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

[Adidas-Clichèd Cringe]

For example, I'm a democratic socialist, but the way they presented communism was so foul I opted out of that thought. I just play a mostly non-political character.

"Murder everyone with more than 25 réal in their pocket!"

 

[Lithium Flower]

For example, I'm a democratic socialist, but the way they presented communism was so foul I opted out of that thought. I just play a mostly non-political character.

"Murder everyone with more than 25 réal in their pocket!"

Better yet, "murder literally everyone regardless of their political association."

The writers are clearly not (all?) tankies.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

I shouldn't say non-political character, but I play a humanist mostly, with a tendency to do drugs and maaaybe steal here or there, and favors liberal thinking. But they always give you multiple angles on nearly every situation. You can play a real creep, a nice guy, an indifferent guy or whatever you choose. You're not railroaded in any way.

 

[Tigranes]

"Here is my VIDEO GAME review which is entirely composed of vague references about resetera and how much I hate resetera and their choice of voice actors and also I got banned from a forum isn't that total CENSORSHIP NAZI jesus christ also I hate resetera fuck man game sucks"

I don't wish them any malice really, I'm sure they'll do well regardless, but I know any enjoyment I derive won't offset the buyer's remorse for me. I'll give them some money if its actually good but I remember the interview one of them gave the "Crate and Crowbar" podcast and that was already a little triggering. To hear how casually the developer agreed with all the left wing racial identitarian crap those games journalists spew already made me a little wary.

D1Ps are generally not a smart idea, no, even if we all do it every now and then.

I'm sure that DE by its very nature will be political, and I'm sure it will trigger some people. I'm sure it'll have NPCs or dialogue options or plot points that I find objectionable. But if it's a serious effort to create a good game using those elements, I don't care. I don't need my games or books to agree with me or to not trigger me.

The only problem is when the game is a thinly veiled crusade about X (even if I happen to agree with X), in which case it's a shitty game. Which really has nothing to do with what the developer believes personally.

 

[The Fish]

"Here is my VIDEO GAME review which is entirely composed of vague references about resetera and how much I hate resetera and their choice of voice actors and also I got banned from a forum isn't that total CENSORSHIP NAZI jesus christ also I hate resetera fuck man game sucks"

I don't wish them any malice really, I'm sure they'll do well regardless, but I know any enjoyment I derive won't offset the buyer's remorse for me. I'll give them some money if its actually good but I remember the interview one of them gave the "Crate and Crowbar" podcast and that was already a little triggering. To hear how casually the developer agreed with all the left wing racial identitarian crap those games journalists spew already made me a little wary.

D1Ps are generally not a smart idea, no, even if we all do it every now and then.

I'm sure that DE by its very nature will be political, and I'm sure it will trigger some people. I'm sure it'll have NPCs or dialogue options or plot points that I find objectionable. But if it's a serious effort to create a good game using those elements, I don't care. I don't need my games or books to agree with me or to not trigger me.

The only problem is when the game is a thinly veiled crusade about X (even if I happen to agree with X), in which case it's a shitty game. Which really has nothing to do with what the developer believes personally.

Yeah, I probably sound like a hyperbolic pussyhole but seeing your media creep towards "white man bad" identity politics while muslim rape gangs and somali drug dealers are operating down the road makes you think a little more carefully about the beliefs of the people you're supporting with your money. I just remembered cringing a little at their talks with the UK press but to be fair what else will they be but agreeable to the dickheads giving them all their publicity? Blaming them isn't fair but I've never felt guilty about not handing someone my money so whatever.

 

[Grauken]

Goose 's post is the definition of fake news. The game's not linear, the case itself is more structured but you can do whatever you want on the side.

The game makes fun of communism and it doesn't railroad you in any way, it only is based on the choices you have made so far.

Uppity NPCs? Who, exactly?

Why does anyone care about somebody who literally joined yesterday? Is he some alt of somebody important?

