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Disco Elysium Pre-Release Thread [GO TO NEW THREAD]

Madawc

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Second, it's an open world game with tons of just stuff to just do. Dance, joke around, get to know people. This content may lead to some of these side-cases, or may just be side-activities, mini-quests, or just experiences.

Can you elaborate on what "open world" means in the context of Disco Elysium?

I assume it's not the sandbox kind of open world that plagues a lot of the single player games released in the past couple of years. What is it like, then? Will we have access to most of the areas of the city from the start? Or is it split in several areas (un)locked by the progress of the main case, each having a bit of wiggle room for side activities? Can you compare it to an existing RPG?
 

Kyl Von Kull

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To put it another way: you could say Disco Elysium is a CRPG with no traditional combat, but it sure seems like it would be far more accurate to say it’s a CRPG where dialogue is handled the same way that other games in the genre handle combat.

The point I was making with Wizardry is that choosing combat options from a list has a long and storied heritage.
 

Lyric Suite

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To put it another way: you could say Disco Elysium is a CRPG with no traditional combat, but it sure seems like it would be far more accurate to say it’s a CRPG where dialogue is handled the same way that other games in the genre handle combat

I've been keeping away from this thread because i want my experience of the game to be as fresh as possible, so i have no idea what this means. In what way does this game differ from, say, Torment? RPGs are defined by character building and the game being reactive to the choices the player makes, both in developing his character and in the actions he takes within the game. This means that the game is partly about what you do in a given instance, and partly about what you did during character development (thus in Torment if you have a low Int or Wis etc you will have a more limited number of dialog choices, or different ones as in the famous case of Fallout). It is not clear to me in what way this game brakes away from this convention. Yes the stats appear to be rather unorthodox, which is interesting in itself, but i'm not sure i understand how it deviates from traditional story fag RPGs in the way it handles dialog choices or combat vis character development.
 

Kyl Von Kull

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Yes the stats appear to be rather unorthodox, which is interesting in itself, but i'm not sure i understand how it deviates from traditional story fag RPGs in the way it handles dialog choices or combat vis character development.

Good question. This is lifted wholesale from Marat Sar's devblog:

http://zaumstudio.com/2016/09/19/on-skill-checks/


In the 15 year build up to No Truce With The Furies, one of our main gripes with RPG-s has always been non-combat skill use. In RPGs – even the story-heavy ones – combat is lavished with tactical tension, skill use produces cool chunky animations, you get pulse-raising rewards and punishments, the logos are colourful. Sound effects go “Tring-trang!” and “Pow!”, there are intricate beautiful systems for you to delve into.

Most of this is missing from non-combat skill use. Talking and exploring gets a simplified, non-competitive version of the combat rules. Usually this comes in the form of passive dialogue options: have this much of that required skill and you’ll be able to say this thing. Even the games we truly admire – Planescape: Torment, Mask of the Betrayer, Fallout – have little going on in the rules department when it comes to dialogue. Ditto for most tabletop pen-and-paper role playing systems. The tactical depth of using arguments, employing logic, original thinking, empathy – the skill use that covers 95% of our actual lives – makes up 5% of the rule system. Yet my experience tells me thinking is the ultimate game. It’s nerve-wrecking, conversations are filled with hidden doubts; we struggle to trust each other, manipulate each other, stay sane. There is great strategic depth and tactical tension that goes into talking that games haven’t really – for me – begun to represent yet.

So that’s the first thing we set out to create: a truly in depth non-combat skill system. We have four stats and under each stat there are 6 skills. That gives us 24 skills – all 24 have critical non-combat use. In fact, No Truce With The Furies (the first implementation of our role playing system) will cover their non-combat use almost exclusively. (In the future we want every skill to be a two-faced Janus with somewhat unsymmetrical and unexpected uses in combat and outside it).

I’ll show off the individual skills in a future post. But first I want to talk about how the skills are used in No Truce With The Furies. That is – about skill checks.


