives you large number of builds to go through the same path in slightly different way. Once you look under the hood how DE works, it becomes clear that despite seemingly large variety of builds, you're mostly doing the same things and talking to the same people in the exact same order and getting similar results.

I really like this post from kasparov

What Vault Dweller was saying and what I firmly believe is that the game is not hard but it is flawed. Bad design. At least the kind of design I do not approve of. Here we've entered the realm of opinions and assholes where everyone has got one or in some rare cases more than a few. The fact that Vince labels it "hard" in a disclaimer at the beginning of the game does not necessarily make it so. If you break the mechanics apart you see that the idea is good but implementation can be improved on.

Very fitting description of Disco, especially the bits in bold.

 

[Mortmal]

Congrats! A major French-language newspaper, Le Monde, just reviewed it:

https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/artic...ngardise-tous-les-autres_6016374_4408996.html

They call it 'the CRPG that renders all others obsolete'.

Not obsolete, tacky. As for the newspaper , the folk at the codex would call them..liberal.

It’s just so weird that this indie RPG is being reviewed in major establishment newspapers like Le Monde and The Washington Post, or even a British tabloid like The Daily Mirror. Like, I didn’t even know WaPo reviewed video games.

It's artsy and there's lot of words, enough to get their attention.

 

[Jezal_k23]

Nice of him to buy somebody a copy.

 

[Jenkem]

Congrats! A major French-language newspaper, Le Monde, just reviewed it:

https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/artic...ngardise-tous-les-autres_6016374_4408996.html

They call it 'the CRPG that renders all others obsolete'.

Of course the French would love this game... There's no combat to run away from.

 

[Owlish]

Have you ever watched a cop film or show or read a cop book? You don't do that kind of shit in them. If anything the ending had more closure than usual.

Yeah let's take that tact, even though the culprit of the case you are investigating is unrelated to anyone or anything you do throughout the whole game until the very, very end and you are locked from investigating his location for reasons. Really cool "cop" book, "shrewd whodunit."

Fanboys of this game are insufferable. No you see, it's totally awesome, and meta, and a genius comedic outpouring, it hasn't any flaws and is indeed an RPG, the greatest of all time. A masterpiece.

 

[pomenitul]

I haven't played this game yet but I refuse to believe that its groupies are anywhere near as irritating as AoD's or PF:K's.

 

[Owlish]

This game doesn't let me roll into town, solve everybody's problems and singlehandedly decide which major faction is to succeed and shape the fate of the entire area for years to come, shit game.

Not a Fallout clone/10

Game doesn't give you agency to do anything. It's neither a good detective story, nor a good RPG.

The options you pick don't even matter. I told her to assassinate Evarte and I'm told that's not a good idea because of his twin brother, why not assassinate them both? Then later in the dialogue she says, "I'll take your advice and surrender the terminal," which I never said at all.

Just admit it's a clicky comic book, a lousy deconstruction of a detective story with a bunch of gratuitous and out of place political commentary, the only thing stopping it from being a true point and click adventure are the lack of puzzles and a minor smattering of "RPG" and "CYOA" features that are mostly smoke and mirrors.

If this was presented as a novel, graphic or otherwise, would anyone be wowed by this story and characters? I highly doubt it. But because it's a video game and the bar for video game writing is so low, the story is considered a masterpiece.

 

[fantadomat]

I haven't played this game yet but I refuse to believe that its groupies are anywhere near as irritating as AoD's or PF:K's.

Nothing beats AoD fanfags at annoyance!

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

I haven't played this game yet but I refuse to believe that its groupies are anywhere near as irritating as AoD's or PF:K's.

Dude the groupies were literally arguing couple pages back that it's entirely logical when character with max STR is also automatically becoming a highly qualified drug researcher.

Apparently all these years we've been doing it wrong paying some silly professors to find cure for cancer, we should've been paying Mike Tyson.

 

[Butter]

I haven't played this game yet but I refuse to believe that its groupies are anywhere near as irritating as AoD's or PF:K's.

Dude the groupies were literally arguing couple pages back that it's entirely logical when character with max STR is also automatically becoming a highly qualified drug researcher.

Apparently all these years we've been doing it wrong paying some silly professors to find cure for cancer, we should've been paying Mike Tyson.

I'm pretty sure Magic Johnson found the cure for AIDS decades ago.

 

[pomenitul]

Sounds like it's got its own, idiosyncratic twist on PoE's muscle wizards.