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Why does anyone care about somebody who literally joined yesterday? Is he some alt of somebody important?

I just want to make sure right and factual information is being presented. I don't appreciate fake news which can misinform people who don't know they're being misinformed.

 

[Tigranes]

The Fish You can certainly vote with your wallet. I'm saying I choose to vote for good games with my wallet, and not 'game developers that don't trigger me with their worldview' - partly because good games, books, etc. happen when creators and consumers are all open to experimenting

Ironically, I'm sure we will get at least one video game 'journalist' outing DE as a crypto-fascist codebook, and at least one Twitter guy arguing it's hipster-Marxist commie propaganda. And both will be painfully dumb just like the KCD shitstorms were

 

[Goose]

Goose 's post is the definition of fake news. The game's not linear, the case itself is more structured but you can do whatever you want on the side.

The game makes fun of communism and it doesn't railroad you in any way, it only is based on the choices you have made so far.

Uppity NPCs? Who, exactly?

Why does anyone care about somebody who literally joined yesterday? Is he some alt of somebody important?

Look if you're left-leaning you will probably love this game, you won't even understand the subtext. If you're a full on communist you will really love it. Have fun.

But if you are even remotely to the right and you buy this game you're a cuck getting cucked out of 40$ by a bunch of ironic hipster commies who are laughing at you.

 

[Grauken]

Look if you're left-leaning you will probably love this game, you won't even understand the subtext. If you're a full on communist you will really love it. Have fun.

If I can't start a revolution and murder thought enemies left and right, I will be disappointed now. You've been warned

But if you are even remotely to the right and you buy this game you're a cuck getting cucked out of 40$ by a bunch of ironic hipster commies who are laughing at you.

Given that everyone remotely to the right is the very definition of cuck these days, I'm not sure what you're complaining about

 

[normie]

yikes

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

Holy shit looks like 2019 gets a decent RPG after all. Brings a tear to my eyes.

 

[Latro]

ZA/UM is a cultural movement uniting artists, writers, entrepreneurs and socialists, established 2009. Named after the Russian futurists' language of gods and birds it does popular and avant-garde. Creates and markets. In 2014 ZA/UM started Nihilist.fm - an online publishing platform. In print media, ZA/UM has published four national bestsellers.

more like a collective of BIG FAT PHONIES

 

[Kasparov]

Some of the reviews are rolling in.

https://ragequit.gr/reviews/item/disco-elysium-pc-review-english-version/

DISCO ELYSIUM REVIEW
Κώστας ΚαλλιανιώτηςOctober 15, 2019
0 8 minutes read


Looking back on the two playthroughs I completed as part of this review endeavor, I can’t help but feel that the essence of Disco Elysium is too unique for me to analyze like I probably would in any other, more “typical” game review (“plot, gameplay, graphics/sound, final thoughts, score, the end”). This raises the predicament of how to address it in a way that does credit to its virtues without spoiling it for future players, since the experience of progressively lifting the layers of the fog that has clouded our protagonist’s mind is undoubtedly a major part of the joy one could extract from this game. In cases like this, the safest route is probably to just start at the beginning.

Our first contact with this game was in a forum thread back in June 2016, that referenced a peculiar new RPG project with the intriguing name “No Truce With The Furies” marketed as “a story-driven isometric role playing game about being a total failure. An almost irreversible, unmitigated failure. Both as a human being and an officer of the law“. In the 3+ years that have passed since then, the game’s title might have changed into the much more market-friendly Disco Elysium, but the core description still stands 100% true.