In role-playing games the check is the moment the system “checks” if a character has enough points in a skill to perform an action. It’s a “you have to be at least this tall to ride the rollercoaster” kind of deal. Of course there are exceptions and interesting ideas around, but this is how RPGs usually handle skill checks: your character is talking to someone, that someone lies, if your character has 5 INTELLIGENCE you get a dialogue option that says: “You’re not telling me the truth”. Saying that will make the guy admit he lied. This type of check is called passive because you’re doing nothing. Some hours ago you put two points in “seeing through lies skill” and now the software affirms your choice. There’s not a lot of game in there. And certainly not a lot of literature.

WHEN DESIGNING OUR SKILL CHECKS IN DIALOGUES WE HAD TWO GOALS:
  1. Make dialogue more like literature – rethink passive checks
  2. Make dialogue more like a game – add active checks
PASSIVE CHECKS
In literature dialogues are interspersed with thoughts, emotions, alterior motives and physical phenomenon taking place within the characters while they talk. This comes in the form of parenthesis, streams of consiousness, author interjections etc. A whole plethora of literary devices. We wanted to do that in game form. To depict what’s below the surface: the moment an idea forms, the sense of self delusion, secretly laughing because you came up with a stupid joke. Then trying to figure out if you should say it out or not…

It was surprisingly easy to achieve – your skills talk to you. When we use passive checks they are not dialogue options but extra “characters” who silently interject. Only you, the main character can hear them because they are your thoughts, your sensations. Our passive checks are souffleurs in a play.

Let’s look at a sample situation from the game. And remember: every time the main character speaks they have options to say something else. (I have simplified the choice part of the dialogue for the sake of this example).

YOU COME UPON A LOITERING TEENAGE GIRL KNEELING ON THE ICE WITH A TAPE RECORDER IN HAND. YOU APPROACH HER, QUESTION HER, THEN THIS HAPPENS:
You: “What’s that device you have there?”
Acele: “This? It’s a portable recording device. It’s for field recording. Low quality, but still.”
You: “And the wires?”
Acele: “Actually just one wire, I picked on it ’til the braiding came loose. The wire leads to a contact microphone.”
You: “What is a “contact microphone”?”
Acele: “A contact mic is a microphone that records sounds from inside things. Like this ice.”
TRIVIA (difficult success): Your mangled brain would like you to know there is a boxer called Contact Mike.
You: What am I supposed to do with this?
TRIVIA: No idea.
You: “Does this have anything to do with Contact Mike?”
Acele: “Uh…” She’s confused. “Yeah, I record stuff with it.”
You: “No, I mean the boxer Contact Mike.”
Acele: “Ah! No. This is a *contact microphone*, it’s for recording *inside* solid objects. Contact Mike just beats people up.”
You: “You know, Contact Mike doesn’t “just beat people up”. Contact Mike is a role model.”
Acele: “Um…”
You: “On second thought, screw Contact Mike. He’s no true champion – you are! Look at you here in front of a saggy tent, picking your nose to drug-addict music. The world of sports is in awe of your faith and dedication!”
Acele: “Man, you are one weird cop.”
You: “This isn’t about me. This is about your lack of respect for one of boxing’s greats – and for *yourself*.”

This dialogue could have gone differently if you didn’t have a ridiculously detailed (and mostly useless) factual memory. Even then you could have ignored the little connection your mind made, but in this situation the player chose to go off on a tangeant.

WHAT HAPPENED WAS
  1. First you had a high enough Trivia skill.
  2. Then your Trivia told you an “interesting” fact.
  3. Then you had a little conversation with that part of your memory.
  4. Then you reached a hub of questions to Acele where in addition to normal, situation-appropriate ones you had “Does this have anything to do with Contact Mike?”.
This line we call a black check. It’s a line of dialogue fed to you by a passive check. It’s the closest we have to a “have this much skill to get dialogue option” type of affair, but 1) it’s covert, often you don’t even understand where an idea came from 2) we always have the conception of an idea first: the skill talks to you and then sometimes you can use this idea on whoever you’re talking to. If you choose to. Keeping the tidbit to yourself produces effects down the line too, since we consider all dialogue options seen by the player to be ideas circulating in the character’s psyche. Some just remain unspoken.

On some occasions the passive check just makes little observations that lead to more things later, but remain one-liners for now.

