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PC Disco Elysium

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PC Disco Elysium

Unread postby Hanged Man » 27 Feb 2017 20:51

No Truce With The Furies
http://devblog.fortressoccident.com/

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ZA/UM wrote:NO TRUCE WITH THE FURIES is a police procedural role playing game inspired by Planescape: Torment and Kentucky Route Zero. All combat is handled in dialogue, story is everything.

Wake up as a disgraced detective lieutenant. Put on your disco pants. Wander a gorgeously rendered seaside city in another world, solving one last case. Or wander the inside of your own head, talking to your senses, doubts and memories. 24 uniquely realistic skills represent the real human psyche and physique.

The role playing game is an emergent art form – and we’re set to light it on fire.

THE SETTING
Is it fantasy? Is it sci-fi? Is it alt history? Some kind of punk? No. It’s a genre-busting new world we’ve built for more than fifteen years. We call it fantastic realism. And we’re ready to show it to you.

THE ART
No Truce With The Furies pushes isometric graphics further than ever. The light is dynamic, so is the weather – pick up a flashlight and see the shadows move at night!

THE AUTHORS
Contemporary oil painters hand paint this world. Published authors write these dialogues. A rock’n’roll band records the music. No Truce With The Furies is made by a movement.

THE THOUGHT CABINET
You have an inventory for thoughts. Pick up old mysteries, develop new ideas. Come to conclusions both light and dark. You will develop obsessions you can’t get rid of, and beliefs that guide your words and change the way you talk.

THE SYSTEM
No Truce With The Furies takes non-combat skill use to absurd new heights. You can sing, dance, pay rent and actually fail at skill checks with profound results. Built by D&D evangelists, we use the rule system to represent real life.

THE CHOICES
Everything, even the smallest of details, matters. The minutiae of what you say – or think – gets carried from dialogue to dialogue. This palm sized open world is an unprecedented toybox of choices.

NO TRUCE WITH THE FURIES is coming in 2017 for PC.


Teaser Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE2MMpKiJCk
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Unread postby icycalm » 19 Mar 2017 01:02

The official website THM linked above had been down for the last couple of days, and it still is apparently, but there's a new, hugely updated one now: http://zaumstudio.com/

I am gonna play Kentucky Route Zero because these guys said they were inspired by it.
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Unread postby icycalm » 13 Dec 2017 00:20

Same exact deal as with Bannerlord (only this one has no reddit): http://culture.vg/forum/topic?p=30347#p30347

I wrote:Last release date I had heard of was TBA 2017 (don't ask me where I heard it, can't recall). Now 2017 is almost over and the reddit is full of people asking about the release date: https://www.reddit.com/r/MB2Bannerlord/

So I updated it to TBA.
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Unread postby stakkir » 11 Mar 2018 19:10

Title changed to Disco Elysium.

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New trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IbHeFaOpJw
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Unread postby icycalm » 11 Mar 2018 20:53

The trailer voiceover was so bad I quit watching halfway through. Also crappy music and animation. I'll be very surprised if this is good.
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★★★★★ Disco Elysium (2019, PC)

Unread postby Insomnia » 02 Nov 2019 02:16

Review (5/5): https://culture.vg/forum/topic?t=7143

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Insomnia wrote:Imagine a world where True Detective would collide with Slavoj Žižek, and drinking with Bukowski. This is peak gaming.
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Unread postby icycalm » 16 Dec 2019 08:45

So what's up with Disco Elysium? Is it a genuinely great game, or is it an overhyped piece of simplistic commie propaganda? On the strength of the very well written and very convincing current Insomnia review, as well on the recommendation of two CULT players (Hanged Man and Diamong Dawg; though they didn't play too far into it, for what it's worth), I would guess the former; but there are some quite convincing contrarian opinions out there too, and I figured they were worth examining while the world waits for the opinion that will settle the matter: God's, of course. For as everyone knows this is a God-fearing website, where My word is The Gospel and My opinion the Last Judgement. But since that's gonna take a while, why not sit back, grab a cup of your favorite beverage, and see what the contrarians have to say too?

https://steamcommunity.com/id/habraken/ ... ed/632470/

habraken wrote:It's an okay game, and somehow I already put a lot of hours into it, but don't fall for the hype. It isn't 'great' or 'groundbreaking'. So my thumbs-down is mostly a 'meh' to balance the many thumbs-ups. Probably buy it when you like the kind of game, and when it's become a bit less expensive.