 

[Rinslin Merwind]

So I finished game, maybe later I will write more, but right now only few points about game:
I played 4/3/1/4 character and did almost all side quests except drugs dealers one. I admit that sometimes I save scummed (fucking shivers check, but about this later), but another than that I didn't raised any skill to max and managed to get through game. I don't measure length of game in hours, because everyone has different pace.
Now, shortly about pros and cons of game
Pros:
- interesting characters
-interesting setting
-original stat/skill system
- not annoying companion (had to put it in separate point)
- nice side quests
- humor all over the place
-nice artstyle
Cons:
- setting maybe interesting, but explanation to all Revachol troubles a bit banal and this place has too many bad districts, even if police underfunded.
- skill system is cool, but game is too small for such skill system. And sometimes game forces you to use skill that your build wasn't intended for. For example investing at least one point in shivers - mandatory for all builds, because there mandatory shiver check. Therefore low replay ability.
- companion wasn't annoyance, but wasn't helpful in skill checks either. My character was really fragile, but I wasn't able to ask Kim for help with pry-bar or another physical work. He also can't shoot for shit and majority of talking I done alone.
- too small number of side quests
- humor fine, but endless political memes in dialogue choices made me search for as much neutral response as possible, because making enemies in shit hole is dangerous even for police officer.
- bugs made me start new game 7 times (fucking glitch with boots at start of the game, when you start with one boot already on leg and can't finish quest) and reinstall 3 times without deleting saves (was trying to sleep in fishing village, reloads don't help) and etc.
- sometimes linear plot, which abruptly ends

Sadly people who started screech about how this game is bad managed to create rare situation when anti-fanboi more annoying than fanboi.
And while I agree with some criticism, overall it looks like some people wanted to trash game for sake of trashing.

Perhaps sequel of this game can have the chances to become best shit ever if problems addressed, but it will be possible that army of nagging nitpickers will ruin fun for every one by creating negative shit wave that result in devs bankruptcy. And we ill again left in desert, wondering where all incline left.

 

[thesecret1]

I liked this quite a bit. Not in the Top 10 or anything, but still good, which is more than most games can claim. I love the experimentation - finally someone tried making something new (and actually made it work). If there was anything I disliked, it'd probably be the clock (I really don't see much point in it. It fucks you over if you don't worry about it at the beginning, but otherwise is just there to make you strategize a tiny bit, at the cost of rushing you through the dialogues) and the RNG. It should have used hard checks, not probability, or if it had to have probability, then at least have it pre-rolled at game start rather than allowing for save scumming. Even when one decides not to do it, there comes a time when he fails a critical check he had an 86% success chance on, and goes "fuck it, this is bullshit".

 

[Owlish]

Sadly people who started screech about how this game is bad managed to create rare situation when anti-fanboi more annoying than fanboi.
And while I agree with some criticism, overall it looks like some people wanted to trash game for sake of trashing.

That tends to be the case. On one hand you have the majority of people heaping effusive praise on the nude emperor's wonderful wardrobe, calling it the greatest outfit of all time, rendering all other fashion obsolete, and oh those dance moves. And then there's the truly squeaky wheels screeching things like, "what do you mean, the emperor is naked," or "are you mental, he doesn't even have any clothes on." Ugh, how annoying.

 

[tripedal]

 

[ScrotumBroth]

When replay second time, you start to notice it too... You barely change anything, just get to same results in (sometimes different, sometimes not) way.

How bad are we talking here? Telltale Walking Dead bad?

I was hoping for a dumb, strong build replay.

 

[Shadenuat]

Well I woudn't go that far as Telltale but sometimes (like in the end if you fuck up with one NPC you get a replacement in another) the similarities are uncanny.

But unlike Telltale at least you don't get dumb cliffhangers and stupid revelations just for shock value. DE is tasteful enough.

 

[fantadomat]

So how many of you did a clear run without any drugs and alcohol?

 

[Theophrastus]

I don't understand how people are saying there are no choices, either you played similar to how you did before or you're exaggerating. I played twice and got wildly different results on each play-through. Your actions have have huge consequences both for yourself and the setting, even if the game doesn't shove them in your face through ending slides.

 

[thesecret1]

So how many of you did a clear run without any drugs and alcohol?

I smoked a cigarette once, does it still count?

 

[Shadenuat]

kinda did both without, they don't help if check is impossible anyway.

 

[Hellion]

My first run was completely sober. It was even referenced during the end-game sequence.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Disco Elysium: Good Great for what it is, the best computerized gamebook since Warlock of Firetop Mountain