2w ago

The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made

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Not set in a fantasy world and was not expansive science fiction
Uh... I mean, it kinda is. The world of the game itself is pretty wild. Monsters of a kind exist, and there is some sort of fog between the continents that csn literally make you stop existing without sci-fi tech to protect you. And it's growing.
Actually talking to the corpo lady on the boat, doing the church quests, as well as having a high Encyclopedia skill gives you tons of exposition about the world itself, and it is gnarly.
- I was surprised that the church sequence doesn't kill you. I only got shot once in the Whirling-In-Rags.
  
  The dancing for Egghead can kill you if your health is low enough/your physical stats are 1-2.
- Quite frankly I had such a high Inland Empire on my playthrough that the only things I’m sure are real are the things Kim or my good friend Horrific Necktie backed me up on.
  
  I will always back you up bratan! You and I are bratannoi -- brothers. Brothers fight. But when they're done fighting, you know what they do? They party. They fucking party!
- The pale is incredibly interesting as a concept.
  Entropy.
  But filled with memories of things that happened before and maybe in the future too.
  The pale driver gives you evenore context.
- They aren't continents; calling them continents implies a planet, but the planet is long gone, broken apart into isolas (containing both land, including full continents, and sea) floating in the Pale, which is very much not fog.
  The Pale isn't... anything, really. A literal lack of being. Not matter, or energy, but space-time broken down into pure entropy where direction and time lose all meaning.
  
  Part of the idea behind the "world" is the idea that we normalize our reality and it's almost equally absurd and distressing, we have just as much craziness in our existence that we're just used to the same way. "Oh, we're floating on a spherical rock in an endless dark void? And the climate is changing and we may all go extinct? Cool, what's for breakfast."
  It's used as a metaphor for how we just plow through our own narratives in life without stopping to think about how weird and fascinating and disturbing our own reality is, and it could be radically different and we would get used to that as well.
- The game gives the player so many options for what you want to dive deeply into. Some players might get lost in the backstory and politics, some might dive into the characters, some like myself might get lost down the surreal/sci-fi elements. It's very easy to play an entire playthrough and miss entire bodies of work within the work.
  And if you're like half the people commenting here, you might boot the game up and immediately say "I ain't reading all that" and go fire up Call of Duty.
  
  And if you're like half the people commenting here, you might boot the game up and immediately say "I ain't reading all that" and go fire up Call of Duty.
  Fr. Some dude up in here basically implied DE isn't a good game or a proper RPG, but they are so vague about their complaints it doesn't even sound like they ever actually played the game, they just want to be contrarian.
“The greatest RPG ever made?” Not even close. Why do titles need to be this hyperbolic?
- Because it's an opinion article and maybe it's OK for the author to make an subjective statement of the quality of a thing they love? Like, if they really believe it, is it wrong to state that? Do they need to qualify everything in their article with "this is just my opinion, sorry if you don't agree."
  I get being annoyed by hyperbole in articles, but I don't really think that this warrants this kind of response. Sometimes it's OK to make strong statements. You can make statements like that without implying that people who think differently are bad/wrong.
  
  Sometimes it's OK to make strong statements.
  How fucking dare you
  
  If it was an RPG that was even close to contending for that title, I would acquiesce to it. As it stands, I think the burden of proof is on the person making the claim. Personal taste is personal taste, and that’s fine, but if you’re going to make bold claims like this, you should have to be burdened with the duty of backing it up. I don’t accept that this reporter’s personal opinion matters more than the RPG fans’ opinions as a whole. For them to make such a bold claim on such a public forum means they need to provide substantial evidence for it.
  Let’s get back to basics though: this was a bold statement done in an article title to get clicks. You can tell talk till sunrise about a person’s right to have their own opinion, but this isn’t really what’s going on. This is a journalist making a hyperbolic statement to get clicks. Fuck them. Fuck them and their marketing strategy. Tell me it’s not exactly that: a marketing strategy. Tell me it’s not a ploy to bolster the author’s career. Tell me there’s something substantial underneath this that warrants serious attention, rather than a click-bait article that’s meant to incite anger and garner clicks that way. How much does your contention that this reflects a genuine opinion stand up to the idea that it’s just a cheap attention grab?
- I think your "not even close" statement is hyperbolic. Disco Elysium has very positive reviews in most if not all review outlets and won Game of The Year award in 2019. You can personally think its not a good RPG but saying its nowhere close is very hyperbolic.
  