A couple of (minor and major) annoyances I found:
- Loading screens, a *lot* of them. Expect a loading screen after *every* door you step through. Like games in the nineties.
- Repetitive music. You'll hear the same thing over and over again. After a while you'll probably mute it and play your own music.
- Changing your clothes before every dialogue. "I could tell you, but you need more points in Logic." "Okay, bye for now." Put on your glasses with Logic+1, your shirt with Logic+1, and change your Logic-1 shoes. "Hello, I changed clothes, let's have the same conversation again please."
- Bad voice-acting. Some are great, but some are *really really* bad.
- Too many different options on the character sheet that don't seem to really matter. After a while you stop caring about the difference between 'Esprit de corps' and 'Inland Empire', between 'Logic' and 'Visual calculus'. You will only put points in things to pass the various skill-checks. "Okay, apparently I need more 'interfacing', let me put a point in that'.
- Running back and forth the same few streets by double-clicking, over and over again. "Do this thing for me at the other side of town."
- Lots of useless orbs to click. "Oh! There's an important-looking blue orb at the other side of the room, let me spend 10 seconds to run towards and click it, it might be valuable!" "You hear the sound of seagulls." Okay, at least the game gave me some XP for clicking the otherwise useless orb.
- The game tries too hard to be 'weird and deep' in my personal opinion. A matter of taste probably.
- What's with all the anti-racism rhetoric? We get it, racism (mostly: xenophobia) is bad. No need to point that out over and over and over again.
- It feels like yet another old isometric point-and-click post-apocalyptic adventure game. Nothing new about it.

Sure, pick up the game, it's okay. But don't expect too much out of it. Maybe I started the game with stats/skills too well-balanced (I never died for example), and it's more fun when you go all-in with weird character builds. Maybe I'll try again one day... But right now I expect this game will go on my dusty shelf with meh-games.


https://steamcommunity.com/id/fingerspi ... ed/632470/

onionunion wrote:"Disco Elysium is This Generation's Planescape: Torment"
-jumpdashroll.com

Now, I don't think there's any point for me to go through the motions here. You've read enough Polygon/Kotaku/whatever-isms to decipher that this game is at least competently written, has a fantastic soundtrack and looks great, which alone should be enough to warrant a purchase. This is nor glowing, neither is it really a review at all; a mini-rant, disheveled collection of nitpicks, if you will.

Calling Disco Elysium this generation's Planescape is preposterous and misleading. Misleading, also, is the game's marketing campaign, calling this point and click adventure an open world RPG. Disco Elysium is more of a this generation's Monkey Island (Петька if you happen to live in one of those grey post-commie wastelands) with dice roll skill checks and a tacked-on political alignment mechanic that barely influences the game in any way and comes off as meaningless fetishism. It's more infatuated with an actual idea of there being a political coordinate system at all rather than delivering any sort of meaningful and/or unbiased commentary on the variables, all while cheekily patting itself on the back when it comes to the political system ZA/UM clearly likes the most. Not to say it doesn't quite have anything worthwhile to express, but most of the time it's obnoxious at best.

The quality of writing varies. Going from characters like Harry, Kim or Klaasje to point-and-click-esque weirdo filler like that guy whose entire personality is about "disliking foreigners", or that other guy whose entire personality is about "disliking foreigners" who also owns a collection of "racist mugs" or to a literal walking Scooter reference has the capacity to at least make your eyes roll or perhaps skibadee the hell out of the game for a while. The little interaction regarding Kim and precinct 41 at the very end of the game that I'm not going to spoil so you can experience disappointment yourself is straight out of some shounen anime too.

Disco Elysium is at its best during its hours of urine-soaked existentialism and the drunken ramblings of your failure of a main character; the smells, the sudden urges, the swarms of inner voices all confronting you with their own sets of truths for you to abide by or suppress; and its absolute worst when you're forced to sit through its unbearable strawman of a political satire with borderline twitter-esque depictions of certain ideologies.

It's equally as cool to find various optional characters and side-stories as it is disappointing to come back to them later only to discover that they don't have anything new to say, despite that, talking, being pretty much the only thing you do in Disco Elysium.