All great stories start with a trashed room and a MASSIVE hangover.
In the beginning of the game, our not-so-heroic protagonist, a police officer called upon to investigate a murder but got *slightly* derailed in the process, finds himself in the situation you see above: waking up in a seedy, completely trashed hostel room. The immense amount of drugs and alcohol he’s consumed has rendered him unable to recollect any detail of who he is or what he has to do. This hostel is situated in the Martinaise district of the city of Revachol, a general area that can be accurately described as a “battlefield” – both literally, since it’s been in the past the field of bloody combat, the results of which can still be felt in the game’s “present” in more ways than one, as well as figuratively, since within its confines a constant struggle takes place between people, groups and factions of different political-socioeconomic backgrounds and interests. The world-building and general Lore stand out as the first impressive elements of Disco Elysium; the narrations regarding the history of Revachol and its cocaine-addicted hedonistic king, his deposition by the great Communist uprising and the eventual intervention by the “democratic” forces of the Coalition that sought to impose a semblance of capitalist normality, could easily be the subject of a separate fiction novel.

However, the most interesting conflict of all, and one of the main pillars that form this game’s unique essence, is the one taking place within the mind and soul of our insane, alcoholic druggie of a protagonist. Gameplay-wise, this conflict is implemented by the splitting of his Self into 4 general categories that represent our 4 main character stats: Intellect, Psyche, Physique and Motorics. Each stat is connected to 6 unique Skills, that essentially comprise different manifestations of our hero’s inner monologue.


The max value of each stat determines the maximum possible “cap” for its associated skills. The fact that we can only distribute 8 points between our stats (up to a stat cap of 6) at the beginning of each game makes it clear that it’s impossible to be “great” at everything and we thus have to decide what kind of a Detective we want to play.
This inner monologue and the interplay between our skills and “reality” essentially form DE’s entire gameplay. We can wander around the world and interact with NPCs and points-of-interest like in any other typical RPG, although these interactions usually just open up a dialogue window in which the protagonist converses with NPCs or with his inner voices – or, in most cases, with both at the same time.

This results in his inner voices constantly interjecting and giving input, as if they were living conversation partners that actively take part in every interaction, or companion NPCs that accompany the player and comment on everything that is happening. It’s noteworthy that the skills connected with our highest stats essentially form our “main” inner monologue during each playthrough, the one that makes the most frequent appearances during dialogue. What’s great is that this also actively affects how certain dialogues play out, since, for example, an Intellect-based character will receive different text input (and, sometimes, dialogue options) compared to a Motorics-based character.


A typical example of conversation flow, with the main dialogue being constantly interrupted by the “inner daemons”. Note the unique portrait associated with each interjecting “voice”.
Apart from their interjections during dialogues, Skills also occasionally appear as separate dialogue options tied to Skill Checks, whenever we want to perform some particular action – for example, if we want to kick some character’s ass, we select the dialogue option connected to our Endurance skill and see how this plays out according to the success or failure of our roll. This particular example leads me to the next point, that DE does not contain any sort of “combat gameplay” in the traditional sense that one would expect in any other RPG. All instances of “physical confrontation” are handled precisely like in the above example, with dialogue options and skill checks. It’s also worth mentioning that failed skill checks are never a “dead-end” in this game – apart from having at least 2 in-game ways of resetting some of these White checks (in contrast to Red checks, which are one-time only), there is always a different path one could take towards his objective (usually involving different skills), and even failed rolls sometimes have their uses, either by producing some unexpected beneficial incidence that we normally would miss, or simply by producing hilarious results.


During the game we end up collecting a wide variety of clothing items, which offer various bonuses or penalties to our skills. These bonuses, together with the benefits of using drugs and alcohol, are sometimes the only path to success. This last sentence would sound so wrong in any different context.
In the context formed by all of the above, it becomes clear that the amount of text in DE is INSANE, with the developers having casually mentioned a number around “1 million words”. This could possibly have been detrimental to the game’s enjoyment, if not for two crucial factors.

First, the vast majority of text in the game is pure dialogue, with a rather simple and “everyday” flow to it. You won’t meet any of NuTorment‘s instances of purple prose in which we read 40 lines of text regarding “how the sun gleefully bounces off the sensually chiseled curves of a pink marble table during a melancholic spring afternoon” or something tiring and cringe-worthy like that.

