Disco-Like We are reaching Disco-like saturation

[Butter]

Tyranicon should make a game called Escort Quest where you play a gigolo who has to service various high power women. Why do I have to come up with all the million dollar ideas?

 

[Christoffer Bodegård]

Always fun to see another game join the list. So far I've found ~12 pretty direct Disco-descendants, that have Steam pages at least.

What I find most interesting about this genre (CYOA/Disco-like/etc) is how I don't actually think any of them live or die based on the quality of the writing, but rather the quality of the writing-design. The prose/pacing/characters/dialogs in DE are really well-written of course, but I always found that the thing that really hooked me was the moment to moment gameplay, i.e. the actual choices. Dynamic prerequisite-choices based on your skills. Very high choice-to-text ratio. Absolutely stellar comedic timing on the player input. All of it coming together beautifully to keep my goldfish attention-span activated until the end. In a world where the average person normally requires cinematic fully-voiced cutscenes to be in any way interested in a narrative game, that's a big deal (to me).

While the discussion in places like this often focuses on genre definitions (does combat constitute an RPG? etc), I think a 'Disco-like' should be less about writing style, tone, or UI Design. The vertical dialog box is probably not a great subgenre-indicator. Instead, I'd say the thing I personally want from DE-inspired games is entirely focused on that writing-design. Or interactive writing, as I like to call it. I like Visuals Novels. It's a cool genre. But the general Visual Novel (as well as modern point-and-clicks & CYOA/Telltale-like games) generally have a very low choice-to-text ratio and of course also don't have dynamic content based on the RPG stats. Some of them also focus more on things like systematic storytelling - Citizen Sleeper comes to mind. And these games all do what they do very well. But what I'm hoping from these Disco-likes (especially if they stay in the RPG genre) is primarily that they push the interactivity to another level. You don't have combat? That's fine. But then at least try to simulate a Dungeon Master in a non-combat campaign. A good Dungeon Master.

 

[Jaesun]

I may actually be one of the very few who has not even played Disco Elysium?

 

[Tyranicon]

I may actually be one of the very few who has not even played Disco Elysium?

I've never gotten past the two-hour mark or so.

 

[Jaesun]

I may actually be one of the very few who has not even played Disco Elysium?

I've never gotten past the two-hour mark or so.

Out of sheer curiosity, what just didn't pull you in? Setting? Writing? etc...

 

[Tyranicon]

Out of sheer curiosity, what just didn't pull you in? Setting? Writing? etc...

I'm originally wrote it off as personal taste. The introduction was a lesson in self-flagellation, but I haven't played enough of the game to say the writing was quantifiably bad. Same with the characters, mechanics, and everything else.

Then at some point I learned that it was produced by a communist artist collective and everything made sense. I lol'ed and never thought about the game seriously ever again.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Always fun to see another game join the list. So far I've found ~12 pretty direct Disco-descendants, that have Steam pages at least.

GameDec (2021) has 951 user reviews on Steam, Sovereign Syndicate (2024 January) has 219 reviews, and the other ten games haven't yet been released.

Even though the main input into this type of game is writing, it seems these studios are struggling with generating enough text, as they might also be with the simplistic programming required or the relatively small amount of artwork needed.

 

[Sweeper]

I may actually be one of the very few who has not even played Disco Elysium?

You aren't.

 

[Lantersay]

Always fun to see another game join the list. So far I've found ~12 pretty direct Disco-descendants, that have Steam pages at least.

Good post.

Hadn't heard of some games on your list, but it's missing this one: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1926120/Vampire_The_Masquerade__Heartless_Lullaby/

 

[Christoffer Bodegård]

Always fun to see another game join the list. So far I've found ~12 pretty direct Disco-descendants, that have Steam pages at least.

GameDec (2021) has 951 user reviews on Steam, Sovereign Syndicate (2024 January) has 219 reviews, and the other ten games haven't yet been released.

Even though the main input into this type of game is writing, it seems these studios are struggling with generating enough text, as they might also be with the simplistic programming required or the relatively small amount of artwork needed.

That's a really good point. I think there's statistics somewhere saying the two of the most successful genres on Steam are Strategy and RPG, primarily because there are very few of them released compared to every other genre. Just making a baseline RPG with all the systems, stats, potential narrative, and so on is such a time intensive task by itself, that the few game developers that manage to actually release games in these genres have a much higher success rate than the median. It's still a very, very low success rate, but still.

