Disco Elysium - Insane Drunken Cop Simulator RPG GotY 2019

[HorridHenry]

I always wondered, is there any particular reason the Fascism route is achieved exclusively through hating women, aimlessly wandering around thinking about the Roman Empire Old Revachol, and then listening to a buff dockworker with autism talk about hyperborea for 20 minutes?

Like, that feels like the way someone would become fascist on the catboy ranch discord server, not in a post-soviet-collapse shithole that doesn't even have televisions. Where's the revolutionary attitude? The train autism? The Gentileian rhetoric? The desire to overcome the shortcomings of communism in attaining true socialism?

If just being vaguely nostalgic and really racist was all it took to become a fascist ubermensch then a new reich would've popped up every time a Euro saw a gypsy caravan come into town for the past 70-odd years. I think national socialism is a retarded school of thought and even I'd say it's more complex than that.

It feels like they put far more thought into the communist philosophy side of the discussion then they ever did with it's counterpart, even when criticizing it. The fascism route comes off as a giant shitpost that never takes the philosophical subject matter seriously at all and I never understood why.

This is the biggest flaw of the game and you are spot on. The problem is the lead writer is a communist and this is how he sees fascism. It's just abject hatred and a lack of willingness to understand why people want to throw the nogs out and make the faggots stop faggoting. The humor about is, therefore, just going to be a shallow caricature. The way it needles communism is coming from the perspective of someone in the know, therefore it's funnier, gentler, something the audience can see itself in.

I say this but Disco Elysium is one of my most adored games. For all the faults of the game, and its creator, the artistry used to craft it, its sense of humor, and its attention to detail in bringing such humanity to its characters are just above and beyond.

 

[Nick Obre]

Should be noted that out of everyone Revachol, the Fascists, mocked as they are, are also the only ones trying to actually improve things. Not running agendas or trying to build revolutions or anything like that, but actually improving their direct surroundings.

The Cryptofascist (which is a joke because he's a fascist and hangs out with cryptozoologists) picks up trash, helps out the elderly, and tries to prevent a drug lab (under the guise of a youth community center) being established. That's why Fat Fuck makes you go intimidate him by unlocking his door.
Measurehead may be a faker ("I HEARD IT ON THE RADIO") and a racemixer (and what's more fascist than preaching racial purity and superiority while fucking women of other races?) but he's the only one committed to self-improvement and self-mastery, and will help you get clean and deal with your issues if you down that route.
The old soldier doesn't do much in the present, but he fought for what he believed in, defends the memory of his beloved, his land, and his king, and laments the fallen state of the nation. This makes the communist deserter seethe like nothing else; that in itself makes him the greatest hero in the story.

They may be treated as morally repugnant, but the fascists are written in a much more positive way than it seems at first, quite likely by accident.

 

[2mm and 99 others]

Very old news. But curious nonetheless.

https://x.com/Pirat_Nation/status/1886202943294128584

View attachment 7780230

The grifter was foreseen. It's even possible he wrote it.

(this was in the original game, so unlike that Harry's mod, not a later addition to mock the original team)

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

Very old news. But curious nonetheless.

https://x.com/Pirat_Nation/status/1886202943294128584

View attachment 7780230

This is a bit disappointing. Argo came off in this interview as fairly level-headed and uninterested in being Kurvitz's whipping-boy. He struck me as the one to recognize corruption in everything, while Kurvitz was obsessed with stupid shit and self-aggrandizing.

But the actual wording on the GFM is a little ridiculous. I can't even actually tell what these legal expenses are for based on the bizarre way he's opted to word it. One of the DE rightsholders wanted to be on the board of Summer Eternal, which is... a video game? The closest I can find to make sense of this:

The judge ruled in favor of granting the Claimant the interim injunction that he sought, preventing me from working on my chosen field for six months, pending further trial to determine the validity of his claim.

Is bongland law so retarded that you can literally sue a writer if he leaves your company and tries to write on what you might loosely define as a "competitor"? That's non-compete-clauses on steroids; that's retarded. I do also get the impression Argo is, however, too stupid to recognize he can pen commissions under a pseudonym or just work under the table, as plenty of writers do.

 

[Lt. H. DuBois]

Anyone play the phone adaptation, kinda just seems like a picture book version, but I did like seeing all the familiar locales with differing artworks

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I always wondered, is there any particular reason the Fascism route is achieved exclusively through hating women, aimlessly wandering around thinking about the Roman Empire Old Revachol, and then listening to a buff dockworker with autism talk about hyperborea for 20 minutes?

Like, that feels like the way someone would become fascist on the catboy ranch discord server, not in a post-soviet-collapse shithole that doesn't even have televisions. Where's the revolutionary attitude? The train autism? The Gentileian rhetoric? The desire to overcome the shortcomings of communism in attaining true socialism?

If just being vaguely nostalgic and really racist was all it took to become a fascist ubermensch then a new reich would've popped up every time a Euro saw a gypsy caravan come into town for the past 70-odd years. I think national socialism is a retarded school of thought and even I'd say it's more complex than that.