The tool system is unwieldy, annoying, half-baked. Most of them are supposed to be equipped before certain action like prying doors open or whipping out your flashlight in the darker areas, which could've been achieved contextually through the dialog window without forcing the player to open up the clunky inventory menu or at least through an additional HUD element, cutting on the tedium.

The time mechanic, to my knowledge, adds absolutely nothing but contributes to the awkward moments where you've exhausted everything you could do in a day but it's not 9pm yet so Kim won't allow you to chill on a bench forcing you to read books until it's late enough for your alcoholic manbaby to go hushabye. Cheeky literary activism it ain't.

There are others like the constant loading screens, sluggish UI, complete lack of interactivity, but what's more important is that the game's simply nowhere near the groundbreaking RPG it was advertised as. A charming yet distasteful at times adventure with a lot of impressive artistry on display, sure, but comparing it to the classic cRPGs doesn't bode well for the former. The red thumbs down, however, doesn't mean you shouldn't try the game out, Steam simply doesn't have another way to to communicate a review's neutral nature. Luckily for them, ZA/UM has enough secretaries under their desk already, so it won't hurt them in any way.

At the end of the day, this is a unique product worthy of at the very least your attention if not your praise, but it is also a testament to how low the standards of writing in videogames are when the first game in a while that manages to be competently written snatches just about every award and unanimous gaming press acclaim.


https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/765 ... ed/632470/

Dinoabunai wrote:I saw the trailer and read reviews. And I thought - this is it. The RPG we was waited for. Open world, decisions, roleplaying.

It was all lie. Looks like people didn't play a single RPG ever. The game is a pretty straightforward quest/adventure and not even close to a RPG.

Open world?
No - the whole game is linear. The city is tiny and you are restricted to even a smaller area, until you finish ACT 1.

Dialogues? Freedom of choice?
If you have a conversation with someone that insulting you constantly and you really wand to punch him or even kill... nope. This is not in the scenario. You can't do it. Suck it.
My partner offered me some suspicious medicine. I said - "No. I don't want it." My partner replies - "No. You WANT IT." And there is no other choice.
You need to take down a hanged man? How about finding a ladder? No. Instead - go and do a favours to thugs, so they can put it down. Cause it is in the scenario. And ladders are not.

Roleplaying?
Trailer: Be a hero, a prophet, a disaster, a psycho...
Game: You want to roleplay a tough serious detective? Whoops you lost your badge. Whoops you lost your gun. Whoops you is an alcoholc and a junkie. Whoops you pis-sed yourself. Whoops you can't remember your name.
Reason: It was in the scenario. You can only play a written role.

Too bad I already spent 2 hours hoping that, maybe a little more and game will show me all that was promised... maybe a little more... Now I can't make a refund. Thank you Mr. Deceitful trailer.

<span class="bb_strike">Thank you people that never played a single RPG.</span>
OK it looks that we rather have a different opinion on what is an RPG genre, than you didn't play any RPG :) You convinced me on that one.
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Unread postby Discord BOT » 16 Dec 2019 09:41

CULT|Adjudicator
"Indie" game developers and their political preferences...

Disco Elysium Developers Shout Out Marx And Engels In Game Awards Victory Speech
https://kotaku.com/disco-elysium-develo ... 1840403603

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Gita Jackson wrote:During the speech for their second win of the night, ZA/UM, the team behind Disco Elysium, gave a special thanks to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the authors of The Communist Manifesto.


CULT|Some guy
lol: "If you’ve played Disco Elysium, which features the vocal talents of the members of socialist podcast Chapo Trap House, you may not be surprised by these references. If not, I encourage you to read The Communist Manifesto, which is about how a ghost called “communism” is haunting Europe. It’s pretty radical."

CULT|icycalm
That ginger is cute
Originally posted in the Insomnia Discord.

Insomnia Discord bot powered by proprietary next gen next level neural networked quantum learning self aware AI developed by Cult Games.
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Unread postby leccosta » 16 Dec 2019 18:09

I finished the game some time ago. I found it to be pretty good and recommend it, but it is no masterpiece.

What this game gets right is the density of options in the world. There is so much stuff to do, and each one of them is interesting and has some relation to the story. Also, I never had so much fun talking to an NPC before, the conversations are treated like a battle, there are no throwaway lines, and every single one of them is important and fun.