  But "best RPG" though? There are tons of RPGs that won "Game of the Year", and when people talk about iconic RPGs, Disco Elysium is rarely the one mentioned. Most people will claim Chrono Trigger, Morrowind (or Skyrim I guess), or one of the Final Fantasies (usually 6, 7, or 8). Look up any list of top RPGs and it probably won't crack the top 10.
  That doesn't mean it's a bad game, but "best RPG" is a pretty crowded field that rarely includes Disco Elysium.
- Because it riles up the nerds.
- Out of curiosity, what are some games that you consider contenders for greatest RPG?
  
  Not OP, but:
  Chrono Trigger
  Morrowind (or maybe Skyrim)
  Final Fantasy (esp. 6 and 7)
  Baldur's Gate (esp. 3)
  Pillars of Eternity
  Fallout (esp. New Vegas)
  The Witcher (esp. 3)
  World of Warcraft (not my jam, but it's insanely popular)
  There are a ton more, especially if you broaden the definition to sub-genres to include Diablo 2, TLoZ games (esp. Ocarina of Time and Breath of the Wild), and Dark Souls.
  There are just so many bangers.
  
  Western - Ultima IV
  Eastern - Phantasy Star II
  
  Xenogears. Just off the top of my head.
- The article author has never played a good RPG before, clearly.
I found it...daunting. I couldn't stick with it. maybe it's because I like my RPGs to have a bit of action or random encounters I don't know but I just couldn't get into it. once I found myself skipping text and stuff I figured "welp, there's no point in playing this now".
So yeah I guess I just found it daunting and boring. Just not my cup of tea. If you're someone that enjoyed it, kudos. but personally I don't think it's the greatest RPG ever made.
- I'm not entirely confident in my answer but I think my initial issue with Disco Elysium when I first tried to play it was because I expected the typical high action and quick cause-and-effect outcomes I'm used to in most RPGs. At least IMO, most RPG choices in games usually end up with a relatively clear outcome, whereas DE felt more gradual. Similarly, DE is more detective than action, which might sometimes benefit from gradual clues all coming together.
  Not to say anyone is wrong for not liking this approach, it does take a bit of commitment to engage with it. But I think being willing to engage with it on its level might make the initial hump more bearable. I've honestly come to enjoy the slower approach of DE, but refreshing compared to everything else.
- Yeah, it wasn't for me either. I really tried to give it a shot, gone back to it a couple times but I really just don't get it.
  Great art/style? Definitely. But the gameplay itself is SO boring.
  I'm trying to play a game here, and the game part is lacking. RNG+ text? No thanks, not much to keep me.
  
  It’s about the exploring the story, the mind of your character, and lots of political and philosophical themes. The deep psychological exploration of the human condition is absolutely unique and fascinating.
  Maybe you’re too young or otherwise not ready to engage with these themes.
  
  But the gameplay itself is SO boring.
  I don't know why anyone is trying to pass it off as a "gameplay" experience, it's literally an interactive novel that uses visual settings and reader choices to advance the plot in a thousand different ways.
  If you don't like reading, if you don't have a brain adapted to creating worlds from text, you won't like it. If you sit down to "play a game" and wanna click-splat baddies or strategically manage your health potions as you horde massive piles of wealth and gain levels... you won't like it. It has some of those elements but its to serve the purpose of advancing story, not engaging in gameplay.
- Same - Planescape Torment is my personal greatest RPG ever made
  
  A true fellow of culture. Just don't trust the skull.
- If you read a lot of books, it's absolutely one of the best interactive reading experiences ever made. If you're not into reading and you don't have a brain adapted to creating worlds from text you're going to feel like only some kind snob likes it or it's pretentious and people only like it for the politics or something.
  Edit: the idea that so many of you are actually mad that other people had a great experience that you can't share for whatever reason should be your tell that you are experiencing a form of cognitive dissonance that should be embraced and explored.
  
