This is my main account. This is genuinely my first time using the site. Someone recommended I bring my ideas here to get your guys opinions.
Whoever told you this knew that you would get shat on massively for your take and was looking forward to it. Disco Elysium gets pretty harshly criticized around here and Planescape: Torment is a rather well-respected game, so anyone familiar with the Codex would expect a strongly negative response to your take. It's basically obvious bait.
The basic problem with Disco Elysium is that it fails to be a RPG. While it nominally flirts with things like stats, gear, skills, thought cabinet, etcetera, in reality all of it just boils down to skill modifiers with one or two minute divergences. Moreover, all the skills are pretty much cosmetic. They affect the flavor of dialogues you get along the way, but there are no obstacles to progression that demand player or character skill to progress. So in the first case, as a RPG it is a failure. The character development system of Disco: Elysium is simply cosmetic, pretending at much greater depth and consequence than it actually possesses. I can go one step further and say that as a
game it is also a failure. Games require gameplay challenges, but in Disco: Elysium there is no real form of challenge. Progress is guaranteed. Some people assert that DE is more appropriate as an Adventure game, but it fails to be part of the Adventure game genre also, because Adventure games have problem-solving challenges. There is no hard "game over" state in many Adventures, but there are puzzles, problem-solving segments, and the like and if you fail to figure out how to move past your current predicament you are stuck there, so the challenge is there and your failure state is an inability to progress. DE does not do this much either.
Without the presence of gameplay, without the presence of challenge, it is not really a game at all, and indeed Disco: Elysium is not a game. It is, start-to-finish, a storytelling enterprise. Which is to say, in reality, that Disco Elysium is just a slightly dressed up Visual Novel pretending to be an RPG.
But the narrative of Disco Elysium also has its issues. First, it pretends to be a detective story, but it isn't, not really. The detective aspect is at most used as a vehicle to get the protagonist through the story beats, but actual detective-work is pretty much unnecessary and it doesn't follow the rules of fair detective stories either. In detective stories, the reader (or player, in this case) is supposed to be able to puzzle out the culprit on their own (This is part of the appeal of the genre: Trying to puzzle out who the culprit is as you read the story, which only appeals if puzzling out the culprit ahead of time is actually possible.), but here that constitutes a problem since the narrative cannot allow for you to discover the culprit early and resolve the game early. Therefore, most of the detective work you do is totally useless and any attempt at saying "This is our culprit!" before the ending is an automatic failure. The real culprit is simply concealed from you, so the detective work is almost narrative busywork rather than any genuine investigation that can deliver results. This brings on another major problem with Disco Elysium: It is a very linear tale in the end. There is a bunch of totally optional content, and you might be able to cut through a part of the plot (iirc there's a Shivers check for that?) but on the whole of it, the narrative is predetermined for you. You cannot meaningfully chart your own path through the game or take a different road. Most choices pretend to be of more consequence than they actually are. Hit on the first girl you see? Okay, if you fail, your fuck-up makes sense. But if you succeed at the skillcheck? You still basically fail. Apparently the situation only allowed for one outcome, with a slight difference in the cosmetics of it. If you decide to be a hobo cop, you are still not permitted to actually live homeless. You have to take the rooms the game offers you. There is tons of shit like this, and that's just the minor stuff, where it hints at branching but doesn't deliver. The central plot is basically indifferent to your efforts.
Anyway, all of this adds up to Disco Elysium maybe having some interesting writing but being a failure as a game, a failure as a detective story, and a lie as a branching narrative.
I hope the mods let me post again. I'm not trying to cause any harm.
Your first 10 or so posts are automatically subject to mod approval. This is done to weed out spambots.
a game without combat cannot be an RPG
it might contain RPG elements, but it is not an RPG
I disagree. A game can be a RPG without combat just fine, but it does need one or more systems of gameplay challenge resolution, which Disco Elysium utterly lacks, and it needs to be reactive to player choices, including build choices, whereas in DE pretty much everything is cosmetic.