Also, the whole "your skills talk to you" thing is nothing short of genius. They try to convince you to do things and sometimes you end up doing them just for the hell of it, even if it seems like a bad idea. And even the bad results have something interesting in them, so it is always fun. This really pushes role-playing forward in a fun way.

But the main story is nothing to write home about and the setting really sucks. I am actually impressed that not many people talk about this. They wasted so much time creating a world with more than 6000 years of lore and there's nothing interesting in it, and the only interesting thing about the world (the Pale) is barely mentioned in the story. If it is mostly our world with some names changed, why bother? Just make this story be about a New York detective, at least I know where this is.

In the end it left me wanting more, but not in the sense of wanting a Disco Elysium 2. I would love if bigger developers took notice and start making more of this kind of dense role-playing game, preferably in a more interesting setting like cyberpunk.
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Unread postby icycalm » 16 Dec 2019 19:46

Thanks for the breakdown, I can very well believe your opinion from everything I have seen about the game. Sounds like you'd give it 3/5 or 4/5. Probably 4 since you say you recommend it.

On the other hand, great "battle" mechanics (the conversations) but bad world and plot sounds like Divinity: Original Sin to me, and that game is Videogame Art to me, so I don't know. I really have to try the game for myself and see what's what. It will depend on exactly how good the good parts are and how bad the bad. In D:OS the good parts were outstanding, genre-evolving and genre-defining, but the bad parts were not that bad at the end of the day. Just very mediocre and generic. So overall it is a masterpiece for me. Can't wait to see what I will make of this one, but I have a number of higher priorities before I get around to it.
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Unread postby leccosta » 16 Dec 2019 22:01

You're welcome. Yeah, for me this game is a 4/5, but I can totally understand the people who are giving it a 5. It has some good ideas that bring the genre forward and it's been a long time since we've had anything above average in the genre so it really is a breath of fresh air.

As you said, it's all about how those good parts outweigh the bad ones. To me, this game is different from Divinity: Original Sin since the boring story and setting are too interwoven to the other parts of the game to ignore, bringing those other parts down. That's where the game loses a potential fifth star from me.

You talked about genre-evolving games and I think this is one of them. The key improvements here are the density of the world and the way that the skill system blends into everything you can do. Even so, I don't think the evolution is as big as some other games did for their genres like Planetary Annihilation and Valkyria Chronicles.
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Unread postby icycalm » 16 Dec 2019 22:12

If an RPG can be made about just talking, without being boring, that's a monumental achievement in the genre, and even in videogames as a whole, and certainly outclasses PA's achievement which is merely in adding complexity and not in fundamentally changing how the game is played. I don't know much about the Valkyria games though. From what little I have seen, they don't seem revolutionary, but you're welcome to elaborate for us if and when you feel like it (preferably in the first game's thread [ > ]), or if you want to write a full review in the Submissions forum.

Also the Original Sin games and Kingmaker are certainly "above-average", and the genre is flooded with such games these days, so I take exception with your comments about the state of the genre today. Unless you mean the "conversation-RPG genre", which didn't really exist before this game, and doesn't really exist even now, because it takes more than one game of a type to make a genre.
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Unread postby icycalm » 16 Dec 2019 22:18

Also, from my "RPG Conundrum" essay from 2008: https://web.archive.org/web/20170802123 ... _conundrum

icycalm wrote:But as I explained in my RPG article, none of the above has anything to do with role-playing. Indeed, a role-playing game doesn't even need to have a battle system -- let alone an extremely complicated one, with lots of numbers flashing everywhere. (Take for example an RPG in which the player controls a patient in a straitjacket locked up in a hospital's psychiatric ward. All the player can do is talk to other people, and the game ends when the doctors proclaim him cured and allow him to leave. The whole game then would be about convincing the doctors that you are sane, solely through dialogue. No battles, no nothing.)


Took them 11 years to catch up with me. If they had listened to the "ideas guy" they could have made this game 11 years ago, and several follow-ups and imitators too until now. Oh well. Better late than never.
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Unread postby leccosta » 16 Dec 2019 22:57

I agree that it must have been a huge undertaking making an RPG with no combat that is actually fun. I commend them for that and I want more games like this one.