It feels like they put far more thought into the communist philosophy side of the discussion then they ever did with it's counterpart, even when criticizing it. The fascism route comes off as a giant shitpost that never takes the philosophical subject matter seriously at all and I never understood why.

So is the ultraliberals. As much as I love Disco Elysium as a work of literature (I’ll put up my dukes to defend that, I consider it a playable novel) the fag that wrote it did what all Leftists do, did not make any effort to understand things he finds scary and mean.

The moralists, on the other hand, are well written. Because a Leftist can easily understand Globohomo progressivism.

Measurehead is an amazing character (making a 4chan shitposter be a BBC hotep).

 

[gaysexenjoyer]

I guess none of it really matters because the world is ending and Harry has a magic necktie that can tell the future.

Still very frustrating though, from an intellectual standpoint.

 

[King Vidiot]

ZA/UM just put out a new trailer for their next game, which is called ZERO PARADES:

(preservetube)

As I expected, most comments on YouTube & Steam forums are about how ZA/UM was stolen from the original creators of Disco Elysium, and encouraging piracy or boycotting the game.

It will be interesting to see which of the upcoming Disco Elysium style games from ZA/UM & other studios with former developers is the best. Dark Math Games is making XXX NIGHTSHIFT and Longdue Games is making Hopetown.

 

[Gravityqueen4life]

ZA/UM just put out a new trailer for their next game, which is called ZERO PARADES:

(preservetube)

As I expected, most comments on YouTube & Steam forums are about how ZA/UM was stolen from the original creators of Disco Elysium, and encouraging piracy or boycotting the game.

It will be interesting to see which of the upcoming Disco Elysium style games from ZA/UM & other studios with former developers is the best. Dark Math Games is making XXX NIGHTSHIFT and Longdue Games is making Hopetown.

Can we get a TL.DR recap of the drama surrounding ZA/UM?

 

[Nick Obre]

Can we get a TL.DR recap of the drama surrounding ZA/UM?

I probably have some details (or whole ass facts) wrong, but I think it goes like:

ZA/UM gets bought, commies can't into business or property, get fucked out of the DE rights. They're fired or leave, ZA/UM gets new devs and tries to keep profiting from the DE brand and fame.
Commies who worked on DE split and form different studios that all claim to be the true successors to DE. Except the main writer who is now a hobo or some shit.

Some of the successor studios have things to show like trailers and demos, others are stuck at essentially just manifestos.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I probably have some details (or whole ass facts) wrong, but I think it goes like:

ZA/UM gets bought, commies can't into business or property, get fucked out of the DE rights. They're fired or leave, ZA/UM gets new devs and tries to keep profiting from the DE brand and fame.
Commies who worked on DE split and form different studios that all claim to be the true successors to DE. Except the main writer who is now a hobo or some shit.

Some of the successor studios have things to show like trailers and demos, others are stuck at essentially just manifestos.

life imitates art imitates life

 

[2mm and 99 others]

In longer words, there is a fitting quote from Going postal, a Discworld book (one of those wordier ones), that is about communication services, but this can be applied to the ZA/UM case as well:

Spoiler: A crossover nobody wanted

Vetinari leaned back and placed his fingers together
‘Let us consider a situation in which some keen and highly inventive men devise a remarkable system of communication,’ he said.
‘What they have is a kind of passionate ingenuity, in large amounts.
What they don’t have is money.
They are not used to money. So they meet some . . . people, who introduce them to other people, friendly people, who for, oh, a forty per cent stake in the enterprise give them the much-needed cash and, very important, much fatherly advice and an introduction to a really good firm of accountants.

And so they proceed, and soon money is coming in and money is going out but somehow, they learn, they’re not quite as financially stable as they think and really do need more money.
Well, this is all fine because it’s clear to all that the basic enterprise is going to be a money tree one day, and does it matter if they sign over another fifteen per cent?
It’s just money.
It’s not important in the way that shutter mechanisms are, is it?
And then they find out that yes, it is. It is everything.
Suddenly the world’s turned upside down, suddenly those nice people aren’t so friendly any more, suddenly it turns out that those bits of paper they signed in a hurry, were advised to sign by people who smiled all the time, mean that they don’t actually own anything at all, not patents, not property, nothing.
Not even the contents of their own heads, indeed.
Even any ideas they have now don’t belong to them, apparently.

And somehow they’re still in trouble about money.
Well, some run and some hide and some try to fight, which is foolish in the extreme, because it turns out that everything is legal, it really is.
Some accept lowlevel jobs in the enterprise, because one has to live and in any case the enterprise even owns their dreams at night.
And yet actual illegality, it would appear, has not taken place.
Business is business.’
Lord Vetinari opened his eyes. The men around the table were staring at him.
‘Just thinking aloud,’ he said.

(Terry Pratchett - Going Postal, 2010)

 

[The Grognard]

Except the main writer who is now a hobo or some shit.

He is certainly a classic starving artist, but he's got his own project amongst many. Only question is if actually goes anywhere.

 

[Something Awful]

It will be interesting to see which of the upcoming Disco Elysium style games from ZA/UM & other studios with former developers is the best.