I do think we'll see a fair number of 'Disco-likes' being released with shorter playtimes and lower word counts. One of the problem with creating this interactive writing that I love so much is that it does take a ton of time to, as you say, generate the text. And that's even before doing rewrites to make sure the text is actually good. From what I've heard of DE's development cycle, it sounds like they spent a very long time polishing the dialogs to get them up to a certain level of quality. Takes years.

 

[Ol' Willy]

I may actually be one of the very few who has not even played Disco Elysium?

You aren't.

Same

It looks horrendous even on screenshots

 

[Borelli]

I like DE, but a clone of a game is not inherently good just because it copies a good game, there needs to be a solid execution to be playable.

 

[harhar!]

DE was a mistake, but we knew this.

Ahhhhhh, it's the sign tapping time again.

Who's this we you speak of?

Looking at the rest of those names, I can see why it did so well that year.

Tbh, nothing should have won Codex GotY that year.

Outward should have won but none of you "people" have any friends, let alone girlfriends, to play in coop with. Or maybe it's the chronic lack of taste that is also responsible for giving 50% positive votes to The Outer Worlds.

 

[Sweeper]

Or maybe it's the chronic lack of taste that is also responsible for giving 50% positive votes to The Outer Worlds.

You know, I didn't even see that.
That might actually be even worse than DE winning GOTY. Prestigious RPG forum indeed. ptooey

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Are any of these disco-likes even good? If it's just another Dragon Age-like, Fallout-like, or Cyberpunk-like, then I'm not interested. Speculative fiction has done so much in the literature and roleplaying spaces that video game stories usually just bore me.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

I may actually be one of the very few who has not even played Disco Elysium?

i'm almost there. i thoroughtly enjoyed character creation, i started to unleash my ocd, reading everything, looting everything, interacting with everything, when i noticed that while you move at your own pace, clock does the same. "this is not the game for me". uninstall.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Are any of these disco-likes even good? If it's just another Dragon Age-like, Fallout-like, or Cyberpunk-like, then I'm not interested. Speculative fiction has done so much in the literature and roleplaying spaces that video game stories usually just bore me.

Considering that currently GameDec (2021) has 953 user reviews on Steam three years after release (and deep discounts) and Sovereign Syndicate (2024 January) has 223 reviews (and has already been discounted substantially), seems unlikely.

 

[Mauman]

I may actually be one of the very few who has not even played Disco Elysium?

You aren't.

Same

It looks horrendous even on screenshots

Same here. Smelled like pretentious bullshit from a mile off.

Maybe we should form a club?

 

[Skinwalker]

I may actually be one of the very few who has not even played Disco Elysium?

You aren't.

Same

It looks horrendous even on screenshots

Same here. Smelled like pretentious bullshit from a mile off.

Maybe we should form a club?

I didn't even know what Disco Hitlerium was until this thread. Well, I knew it was a non-RPG RPG, but I had no idea it literally had no combat.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

I may actually be one of the very few who has not even played Disco Elysium?

You aren't.

Same

It looks horrendous even on screenshots

Same here. Smelled like pretentious bullshit from a mile off.

Maybe we should form a club?

I didn't even know what Disco Hitlerium was until this thread. Well, I knew it was a non-RPG RPG, but I had no idea it literally had no combat.

It's a point and click cyoa, who'd even play that shit?

 

[Sunri]

Disco is great good vibes funny educational, I doubt they can recreate it tho

 

[Reinhardt]

Disco Elysium was originally intended to have combat, combat was eventually not included, probably for the better, because it didn't fit the story. Just like you wouldn't expect shootouts from a Colombo episode. DE-clones just deciding up front to never have any combat whatsoever as some kind of unfounded core design principle is just retarded cargo cult behavior. Technically even in Disco Elysium there's one part where you can in fact solve a problem by combat.

Punching Tyrone ranting about haplogroups you mean? First thing I did.

"disco inferno!"
oh, so that's why it's called disco furry. you must scream your secret tech names at opponent.

 

[Reinhardt]

I may actually be one of the very few who has not even played Disco Elysium?

literally no one "played" it. there is no gameplay.

 

[Cryomancer]

I may actually be one of the very few who has not even played Disco Elysium?

Is not a game. How you can play it? That said, I watched a video and it is boooooring

 

[BruceVC]

I may actually be one of the very few who has not even played Disco Elysium?

I played it and quit after about 4-5 hours, I like adventure\CYOA games but the theme has to interest me and I got bored with Disco

I got as far as finding those people having a rave in a tent, something like that