  Why don't you read a PDF transcript of it then? I mean, all the visuals just mean you don't have a brain adapted to creating worlds from text... Why need a game if you can a) go to page 713 b) go to page 23 c) go to page 412
this game was so fucking depressing and bleak and full of downer characters and sub stories i stopped playing after 4 hours.
drama can be good. hardships make adventures exciting. but when the entire world is a hardship, I'd rather play something with more realistic variety.
- Maybe you should have kept on playing and you'd have noticed that the game is also funny as fuck...
  
  If they didn't notice for 4 whole hours the game is funny as fuck I don't think it's for them anyway. Kinda weird they picked up only the nostalgic and sad tones, but nothing else, in a game that basically allows you to react to its world in a myriad different ways.
  
  i have 4 hours on my steam account. not a single chuckle. that's enough time for a laugh. you may jokes about bleak existences and situations but dark humor isn't exactly mainstream and imo is pretty hard to pull off without feeling gross, which Disco Elysium did to me.
  also, i have seen more of the game via youtube than i have played. the game is not a comedy, just stop it.
- Yeah I felt the same way. I kept playing because of the hype around it, but quit after 8 hours or so.
- Sad because I played it a dozen times and found avenues of hope, metaphors for our current lives and generation, bleak and dark views and sublime explorations of acceptance and living in the present. Choices and consequences that can't be reversed and how we deal with them.
  But as I say over and over, it's a reading experience, it's a mental/emotional exploration of ideas and settings that reflect the real world. If you just wanna feel good... well there's a voice in your head for that too, and you can follow that voice and shut out all the others in life, and in game.
greatest rpg ever made? doubtful.
- Greatest to who? In terms of what?
  I tuned out of these absolutist statements years and years ago and now just see it for what it is, attempts at farming engagement.
  I loved DE and absolutely rank it up there as one of the best gaming experiences, but it's more like an interactive novel set in a highly polished world, a dive into an author's mind. It's not a "gaming experience" you can put on the same list with things like Final Fantasy XXVII or whatever RPG's people play now.
  edit: there is a lot of rage-bait from people who don't like to read or follow nuanced stories in this post, I highly recommend just not engaging, you won't feel better after trying to argue with teenage gamers who prefer JRPG's where you farm cave slimes and grind levels for 90+ hours.
  
  Final Fantasy XXVII
- Yeah, I'd argue Clair Obscur is better and that's only talking about recent ones.
  
  Is...this a joke?
If I wanted to read that much I’d reread the Stephen king dark tower series. I just couldn’t get past all the dialogue and reading, that’s not why I play video games
- Because people trying to sell it as a traditional video game are doing it a disservice, you don't play Disco Elysium for the same gaming experience as something where you click buttons to splat baddies, it is literally an interactive novel and if you love reading you will love it, if not, you won't. It's ridiculous to compare it to other games because it's a niche genre.
  I get really sick of the anti-intellectualism around non-traditional experiences though, part of the seven-second attention-span generation leaking everywhere. The "I ain't reading all that" banner that everyone under 20 seems to carry nowadays. It's damn near impossible to find slower-paced, more thoughtful entertainment experiences without really digging into niches and even then you're going to see people complaining constantly.
  edit: if it makes you irritated that other people enjoyed a thing you didn't, that should be a cue to explore deeper why you aren't able to enjoy something so different from the norm and what it makes you feel. It's far more productive to explore your own reactions and conscious thought-stream than try to convince other people who DID like a thing that they're wrong.
  
  It has nothing to do with attention span. If I wanna read a novel I’ll sit down and do so, if I sit down to play a game i want to play a game. Your argument would be like Christopher Nolan releasing a film with no pictures, just words on screen you read, I’d be mad and others would say it’s a masterpiece. But it has nothing to do with me liking to read or not. If you think about it DE is a video game equivalent to a Nolan movie, some will say it’s a masterpiece, others like me will say it’s pretentious, boring crap
  I have the same issue with those telltale games where you just click a choice and watch a giant cutscene.
  
