The decisions in a traditional combat system are entirely scripted in the sense that such and such input has such and such output. You have no freedom here and your choices are predetermined. The difference is that it is a more complex system, so it gives you the illusion that you have freedom. In fact, freedom in cRPGs is pretending you are the boss when in reality you are justing moving from one predetermined point to another.
One allows for emergent gameplay, the other does not. Using systems, any given combat encounter can play out very differently depending on who's playing and what actions they take. In scripted combat scenarios oh sure you have your RNG, but how combat plays out is limited to how much Kurvitz felt like writing.
Look, if you never played the game, don't bother to comment about it. There is plenty of multiple venues to go through, with combat or not, fail-and-go-scenarios and whatnot. Don't be disingenuous and parrot things anyone who played the game knows it is false.
What you can and cannot do in emergent gameplay is predetermined by the developer. Besides, in emergent gameplay, you don’t have the sort of meaningful narrative impact you have in scripted text-adventure events. You may not like those, but it adds something you can’t have in emergent gameplay.
The Choose Your Own Adventure genre is relevant to discussion of Disco Elysium because it relates to the fundamental concept of the game, which is to replace game mechanics with scripting. The removal of mechanics might be most evident in combat but is not solely restricted to combat --- and the game only includes a few narrative situations of combat, broadly defined, such as punching Cuno, fighting Measurehead, and the "tribunal".
I understand, I sympathize, but it is not that simple. cRPGs have gameplay governed by stats and skill, reactivity, etc. The fact that games from other genres tried to imitate this feature doesn’t matter, because the character system in these games is meaningless. What matter is that most cRPGs have more combat than another type of interactions, and this combat is not usually presented in a text-screen. Now, you may not like cRPGs with less combat, but that is a matter of preference, and, as I mentioned earlier, that comes down to developers and players’ preferences. The traditional combat system is a world in itself and provides ridiculous amounts of fun, while combat in text-adventure style is less complex and engrossing, but also provides a different type of gameplay and the narrative impact you don’t have in the traditional combat system. I feel like a mediator here because I enjoyed both the traditional combat system and the dialogue combat system. Besides, if the developers of DE are not experts in the traditional combat system, then it was for the better. At least they didn’t do what Obsidian did with the Pillars series and that grotesque system of theirs. At the end of the day, it’s a matter of personal preference and we shouldn’t judge DE for the things it didn’t try to do, but for the things it did. The linearity and poor use of though cabinets accusations are an important criticism, while the lack of traditional combat (or even the little use of combat in dialogues) not so much.
My definition is retrospective and comparative. I'd say Disco Elysium is an RPG because the stats you have chosen for the character is what allows him to do different things. It would've been a point and click adventure game had there been no stats and you just have a bunch of options to choose from.
I want the original thread.
Im not in any way claiming its not a CRPG. My first post ITT was saying it was. I'm just not all that sure its a progression for the genre or anything. It feels kind of like a dead end. KotC would still be fun with trash quests and trash writing. Games like DE have to bring their A-game all the damn time or you get shit like Twoment.
I was trying to understand the root of the dissatisfaction with DE in more precise terms. Was it the lack of an avatar or emergent gameplay? I will think more about this later. I want to pinpoint what is happening here.
Character statistics and progression are only two of the fundamental aspects of RPGs, and over the years these two particular RPG mechanics have increasingly been copied into games in other genres. Separating these two RPG aspects from the other fundamental RPG characteristics results in a highly misleading and overly expansive definition of RPG.