Hopetown and XXX NIGHTSHIFT (jfc) both look like sad jokes. Would be kind of funny if ZA/UM ends up being the studio that releases a decent game, although I'm not holding my breath.

Can we get a TL.DR recap of the drama surrounding ZA/UM?

Not really. It's an absolute shit show and any tl;dr is unlikely to be fully accurate at this point. I don't think all the litigation is even finished yet.

Commies who worked on DE split and form different studios that all claim to be the true successors to DE. Except the main writer who is now a hobo or some shit.

Are you talking about this guy, Argo Tuulik?



He wasn't the main writer of Disco Elysium, but it is funny how he left ZA/UM and immediately got into some kind of new legal clusterfuck.

Elysium's lead writer Robert Kurvitz is supposedly working on a new project with investment from China, although who knows if that's going anywhere.

 

[Farm Hand]

I haven't played Disco Elysium (though I might one day) and hardly know anything about the ZA/UM controversy besides having the vague impression of commies getting what they deserve, but I see that there's been some recent big info dumps that this thread would want to know about.

Perhaps this has been posted in the thread already, but a couple of years ago, the YouTube channel People Make Games made this documentary about the ZA/UM controversy:

Now just a week ago, they released a sequel documentary:

And in response to this, one of the fired ZA/UM writers Dora Klindžić, who participated in the new documentary, made a giant Medium post with lots of screenshots to counter what she says is new defamation of her by ZA/UM in that final video:

https://medium.com/@dora.klindzic/i-blew-the-whistle-on-workplace-abuses-at-za-um-in-return-za-um-tried-to-defame-me-7ea1eda847e0

(Archive.is appears to be down right now)


Would I take these anti-ZA/UM accounts at their word? Not necessarily, when they appear to be fellow travelers at minimum, and I'm familiar with PMG having made an appallingly stupid video about practical simulation war games before. But it's a lot of material to chew on.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I haven't played Disco Elysium (though I might one day) and hardly know anything about the ZA/UM controversy besides having the vague impression of commies getting what they deserve, but I see that there's been some recent big info dumps that this thread would want to know about.

Perhaps this has been posted in the thread already, but a couple of years ago, the YouTube channel People Make Games made this documentary about the ZA/UM controversy:

Now just a week ago, they released a sequel documentary:

And in response to this, one of the fired ZA/UM writers Dora Klindžić, who participated in the new documentary, made a giant Medium post with lots of screenshots to counter what she says is new defamation of her by ZA/UM in that final video:

https://medium.com/@dora.klindzic/i-blew-the-whistle-on-workplace-abuses-at-za-um-in-return-za-um-tried-to-defame-me-7ea1eda847e0

(Archive.is appears to be down right now)
View attachment 7820387View attachment 7820380View attachment 7820385

Would I take these anti-ZA/UM accounts at their word? Not necessarily, when they appear to be fellow travelers at minimum, and I'm familiar with PMG having made an appallingly stupid video about practical simulation war games before. But it's a lot of material to chew on.

> Crunch.
> Boys club.
> HR complaints.

Lol the only thing stupider than having a company with commies, is having a company with women.

 

[30+GameOvers]

Nothing makes me happier than these hacks suffering, each in their own way

 

[2mm and 99 others]

I am afraid that wanting to join the 27 club or feeling burnt out and medically unfit to work is more or less a natural state of actual artists, also a lot of them need a lot of pressure to do their work, so it's about hardly measurable nuances, which are obscure to anyone outside.

- The double standards for promoting hugely unqualified members of the inner ''boy's club'' - apart from the fact that this is a typical trait of applied bolshevism with its ''working-class directors'', overbastardization with unqualified guys is also typical for companies that are circling the drain. Which sort of happened, so it can be safely assumed to be true. I mean, there was a time (or still is) their social media presentation seemed to be made either by a child or Sunday Friend, as there likely wasn't anyone better.

 

[Nick Obre]

watched the new video and all I got is that Dangerhair and "I'm constantly shitting"-face guy are histrionic and unprofessional.

I am afraid that wanting to join the 27 club or feeling burnt out and medically unfit to work is more or less a natural state of actual artists, also a lot of them need a lot of pressure to do their work

Absolutely. I'm reminded of the late Jim Shooter, Editor-in-Chief of Marvel from the late 70's to the late 80's, who was hated by "the talent" for sitting their asses down and making them do the fucking work.

Paraphrasing, but when he got the EIC job, his announcement memo read something like: "I know this is contrary to the company culture, but effective immediately you are to start producing GOOD COMICS"

Artists are little bitches and you need to pin them down to get anything done. They'll wail and complain the whole time, and paint you as a villain for eternity, but the work will be completed through no other means.

 

[Farm Hand]

And in response to this, one of the fired ZA/UM writers Dora Klindžić, who participated in the new documentary, made a giant Medium post with lots of screenshots to counter what she says is new defamation of her by ZA/UM in that final video:

https://medium.com/@dora.klindzic/i-blew-the-whistle-on-workplace-abuses-at-za-um-in-return-za-um-tried-to-defame-me-7ea1eda847e0

(Archive.is appears to be down right now)

Can't edit post, but here's the archive:

https://archive.is/VcRjI