So this is how we’ve re-thought passive checks. The versatility of this simple system – let me just repeat it one more time: YOUR SKILLS TALK TO YOU – is pretty incredible. It is hard for us to imagine writing the game without it already. We can do really weird stuff. Like Half Light – the skill that controls your adrenaline gland and your prey drive – can railroad you into a rage spiral where you hound an innocent suspect on something they clearly didn’t do. And it takes another skill’s intervention for you to get out of it. The next moment a skill can wildly expand the options you have avalable, for example: Drama whispers insane method acting ideas into your ear. Or your Pain Threshold tells you to stab yourself in the hand to make a point. Whatever you do – don’t. Pain Threshold is an unstable masochist. It will only leave you screaming with your hand nailed to the table. And then – while screaming with your hand nailed to the table – Rhetoric to the rescue! Make a political point out of this. Tell them you’re a victim of your own macho mentality. Tell them (with your hand still nailed to the table) that years of chauvinism have led you to this low point in your life.

Now, I just made this situation up because I didn’t want to spoil any more of the game, but you get the point. If “Years of chauvinism have led me to this point!” was just a dialogue option it would come out of the blue. But it’s different to hear the thought form in your head out of great physical discomfort and then be able to converse with it. Should I say that? Do I really mean that? You sometimes let these ideas out, sometimes you carry on. We have a game where you might have to start censoring yourself.

 
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Personally, I don't see much difference between what these guys are doing and old menu-mediated combat from, say, Wizardry, except you're trying to achieve a different outcome in each encounter rather than just killing' things.

There is an important difference between Wizardry's and Disco Elysium's approach to combat. Wizardry, like every "traditionally" designed game, is based on a very consistent set of rules that allow the player to grasp their available choices in an intuitive manner. The crucial point here is this consistency, because it lets you know exactly how the game is going to behave in certain situations. The option to attack, defend etc are always there in every battle, and you know exactly what each of these actions does. The same rule applies to all sorts of things: You have a variety of items like swords, shields and healing potions, different spells with various abilities, certain resistances that make enemies\party members weaker to certain attacks etc. and all of these behave in a consistent manner.

Let's examine Disco Elysium's approach now; In the image you posted the player has three choices, and all of them are context sensitive, specific to the current narrative circumstances (in contrast to, say, Wizardry's generic attack\defend\item options). So while in Wizardry you are always fully aware of what your options are, and you can use this information to plan a few steps forward, in Disco Elysium all this is much fuzzier.

Take chess for example, from the start of each game you can mentally simulate (theoritically) every possible outcome of the game, and in fact chess is all about planning many steps ahead and forming a long term strategy. Now imagine what would happen if every pawn's style of movement was changed in every round; planning forward would be impossible, and most of chess' tactical depth would evaporate. In the same manner, Disco Elysium's approach doesn't have the same depth gameplay-wise as Wizardry's. And while this approach has its pros as well (it's much easier to integrate gameplay and narrative that way) it's significantly weaker from a strictly gameplay perspective.
 
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Zombra

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It's significantly weaker from a strictly gameplay perspective.
I don't know if I agree. I do agree that the consistency (i.e. repetition) in a game like Wizardry is a major differing factor, but comparing it to chess doesn't quite hold up. In Wizardry, you're learning the rules and refining your perfect tactics: tanks block or melee, wizards AOE etc., but the meaty part of the gameplay is when you confront a new situation, i.e. a monster you've never fought before and which actions cannot be predicted. That's when the rubber of your strategy really meets the road of the game's best challenge.

DE will be similar in that as you go, you'll learn the general way that conflicts work; but instead of "grinding" the same conversation over and over and perfecting your strategy for that conversation (cf. fighting ogres 30 times in a row), every new "encounter" will be like meeting a new monster. Just like in Wizardry, a tool that you used last time might not work very well this time. (Unlike Wizardry, that tool may not appear at all - only tools that might work come to hand. But this is incidental.)

In essence, your statement seems to boil down to the idea that "deep gameplay" equates to refining a single repetitive strategy. I object to this.
 

Haba

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I think repetition is probably the key. Conversations and skill checks tend to work poorly for this, as there is usually quite limited number of them.
It’s not repetition, it is the active aspect of the gameplay. These traditional elements of gameplay exist for a reason. The dialogue based gameplay is very passive and simplistic when compared to combat. I like C&C just as the next storyfag, but Fallout and PS:T would suck without combat. I’m not sure if storyfags are representatives of most cRPG players, despite the recent predominance of narrative gameplay over character building and the insistence of most cRPG developers in that regard. Mart Star said that the combat needed to be inside the dialogue, but I don’t buy that. It seems that traditional combat was not their cup of tea so they invested on what they know best, which is the narrative gameplay. If they had the know-how but decided to do something else, they made a terrible mistake.