  I love reading, but I couldnt get into Disco Elysium besides many attempts, so I disagree with your statement that I love it because I love reading.
  Maybe I don't like starting a book over and over again because the dice made me do it.
  Three bad rolls in the first 30 minutes and you get a heart attack and have to start over.
"Disco Elysium is perfect but also a complete shit show" is becoming its own genre of journalism.
I don't get the love for this game. I've been playing CRPGs since Temple of Apshai and I've never seen a game where the story and dialog choices appear to have been written by or for people with traumatic brain injury.
So bad that I had to hop on a forum and go "Hey, so, there aren't any good choices in the dialog tree, did I fuck up my character generation? Should I start over?"
And got "You just don't get it, man!"
Yeah, I don't get games where "You want some fuck?" is a valid dialog choice.
- The main character starts the game literally giving himself a traumatic brain injury by drowning himself in alcohol. It's not really the kind of RPG where you can play a self-insert, the player character is an actual character with his own backstory. Not being able to make good choices because of the player character's personal trauma and limitations is part of the story that the game is telling.
  
  This is the clearest explanation for Disco Elysium I've ever read, thank you.
  
  This says it well. I also like how the character's fucked up backstory is inescapably linked to the fucked up backstory of the world he lives in. It it were just that he was a fuck-up, then it wouldn't be as compelling. What I really love is that whilst he certainly is the victim of his own choices, it's much more the case that he's a victim of his material circumstances (rather like how I am currently still in bed due to a combination of poor choices, and material circumstances making consistent good choices very hard)
- So bad that I had to hop on a forum and go “Hey, so, there aren’t any good choices in the dialog tree, did I fuck up my character generation? Should I start over?”
  Your first mistake was thinking it was like any of those other CRPGS with dialog trees. No, you didn't fuck up your character generation. Your character IS a fuck up. That's part of the story it's trying to tell. You don't get to Mary Sue this shit.
  How you engage with the game is figuring out how to un-fuck-up the character in a matter that is realistic. Or just ignoring whatever lessons the game gives you and continue down the same self-destructive path. Or somewhere in-between. All paths are have their creative stories to tell, and even being strange and weird with it can still lead to solving pieces of the crime you're trying to piece together.
  Yeah, I don’t get games where “You want some fuck?” is a valid dialog choice.
  Because it's fucking funny when you didn't know what the actual dialogue entry was going to be, you took a gamble, and the "pay off" (well, it was a failed check) is that your character says the cringest fucking line to some woman he's immediately attracted to. So cringe that even your own Volition (best fucking mental power, btw) is like "the words already left your mouth" as if he was already smacking his goddamn forehead right through to the other side. (EDIT: Actually, it was Suggestion, but whatever.) If anything, it should teach you not to make red check gambles unless you're prepared for the mental damage a failure might come with. Or maybe you just want to laugh at the upcoming misfortune.
  Your. Character. Is. A. Fuck up.
  If that bothers you, and you want to play something that involves some extreme power fantasy, where you can pick a class and play a completely silent blank slate, then this game is not for you.
  
