Disco Elysium - Insane Drunken Cop Simulator RPG GotY 2019

I always just assumed that Disco Elysium was lightning in a bottle that wouldn’t get a sequel or follow up and didn’t need one either.

Between sequels made in current year being shit, and the creative team splitting, I don’t think I would want any more Disco Elysium or anything claiming to be a sequel.

I think that I had my fill, but that is just me
 
I always just assumed that Disco Elysium was lightning in a bottle that wouldn’t get a sequel or follow up and didn’t need one either.

Between sequels made in current year being shit, and the creative team splitting, I don’t think I would want any more Disco Elysium or anything claiming to be a sequel.

I think that I had my fill, but that is just me
Spiritual successors using the template to tell a different story verse is perfectly fine by me. Especially as I consider the base game overrated.
 
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I always just assumed that Disco Elysium was lightning in a bottle that wouldn’t get a sequel or follow up and didn’t need one either.

Between sequels made in current year being shit, and the creative team splitting, I don’t think I would want any more Disco Elysium or anything claiming to be a sequel.

I think that I had my fill, but that is just me
Personally I think games like Disco Elysium are one-offs, but the universe is too interesting to be left just like that.

Too bad the 'sequel' novel Sacred And Terrible Air quite literally blows up DE's world by the end of it, but thankfully it is is confined to Estonian and can be retconned if necessary.
 
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...or they can reframe it as an alternate storyline (the one of the book could be the one which begins with the Moralist game over in the game, the one where HDB boards the Coalition airship and is never seen again, and according to some fan theories, taking a tour with the DE variant of AirPinochet). That, or his sense of importance to the world is just overblown. Still I'd like to play or read something that connects the (many) dots between DE and the book.
 
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, the pale, what's beyond the pale, the origin of the pale, the moralintern and shit.
So, this isn't in the game, but we do actually know what the pale is, how it works and what the shivers/inland empire skill is from one of the designers.


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Crypto Conveyant Phenomena/CCP is information flowing backward in time. Magpies are pseudo-psychics who can use their creativity (inland empire) to decrypt said information (shivers) resulting in rapid progress of humanity faster than it theoretically should, stuff like ancient egyptians inventing the radio and ancient greeks inventing the automobile by literally stealing it from ford and guglielmo.

The pale is the paradox that results as a result of this. Its a void of thought and matter as a result of the fact that thoughts manifested into the world in form of technology via magpies no longer have any real source or origin, because they were stolen from a future that no longer exists as a direct result of them being stolen.

This is why the Phasmid says "[the Pale's] advent coincides with the arrival of the human mind."

Gary also mentions it and so does Noid, talking about one of the foreign nations stealing technology from the future.

The Pale is basically "nuclear" waste in form of literal nothingness produced from human "Magpies" intercepting information from the future to manifest concepts prematurely, thereby creating a literal nothingness because said things have no origin anymore, leaving a hole in the universe.

This is why the pale has no dimentions and cannot be travelled through without a pale latitude compressor, because it literally represents nonexistence, there's nothing to travel through.

Harry is a magpie and shivers/inland empire IS CCP in action. Its the collective thoughts of everyone from the city's future being interpreted by harry's fucked up mind as the spirit of the city talking back to him, this is why he can see into the future and discover that revachol is about to become a nuclear crater in 20 years and why he knows communism killed the mercenary ahead of time.

A lot of people don't like this lore, but idunno, I think its cool.
 
A lot of people don't like this lore, but idunno, I think its cool.
The concept sounds cool (though it is literal plot holes) but the whole thing is meaningless and adds a lot of convoluted gears to a setting with a lot of history as it is as well as a massive doom clock for the setting which makes the player actions meaningless in comparison.

I just thought Inland Empire was regular detective intuition.
 
The concept sounds cool (though it is literal plot holes) but the whole thing is meaningless and adds a lot of convoluted gears to a setting with a lot of history as it is as well as a massive doom clock for the setting which makes the player actions meaningless in comparison.

I just thought Inland Empire was regular detective intuition.
If your inland empire is high enough you start hallucinating that your tie is speaking to you (as in it becomes another character alongside the other voices) and you can literally tell the future with the body hanging from the tree. It may be partially intuition but its not just that, its a combination of intuition and excessive creativity, the latter of which is part of what makes magpies magpies.

As for the doomclock, I mean, now we're getting into more high concept philosophy of disco elysium, but you could argue the message is that humanity needs to stop blindly chasing progress for the sake of progress because it will end up destroying itself, since the pale is literally caused by chasing progress at all costs ahead of its time even when the literal fabric of universe tells you its a bad idea.
 
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If your inland empire is high enough you start hallucinating that your tie is speaking to you (as in it becomes another character alongside the other voices) and you can literally tell the future with the body hanging from the tree. It may be partially intuition but its not just that, its a combination of intuition and excessive creativity, the latter of which is part of what makes magpies magpies.