A traditional "skill check" in most games is a single roll with binary outcome, it either fails or succeeds. While in a PNP situation you can have follow-up to this and it can lead to interesting situations.

Combat lets you have more back and forth, partial successes and partial failures. You can get through by the skin of your teeth. And importantly, it gives you a better idea on how strong you or your enemy is. And you as a player get the satisfaction of making smart choices that lead to the optimal result (or hilarious gore, in the case of Fallout).

Now if those elements could be made present in a different form, be it speech or skill check, I think it could work just as well.

If I would do it, I'd probably make it very exaggerated, like a round of mental combat between the player character and the other party. Traditional scripted dialogue sounds too much of a nightmare to make for my liking.
 

gestalt11

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How many sales do you expect in order to break even or to consider the game a success?

What you are going to do when SJWs find out that you can have racist thoughts in your game and demand their removal?

These are both interesting questions -- indeed, too interesting to discuss on a public forum. (Even MCA didn't drop sales numbers and politics in his legendary thread did he...)

Your best options are to either tell them to go fuck themselves or put on a wig and tell them you are trans and how dare they question you.
 

Jenkem

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Make the Codex Great Again! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I helped put crap in Monomyth
Disco Elysium: loved by the Codex and ResetEra.*

https://www.resetera.com/threads/how-disco-elysium-aims-to-revolutionize-rpgs.46072/

The sequel will achieve a lasting just peace in the Middle East.

With only one snide comment about "fucking bitch dyke cunt." They're slipping.

and the guy with the 2nd post in that topic was given a free key meanwhile he is always begging for money and shit on twitter, actually has a gofundme now and a patreon, always claiming he needs money for health reasons for years.. gets 1300/mo from patreon but begs for $5000 to pay his deductible for medical bills but this is over and over and over again.. always begging for money to write articles about vidya on a tumbr blog and contributor to kotaku

shit reeks of a fucking scam always and ZA/UM playing into his scheme lmao and they won't even give a review key to the codex lmao

definitely won't be buying this as I don't want to support this sort of chicanery.

really sad
 

Kasparov

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Can you elaborate on what "open world" means in the context of Disco Elysium?

I assume it's not the sandbox kind of open world that plagues a lot of the single player games released in the past couple of years. What is it like, then? Will we have access to most of the areas of the city from the start? Or is it split in several areas (un)locked by the progress of the main case, each having a bit of wiggle room for side activities? Can you compare it to an existing RPG?
You have access to most of the areas of the city from the start - how much exactly and in which order depends on your character build. DE consists of one big (exterior) world map and lots of closed interior maps of varying sizes. Here´s a teaser (I hope the timestamp works):

 

Prime Junta

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definitely won't be buying this as I don't want to support this sort of chicanery.

You won't buy it because they gave a build to somebody you don't like. Right.

Out of curiosity, have you ever called someone 'snowflake?' Just asking :M
 
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I don't know if I agree. I do agree that the consistency (i.e. repetition) in a game like Wizardry is a major differing factor, but comparing it to chess doesn't quite hold up. In Wizardry, you're learning the rules and refining your perfect tactics: tanks block or melee, wizards AOE etc., but the meaty part of the gameplay is when you confront a new situation, i.e. a monster you've never fought before and which actions cannot be predicted. That's when the rubber of your strategy really meets the road of the game's best challenge.


Let's take another example - say Super Mario, a game that belongs to a very different genre than Wizardry. You have the basic actions of walking around and jumping, you have moving platforms, lava, goompas etc which all behave consistently during the game. And when eventually new elements are introduced, they are coupled with already familiar entities; Imagine a Mario level where from the let go all the enemies, obstacles, power ups etc are novel; All the knowledge the player has accumulated so far becomes useless and he becomes overwhelmed by all the new information that he has to learn from scratch (instead of the more organic step-by-step way that most good games use to teach their mechanics to the player).



