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

[luinthoron]

Yeah, if you could make it so that the game doesn't remove entire C drive when uninstalling, that'd be great.

That's what you get for wanting to uninstall it.

 

[agris]

Yeah, if you could make it so that the game doesn't remove entire C drive when uninstalling, that'd be great.

That's what you get for wanting to uninstall it.

To fix this issue, boot from a floppy into MS-DOS and type

 FDISK /MBR /ACTOK C:

 

[Kasparov]

 

[Kasparov]

Good morning!

Disco Elysium is shaping up to be the most original RPG of the year (link)

By Tom Senior, Samuel Roberts

In this roleplaying game a bunch of the characters live in your own head.

Disco Elysium is part isometric RPG, part 'hardboiled cop show', so say the developers. The game has been getting a lot of attention lately, and we've played about three hours combined of a super early build, which represents about a quarter of the game and is very much meant to be a work-in-progress.

Tom Senior, online editor: Disco Elysium is ostensibly an RPG about solving a murder mystery, but you spend much of the game defining your character through internal dialogue with aspects of your personality. It’s one of the few games I’ve played where it makes sense for the protagonist to have amnesia, because without an established sense of the character you’re playing you’re free to be the freewheeling incompetent drunk detective you want to be.

The game cleverly uses the cRPG format to simulate your internal conflicts. Your stats—volition, authority, empathy, and so on—behave like party members that live inside your character’s head. They can barge into your conversations to try to offer help. Sometimes they can take over to push social situations in unpredictable directions. You can nurture them as you would any RPG stat, but instead of increasing damage output or defence, you’re angling your character’s entire personality in that direction.

I find the results completely engrossing, even when not much plot is really happening. The typical RPG approach offers you a collection of outfits to slip into: do you want to be paragon right now, or renegade? In Disco Elysium your personality is a state of compromise between your brain and your character’s urges, and this often has hilarious consequences. Thank god there are jokes in it. It would be unbearably dense otherwise.

Samuel Roberts, UK editor-in-chief: "Making a mockery of yourself is a recurring theme in Disco Elysium," is what Lauren Morton said in her preview of the gameearlier this month. I agree. I'm not sure about you, Tom, but my time spent with it so far mostly involved trying and failing to achieve certain things in the line of duty: being too pathetic to lift some dumbbells, injuring myself by trying to barge open a heavy door and mostly being mocked while questioning potential witnesses.

Of the four 'characters' you can select at the start of this early build—there's logician, sensitive, predator and detective—I picked the last one. An all-rounder, but great at nothing. And that's how I felt. I've spent two hours wandering around the city of Revachol, looking into mysteries and little sidequests, and not achieving much. I sense this is a valid way of playing the game, though: not taking the time to rush everything, but to speak to every NPC, to investigate each detail, and to see who you can annoy in different ways.

Occasionally, though, I'll have a breakthrough moment where I'll convince a shopkeeper to let me investigate the 'cursed' part of her store that's supposedly been the scourge of many businesses before this one, by convincing her I've investigated 'paranatural situations' before even though I'm lying. I feel like I'm an idiot detective who'll sometimes happen across a break in a case by accident, because I got a lucky dice roll. And I quite like playing as a character like that.

Tom, did you feel like you made much progress in investigating the actual mystery at the heart of this early part of the game?

Tom: Pretty much none, and I’ve played for over an hour. I think that’s because it’s very easy to get sucked into incredibly detailed situations. Just looking in a steamed up mirror triggers a lengthy identity crisis. I used my partner’s radio to call back to base, just to see what would happen, and ended up in a long, tragically funny exchange with my colleagues. Every little situation is examined in minute detail. This could so easily get boring and frustrating, and it might feel that way to some, but I’ve enjoyed it a lot so far because the writing is so good. I can see how it will stand up to replays really well.

Samuel: Oh thank heavens, I thought it was just me making no progress. I played it for a couple of hours and similarly found myself achieving very little. Like you say, it's a game of tangents where the funny writing draws you deeper and deeper into something that might go nowhere—I badgered someone reading a book outside a store who described herself as "no one, just a working class woman." Clearly, she wanted to be left alone, but I responded with "Shouldn't a working class woman be working?" in response to what the logic part of my character's brain was thinking. They're often granular conversations about nothing, and sometimes I'll just pick a dickish choice to see the results, but they're enjoyable, and you can keep poking at them, providing and receiving funny responses.

What I did accomplish was checking out the details of a crime scene, just outside the building where you wake up. A dead body has been hanging from a tree for a week, and you have to investigate the circumstances behind it. First of all, my character vomited twice just while trying to get a closer look at and remove the body, even though I'd gone looking for something that could prevent that the second time. But then I pieced together that the nearby boot prints probably belong to some dock workers, and I started to get a sense of why they might have had a motive to murder this particular person.

I like that Disco Elysium superficially reminds me of older RPGs but has a totally different execution. I could see myself just wandering around the city, talking to as many people as possible, and stumbling across progress to the actual case.