Second, the game’s writing is simply BRILLIANT. I can’t stress that enough – whether it’s our or the NPCs’ lines of dialogue, the incredibly smart humor, or simply the item descriptions in our inventory screen, Disco Elysium features BY FAR the most cleverly-written texts we’ve seen in an RPG of the genre’s “renaissance” during our current decade. These two factors result in the huge amounts of text flowing completely naturally and without boring our tiring the player at all. This is a major feat on its own, especially when taking into account the inane Walls-of-Text that we’ve come to expect from a typical isometric RPG of the “kickstarter era”.


And then there’s also the meta-humor.. GODS, THE ΜΕΤΑ-HUMOR.
Apart from how clever it is, the game’s writing is also impressive due to how “political” it is, though probably not in the way one would expect. The historical in-game facts, I briefly mentioned before, have had a tremendous impact on the game world. Their main result is that Martinaise is a pluralistic mosaic of political beliefs and ideologies. During our escapades we’ll come across xenophobic and anti-communist royalists, defenders of the short-lived Commune of Revachol, capitalist worshipers of the Free Market, as well as Moralists who see themselves as being above petty political ideologies.

These political views can’t help but affect our protagonist as well, whose choices during such “political” conversations result in points being accumulated towards each of the above ideologies (Communist, Fascist, Ultraliberal, Moralist), until he has openly declared in favor of one or more of them (it’s entirely possible to become a… Fascist-Communist, for example). The final adoption of an ideology entails the internalization of a Thought and results in stat bonuses (and sometimes penalties), as well as in extra dialogue options, but also affects the way some inhabitants of the world react to us during dialogues, according to their own beliefs. The same system applies for the dialogue options that give points towards each of the Cop Archetypes: Superstar Cop, Apocalypse Cop, Sorry Cop, Boring Cop – I believe you can imagine more or less what types of responses correspond to each of these archetypes.


ALL THE GOD-DAMNED FOREIGNERS STEALING OUR JOBS AND TAKING OUR DRUGS
All of the above considered, there’s also the more “typical” gameplay aspects one would expect to see in an RPG. Quests/Tasks to be accepted and completed or botched (the order in which you complete – or botch – certain tasks sometimes affects how future Tasks unfold), XP and Skill Points to be gained, Health and Morale to be damaged or replenished depending on the proper triggers in dialogues or due to substance (ab)use, night/day cycle and rotating weather phenomena (that actually even affect gameplay in a few instances), time passing by (mainly by participating in conversations)… To be quite honest, it almost seems unbefitting to focus any more on such mundane aspects when reviewing a game of such idiosyncrasy.

It might seem equally mundane to extensively focus on the game’s few negatives, like the “mild” bugs encountered during the preview build (nothing game-breaking, fortunately), or the fact that meta-gamers can theoretically exploit the game’s dice system and resort to save-scumming in order to pass certain skill checks (despite, as mentioned above, failure being more often than not a treat of its own)… Or the fact that the developers claim it would take “60 to 90 hours for a completionist playthrough” when I’m pretty certain a fairly fast reader could easily discover everything there is to see and do in as few as 40-45 hours. This being said, the huge replayability factor has to be taken into account as well, so perhaps the total hours one would put into the game for all playthroughs could even surpass 90 hours.

The fact remains that Disco Elysium is a unique game, something the likes of which we’ve never seen before. Some have attempted to draw a comparison between it and the mighty Planescape: Torment, and, admittedly, there are a few similarities – after all, both are isometric RPGs with huge amounts of text, with a protagonist suffering from amnesia and with the theme of conflict with his past and his inner demons being prominent. In retrospect, however, we’re talking about two games that are the products of different eras and that aim to accomplish completely different things.


“I would often go there, to the tiny church there, the smallest church in Saint-Saëns…”
Unlike PS:T, Disco Elysium is not an “avant-garde fantasy adventure” that takes the player through different planes of existence and makes him combat gods and demons or tackle philosophical values like Mortality, Duty, Justice and Regret, all culminating with a final showdown of epic proportions inside a bright fortress in a different plane.