As for the doomclock, I mean, now we're getting into more high concept philosophy of disco elysium, but you could argue the message is that humanity needs to stop blindly chasing progress for the sake of progress because it will end up destroying itself, since the pale is literally caused by chasing progress at all costs ahead of its time even when the literal fabric of universe tells you its a bad idea.
Chasing progress for progress sake is one of the ideas that everyone like to talk about but almost always boils down to "I want my progress and not your progress". With leftists it's general hippie shit "we shouldn't advance our technology too fast, unless it's for things like healthcare, etc...", with right wingers it's "we shouldn't try to push a status quo that doesn't happen on its own". Basically it's a pointless idea, you can't revert progress and there is no agreement what is progress.
 
Chasing progress for progress sake is one of the ideas that everyone like to talk about but almost always boils down to "I want my progress and not your progress". With leftists it's general hippie shit "we shouldn't advance our technology too fast, unless it's for things like healthcare, etc...", with right wingers it's "we shouldn't try to push a status quo that doesn't happen on its own". Basically it's a pointless idea, you can't revert progress and there is no agreement what is progress.
Not exactly, since some 'cliques' of right wingers (part of the ones what aren't suitable for advertisers) reject the "myth of progress" altogether, i.e. the line doesn't constantly "go up" until it reaches some sort of utopia (something what leftists universally believe as dogma), and in fact does the opposite following the end of yet another cycle, falling levels of IQ, the fourth turning and various examples of the competency crisis, like airplane doors falling off mid-flight, nurses doing twerk tiktoks with unconscious patients, CPU's melting themselves due to 'jeet code, etc. being the usual examples to follow.
 
Not exactly, since some 'cliques' of right wingers (part of the ones what aren't suitable for advertisers) reject the "myth of progress" altogether, i.e. the line doesn't constantly "go up" until it reaches some sort of utopia (something what leftists universally believe as dogma), and in fact does the opposite following the end of yet another cycle, falling levels of IQ, the fourth turning and various examples of the competency crisis, like airplane doors falling off mid-flight, nurses doing twerk tiktoks with unconscious patients, CPU's melting themselves due to 'jeet code, etc. being the usual examples to follow.
It's still bullshit, whether you believe in some grand design where everything leads up to a point, or that you need to steer history so things will remain on a positive overall, you still have the majority case of advancement that some people will accept or reject purely by their own metrics.
 
I hate the pale lore. It's something that if removed from the game, wouldn't effect anything any. The fact that it is ingame adds to a hopelessness to everything since the pale is eventually going to consume everything.

Not to mention it's a poorly used allegory for Global warming. Let's pretend that global warming wasn't a tool that rich and powerful people were using to make money and to control people. All that does is warms up the world and for some reason only effects 3rd world countries by raising the temperature a few degrees. The pale destroys peoples' minds and can be visibly seen.
 
It's still bullshit, whether you believe in some grand design where everything leads up to a point, or that you need to steer history so things will remain on a positive overall, you still have the majority case of advancement that some people will accept or reject purely by their own metrics.
Does a major nuclear war wiping out all silicon production and confining everyone capable of reinventing it to a life in bunkers counts as advancement then? Doesn't really seem like a line-go-up'ism to me.
 
I hate the pale lore. It's something that if removed from the game, wouldn't effect anything any. The fact that it is ingame adds to a hopelessness to everything since the pale is eventually going to consume everything.

Not to mention it's a poorly used allegory for Global warming. Let's pretend that global warming wasn't a tool that rich and powerful people were using to make money and to control people. All that does is warms up the world and for some reason only effects 3rd world countries by raising the temperature a few degrees. The pale destroys peoples' minds and can be visibly seen.
Tbh the first thing it reminded me about (apart from slower Nothing from Neverending story which was an apparent inspiration, the HP Baxxter in the church directly quotes a line from its theme), was the world turning ugly, grey and bleak - once interesting places rich in details and history turning into dusty wastelands of asphalt, internationally uniform concrete blocks and miserable vegetation, essentially no-places that could entirely vanish overnight and nobody would even notice, except some people who'd lose their jobs.
But yes, the technological and societal stagnation, poverty and metaphorical lack of future imposed by Moralintern (overcomplicated structure of bureaucrats nobody had voted for) vs DE's Asians not giving a shit and literally exhausting all the ways to the future, looks a lot like EU's Green deal.
 
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That moment where you meet the Phasmid is one of the majestic things I’ve ever experienced in gaming.
It's actually incredible how "giant invisible insect appears up and talks to you" is the best five minutes of a GOTY. The music does a lot of work there, but the way the game uses the cryptozoologists to introduce the phasmid allows the player to immediately understand what's happening in the final scene while enhancing the sense of wonder when it happens. And I think that sense of wonder allows the interaction to have a life-affirming quality that would normally seem impossible to convey in a conversation with a stick insect.
 
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