  And I'm not interested in playing as a fuck up... it's not interesting to me.
  Thank god Steam let me return it.
- Hey, if you don’t have traumatic brain injury, what are you doing on Lemmy?
- I enjoyed it because many RPGs are a power fantasy, where you're an epic hero who saves the world. Some of them present you with a blank slate character you can shape however you wish, and whilst that can be fun, I find I have more fun when I'm playing a character with some history.
  In Disco Elysium, you're playing as someone whose history is fucked up, so good choices often aren't an option. He's not a typical hero, and he'll be lucky if he can save himself, let alone the world — the world is even more fucked up than he is, riddled with scars from a long dead, hopeful era. Even though at the start of the game, both the player and your character have no knowledge of history, you can't escape it.
  A huge part of why I like it is because I can see what it's going for, and I'm here for that. Even if I didn't personally click with it, I think I would respect it for having things to say and committing to it. What's an RPG that you have clicked with or loved what it was going for? If you're not into Disco Elysium, then I suspect that your answer might be a game that would pull me out of my comfort zone in interesting ways.
  "dialog choices appear to have been written by or for people with traumatic brain injury."
  I think this is a pretty harsh statement, but it did make me laugh, because part of why I vibed with Disco Elysium so much is because a couple years before, I actually bumped my head that I lost my memory and couldn't even remember who I was.
- I mean, it's ok to not get it? It really does sound like you just don't get it. If your example of why it's bad is a genuinely funny, absurd result of a failed check, it might just not be for you.
- Being insulted by Cuno and that other little rat faced fuck was a highlight for me
  
  The fuck you're saying about Cunoesse? The Cuno will fuck your face up! With his maximum velocity fists!
  
  I'm so disappointed we came so close to having a Cuno RPG, only to have that ripped away.
  
  Fuck Cuno. I stole that kid's dad's speed.
- I mostly just hated that the story was largely delivered via info dump and nearly every character was a terrible person to the point of being grating. I don't have to enjoy every video game, but I wish I at least understood why this one got this much acclaim.
  
  That's a really bizarre read, how do you come to the conclusion that every character was a terrible person? Even amongst the first 6 or so people you talk to, most of them are decent people living in a very poor area. I usually hate media where everyone is an asshole but DI is so NOT that that I'm just... Confused.
  
  There are a lot of characters who are good people. A lot of bad ones too . A lot of the good ones you've previously pissed off so they start out barely putting up with you talking to them (and you deserve that treatment frankly).
- I think the problem is that it kind of isn't an RPG.
  It's an adventure game with heavy RPG elements. Like the core gameplay clearly resembles old point and click adventure games. It's just the experience and leveling system are also so central to the gameplay that it wouldn't work without also being an RPG.
  
  I think trying to fit games into genres and people disagreeing with your reasoning is incredibly bad around RPGs.
  I'd argue disco elysium is a stellar example of an RPG especialls since I enjoyed role playing as someone who is incredibly far from my own mental state. A game with somehow gets me to roleplay someone so different is a prime example of a good RPG for me.
  But I get how messy the term has gotten. People argue about whether Dark souls or Witcher are RPGs, where both games have arguments for it beeing an RPG. Personality I think an RPG has an adaptility in the character AND the world in response to my choices. But I can totally see how others see it differently.
  For me personally I've set up that there are the traditional RPGs like Fallout, Baldurs gate and Pathfinder WoR. But there are also a lot of games which use a lot of similar parts of the RPG gene that I consider them RPGs aswell.
- That's not what the detective said. He SAID "I want to have fuck with you"
  
  That correction makes you sound like a pedomorphic binoclard. 😅
- You've confused basic with good, common mistake
- I could see what it was going for but it felt like a chore to play so I stopped.
  The term "over-embroidered" springs to mind.
- By chance did you pick a character with a low intelligence or charisma? Because ability scores matter a lot.
  I sadly didn't get to play much of it. I only had access to it for a limited time, and I did not get far at all.
  
  See, that's what I was thinking. The reaction in the forums was it was supposed to be that way.
- To me Disco Elysium was the next example of the "Art Game".
  The game people bring up when discussing Game as Art, without actually explaining what makes it art.
  
  without actually explaining what makes it art.
  Is that happening? Everyone endorsing the game even in this post are going on at length what makes it great. I could drop a 20-page thesis about the themes, plots and interwoven interactive narratives, but I am guessing you don't actually want to read that any more than you want to play a reading game to begin with.
  Maybe... and hear me out here, maybe some of you just don't like arty games and rather do mindless clicking and grinding. That's fine, just understand what's what.
- ITT: lots of people who don't like this kind of game saying they didn't like it, comparing it to wildly different games and getting pissed at people explaining why it was great.
  I weep for our species' lost potential, which ironically was a theme of Disco Elysium.

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