Disco Elysium is indeed “a story-driven isometric role playing game about being a total, irreversible and unmitigated failure“. It is the deeply personal story of our drunkard speed-freak protagonist and the struggle with his inner demons, always within the context of the political-social circumstances of his times. It is one of the best-written RPGs in recent memory. It is a glimpse inside the mind of Hunter S. Thompson, combined with the best script that David Lynch never wrote. It is True Detective’s Rust Cohle, drinking beer and smoking opium with Sherlock Holmes while Twin Peaks’ Dale Cooper is in the next room brewing damn good coffee. Despite being the first title to be produced by the independent developers of ZA/UM Studio, Disco Elysium is undoubtedly an indie masterpiece that will be regarded as one of the benchmarks with which we compare all future endeavours in the isometric RPG genre.

Levels of Disco Insanity - 90%
90%
I AM BECOME DANCE, THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS
Disco Elysium is undoubtedly a Detective RPG masterpiece that will be regarded as one of the benchmarks with which we compare all future endeavours in the isometric RPG genre.

This one's slightly spoilery, but rather thorough:

Spoiler

 

[Jezal_k23]

Well, this is making me quite anxious.

 

[Alexios]

$40 is a lot for an isometric game.

 

[Tigranes]

$40 is a lot for an isometric game.

If only it was first person like FALLOUT 4, I would surely pay all the monies the gentleman asks

 

[Grauken]

$40 is a lot for an isometric game.

If only it was first person like FALLOUT 4, I would surely pay all the monies the gentleman asks

Some people have problems adjusting their viewpoint, FPS perspective basically means supporting mentally stunted people

 

[you know what time it is]

I wonder what regional pricing will look like, 40$ is a decent chunk of change for a game around these parts, I'll shell it out regardless, because proper CYOAs are where it's at, but yeah.

Another review's out btw:


There's a bit of a buzz on reddit as well, hope all goes well for the devs, shit like this is a rarity nowadays and should be treasured.

 

[Kasparov]

I wonder what regional pricing will look like, 40$ is a decent chunk of change for a game around these parts, I'll shell it out regardless, because proper CYOAs are where it's at, but yeah.

Another review's out btw:


There's a bit of a buzz on reddit as well, hope all goes well for the devs, shit like this is a rarity nowadays and should be treasured.

Cheers! Also I’ll note that it is fairly spoilery in the footage, just in case

 

[Alexios]

$40 is a lot for an isometric game.

If only it was first person like FALLOUT 4, I would surely pay all the monies the gentleman asks

The fact that a shitty mainstream game (with a multi-million dollar budget) was priced similarly doesn't change anything. I wouldn't have spent $40 on Atom, which this looks to be about on par with.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

I'd rate this a tier above ATOM. It has a million words and 5 years of dev time. It's slick and polished. I dunno, just my opinion. Anywho, I just wanted to answer someone about melee weapons. You get a prybar but I don't know if you can hit anybody with it, sorry.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

I'd rate this a tier above ATOM. It has a million words and 5 years of dev time. It's slick and polished. I dunno, just my opinion. Anywho, I just wanted to answer someone about melee weapons. You get a prybar but I don't know if you can hit anybody with it, sorry.

So it's either guns with Hand-Eye Coordination or fist fights with Physical Instrument. Gotcha.

 

[Whisper]

Kasparov, who is writer for this game? You? Good writing, i enjoy it.

 

[Kasparov]

I'd rate this a tier above ATOM. It has a million words and 5 years of dev time. It's slick and polished. I dunno, just my opinion. Anywho, I just wanted to answer someone about melee weapons. You get a prybar but I don't know if you can hit anybody with it, sorry.

C’mon, you can dual wield a sabre and a nock gun!

Kasparov, who is writer for this game? You? Good writing, i enjoy it.

Naw, I drew some lines and now I shitpost on the Codex