And I'm feeling foolish for saying that we didn't have anything above mediocre in the genre for years. I finished Divinity: Original Sin and played Pathfinder: Kingmaker and both are games that I really like. And even though I cited Divinity in my post, I wasn't actually comparing this game to it. Disco is such a departure for the genre, with its lack of combat and the fact that every action besides walking is text-based, that I was actually comparing it to visual novels, or text-based adventure games, which I think it shares a lot of DNA with. Sorry for making that leap.
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Unread postby icycalm » 16 Dec 2019 23:19

Yeah that's a good point, this game perhaps veers closer to visual novels than CRPGs, only with the complexity ratcheted up so much that it ends up looking so different to what VN fans have come to expect from their genre that maybe they won't even get to hear of this game. It sounds like the kind of game that would disappoint hardocre fans of both genres: the CRPG nuts who've come to expect far more combat than talking, and who will feel the lack of combat as a betrayal of the genre's roots; and the VN fans who basically don't want to play a game but just read a shitty book. That's how it always goes with every new genre; it leaves behind all the hardcore fans of the genres it synthesizes. It's artistic evolution at work, replete with winners who make the leap, and losers who stay behind and spend the rest of their days whining.
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Unread postby icycalm » 09 Jun 2021 11:30

https://selectbutton.net/t/disco-elysium/9168/29

Ideology brings us to the game’s most obvious design flaw, which is that we’re very much in “every system will fail, punch in every direction” territory. Some of the ideologies at work in Revachol are necessarily worse than others, but the game is willing to let you try to adopt any of them, right up to and including being a flag-waving fascist or a eugenics-supporting racial supremacist. I think they intended this to be a joke, since your protagonist’s past already necessitates that he’s something of an awful loser and so any undertaking he embarks on should also be colored by that context. It’s hard to take these options lightly, considering how often media intended to satirize or criticize an idea is subsequently lauded as a celebration of that idea. There’s just a little too much for racists, sexists, homophobes, and fascists to get excited about here.


This role-playing game’s most obvious flaw is that you can role-play.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.
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Re: PC Disco Elysium

Unread postby ChevRage » 09 Jun 2021 11:53

I've been meaning to start this game again and play on the harder difficulty level maybe. There's an update now that has apparently improved the voice acting for a majority of the games' characters (it was pretty bad before) as well as the difficulty thing too. I got halfway through before I needed to travel overseas for a while, and forgot where I was up to. Maybe I'll finish it this time, it was very interesting when I was playing it, even without being a misogynistic white supremacist fascist lol.
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Re: PC Disco Elysium

Unread postby icycalm » 09 Jun 2021 12:14

The question is why was HE playing as fascist? Okay, maybe to explore that side of the game for the purposes of his review. But how does the existence of that path prevent him from enjoying the OTHER paths, which he doesn’t even mention at all? It’s a fucking role-playing game, you’d think a player would at the very least START OUT by picking the path he WANTS to play!?

That’s how you see they aren’t in it for the games. They are in it for the endless whining and pretentiousness in their little scene.

The old IC btw would have allowed me to post this. There’d be a ten-page flamewar and ultimately a locked thread, but they wouldn’t have banned me or scrubbed the discussion. SB and nu-IC would instaban me and outright delete the post and/or thread.
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Re: PC Disco Elysium

Unread postby icycalm » 09 Jun 2021 12:30

https://selectbutton.net/t/disco-elysium/9168/52

I think the political dialogues/axis is a bit weaker. Unlike how attributes and their personalities feed into the Copotype axis (Electrochemical’s urges and Composure’s style feed into Supercop, Empathy leads to Sorry Cop, etc.), and you find yourself roleplaying along with your personalities into situations, the political dialogues all exist in IDEOLOGICAL WARFARE and aren’t well-mapped to personalities. Like, I don’t think anyone really picks up Ultraliberal points because the people in this game literally worship a market god and it’s made very clear how odd this is.

It’s too easy to bow out of these discussions and evince no opinion, rather than being led into one by what you are. Or, it’s not something that interacts with your other character traits (except in a few mappings, like Authority->Fascist) and so feels like a side-system.

Of course, the game very purposely seems to exhibit a cynic’s view - ideologues are doomed to failure and the world is crumbling in a soft entropy, so it may be fitting that picking up a political leaning is an option and not necessarily an optimal one. It’s a choice and not a reflection.


This sounds like solid analysis you could find on Insomnia. That’s why I say that SB is superior to nu-IC. At least on SB they play the odd new game.
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