In essence, your statement seems to boil down to the idea that "deep gameplay" equates to refining a single repetitive strategy. I object to this.


Consider this situation:

maxresdefault.jpg


The player can immediately grasp his possible actions, and the consistency of the rules allow him to plan forward: First you think about whether you are going to dodge the bullet with going up or down, then you need to choose whether you are going to attempt to get the power up first or attack the goompas, then which goompa you need to take out first etc. It's a simplistic example but it goes to show how much is going on inside your head, that you don't just think about what your next action is going to be, but you plan many steps forward. This is why I used the example of chess: It would be impossible to win a chess game if in each turn you only thought about the consequences of the single pawn move that you have; You have to plan ahead for the next rounds.

Disco Elysium's style of combat doesn't work in the same way; Say you are in a bar and you are trying to extract information from a shady looking guy. You don't really have a control over the flow of the conversation, since each time you pick a dialogue option the next set of options is going to be different. And if things get messy and the game gives you the option to pull your gun out, this situation doesn't arise naturally from the systems; You don't have the option to pull your gun out whenever you feel like the situation is getting out of hand but you have to wait for this choice to appear; It's less about planning ahead and more about reacting to situations.

Now, all this is understandable; Disco Elysium isn't so much a game in the traditional, gameplay-above-everything sense of the word, but much closer to say tabletop RPGs, consisting of a mix of storytelling and gameplay. And because narrative scenarios don't always map perfectly to interesting gameplay situations, some compromises are unavoidable. The reason I made the previous post was as a response to the idea that Disco's approach is not essentially different from the traditional one, while I think that the way they managed to integrate narrative and gameplay comes at the cost of a certain amount of depth gameplay-wise.
 

Zombra

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Kasparov Speaking of the title trailer, I just watched it again and noticed this foxy babe for the first time:
Who is she? Was she murdered by Goldfinger? Is this art available as a wallpaper? (Without sales text of course?)
 
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Marat Sar

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Kasparov Speaking of the title trailer, I just watched it again and noticed this foxy babe for the first time:

Who is she? Was she murdered by Goldfinger? Is this art available as a wallpaper? (Without sales text of course?)

The woman is Dolores Dei, an Innocence -- an embodiment of the World Spirit (the highest category of historic figure in Elysium). Here she is, on the poster in more detail... (tremble in fear, bandwidth!)

disco-elysium-poster.jpg
 

Jenkem

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definitely won't be buying this as I don't want to support this sort of chicanery.

You won't buy it because they gave a build to somebody you don't like. Right.

Out of curiosity, have you ever called someone 'snowflake?' Just asking :M

no but I call scammers scammers, and people constantly begging for money on the internet with one sob story after another pathetic..
 

Kasparov

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no but I call scammers scammers, and people constantly begging for money on the internet with one sob story after another pathetic..
You should get off the internet and go outside for a spell. Smell some flowers. Look at dog owners pick up their pets´ excrement. Laugh at that. At least it will be a real thing you´ll be laughing at.
 

agris

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no but I call scammers scammers, and people constantly begging for money on the internet with one sob story after another pathetic..
You should get off the internet and go outside for a spell. Smell some flowers. Look at dog owners pick up their pets´ excrement. Laugh at that. At least it will be a real thing you´ll be laughing at.
See your shoes? Are they covered in shit? Who's laughing now.
 

vazha

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Kasparov Speaking of the title trailer, I just watched it again and noticed this foxy babe for the first time:

Who is she? Was she murdered by Goldfinger? Is this art available as a wallpaper? (Without sales text of course?)

The woman is Dolores Dei, an Innocence -- an embodiment of the World Spirit (the highest category of historic figure in Elysium). Here she is, on the poster in more detail... (tremble in fear, bandwidth!)

disco-elysium-poster.jpg
Oooohhh it finally dawned on me who this guy reminds me of. Is he modeled after Kurt Russell?
 

Kasparov

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no but I call scammers scammers, and people constantly begging for money on the internet with one sob story after another pathetic..
You should get off the internet and go outside for a spell. Smell some flowers. Look at dog owners pick up their pets´ excrement. Laugh at that. At least it will be a real thing you´ll be laughing at.
See your shoes? Are they covered in shit? Who's laughing now.
200w.gif
 

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