Tom: Even the art is a cool mashup of ‘70s cop show and futuristic shanty town. It’s grotesque in the truest sense of the word, comically twisted and ugly. You wake up after a massive bender and everyone is cross with you because you were supposed to clean up the corpse in the yard that’s been there for a week now. You’re a bleary, boozy cigarette monster but no-one can quite bring themselves to tell you to sod off because you’re police.

I hope the murder mystery gives the game enough momentum to keep me hooked beyond this first area. I don’t have a sense of how long the game is going to be from the first hour, but I expect each person’s playthrough will vary depending on how far you want to poke and prod every single object.

It’s one of the most interesting RPGs I’ve played in ages, because it uses old fashioned systems to simulate social situations to a level of detail I’m not used to in games. I left the building I woke up in and asked an NPC for directions. In the middle of a polite conversation one of my traits rolled an impromptu perception check and informed me that the woman was black. It’s a brilliant demonstration of implicit bias, and it shows how the personality system can explore important themes. If the rest of the game can keep this level of inventiveness going for its duration, it's going to be quite special.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

My favorite part:
"I left the building I woke up in and asked an NPC for directions. In the middle of a polite conversation one of my traits rolled an impromptu perception check and informed me that the woman was black. It’s a brilliant demonstration of implicit bias, and it shows how the personality system can explore important themes."

I am truly laughing out loud, which is unfortunate because it's 6am here and it woke up my girlfriend.

PS. I call dibs on this avatar.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Degenerate western audiences and media will read DE as cautionary tale about why political corectness is important.

 

[Prime Junta]

Degenerate western audiences and media will read DE as cautionary tale about why political corectness is important.

I've no doubt somebody will. Just like I'm sure it'll spark reams of sperging about that eternal chestnut, what is a narr pee gee?

 

[frajaq]

Big Meaty article in PC Gamer, nicely done

RPGcodex needs more varied types of DE avatars though, only five won't do, maybe some based on skill art?

 

[HoboForEternity]

I want to get into disco elysium avatar bandwagon but this bozo picture is so precious

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

The comments section has cancer in it.

As someone who just can't enjoy games with this style of camera I have to disagree :D it would take nothing from it if it had third-person/first-person camera. I have no idea why when RPG have regular camera it also means it's not much of an RPG. Why not make proper RPG but with normal camera for once? That is what we need! At least one! GODDAMIT!

Well we got Kingdom Come but that is pretty much it. Hope there will be more in future.

Isometric camera sadly completely breaks any sort of immersion for me. You are not controling the character. You are telling it what to do. It's like board game. I understand why people don't mind that but...it's still very off-puting for me, I tried quite few of them but no dice.

And man there is so many of them lately! It breaks my heart since as far as RPG mechanics go...they are so damn interesting!

Complaining that isometric camera is not normal.

 

[Big Wrangle]

lol those are the same people that assume indie devs have an infinite amount of money and complain about the graphics because they don't have AAA-tier textures.

 

[luinthoron]

The hand painted backgrounds here are certainly better than most AAA textures, if not all.

But I've long accepted that people are idiots. Not even excluding myself from that thought.

 

[HoboForEternity]

But I've long accepted that people are idiots. Not even excluding myself from that thought.

same

 

[Kaivokz]

The hand painted backgrounds here are certainly better than most AAA textures, if not all.

But I've long accepted that people are idiots. Not even excluding myself from that thought.

Hi Socrates. How many alts are you going to make?

 

[Kasparov]

 

[Zombra]

What's with these low-res Instagram screenshots lately? Am I doing it wrong?

 

[Kasparov]

Facebook has barely better resolution, but is a bitch to link to I think.

Let’s try this:

 

[Zombra]

Gorgeous.

Speaking of screenshots, I hope no one forgot what we talked about last year:

In theory we might have the screenshot function take a screen that snaps everything that is under the HUD layer

<------- at least one fan would adore this feature. Every game should have it.

but this would mean that you couldn't take a screen of, say... a dialogue you'd really like to show your friends.

Possible solution: PrScr = normal "all layers" screenshot; Shift+PrScr = "artistic" no-UI screenshot.

 

[Alienman]

ENHANCE!

 

[Big Wrangle]

Needs more png.

 

[Ivan]

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

Kasparov, I got the impression that the picture of your detective changes according to your mood and personality choices. Is that true?

 

[frajaq]

That would be cool, I thought it was just old art that got replaced

 

[Kasparov]

Kasparov, I got the impression that the picture of your detective changes according to your mood and personality choices. Is that true?

It changes in very specific cases. It’s not quite like the good old Return To Castle Wolfenstein faces.

 

[Prime Junta]

Another Rezzed video, with Mikee Goodman and Marat Sar . Some stuff about sidequests (side cases?), a cursed business district, and a release date for the release date plus more release date related stuff. I don’t know how much more I can stand.