Disco Elysium - Insane Drunken Cop Simulator RPG GotY 2019

[Nick Obre]

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Yeah, that's what this longform, dialogue-heavy, deeply personal, political, and psychological work needs, to be adapted to Tik Tok bite-sized chunks

Illustrations look good tho. Are they new or repurposed concept art?

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Got to appreciate how much the game developers are going through the stages of communism, from initial hard work putting good result, into balkanization.

 

[Get the rope Macaulay!]

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this is such a retarded idea, a good chunk of the sentences take longer than 15 seconds, and factor in every skill getting their own 15 seconds to speak their mind, there's no way to even have even the most simple conversation in under a minute. its also a game that really does take advantage of it being a computer title, you really do need all that screen space because of how huge the conversations get.

the game's script had more words than the entire Harry potter series or The Expanse series. its pretty much a game that requires your full attention for hours at a time, its not a weekend fun game, its like reading a novel. you're wasting a month playing this fucking thing.

 

[Xerxes IX]

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This is so bad I wonder if the studio is intentially butchering the game in this manner to make a pointless fart huffing "Capitalism le bad" statement

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

Just looks like a visual novel.
The inspiration for the game's writing style was twitter, so turning that into something like Ace Attorney interrogation sequences plus choice-making, eh, whatever. Probably functions.

Have to imagine it loses all discovery and exploration, but at least it probably wouldn't have stat-boosting clothing you throw on between every roll like a retard. Probably going to release and be forgotten about in a solid day or two.

 

[gay]

the Kickstarter for "Hopetown" is here, and it looks like slop and people hate it, they locked Twitter replies and are manually approving YouTube comments.

this game is made by Longdue which is one of two (the other being ZA/UM) black sheep of splinter groups due to the legal issues they're embroiled in.

Spoiler: legal drama synopsis.

Argo Tuulik (one of the OG writers, now working @ Summer Eternal) worked with Riaz Moola (millionaire investor) at the developer which would later become Longdue, Tuulik recognized that the people at Longdue were unoriginal visionless hacks of the highest degree and decided to fuck off and make his own game, Longdue has since gone after Tuulik for competing with their own game.



Tuulik's GoFundMe, which has since raised £108k for legal expenses and "keeping him alive", has a very verbose and one-sided explanation of what happened which paints Riaz Moola as a techbro millionaire trying to force his way into the indie gaming space by snatching up a few ex-ZA/UM members after shit went belly up so he can advertise his game as "being made by ex-Disco Elysium developers" and hail their project as the one true Disco Elysium successor all while trying to sabotage the games made by the other Disco devs, as a result of this people have completely written off Longdue because they're cut from the cloth as the people who screwed over Kurvitz & co at ZA/UM.

Spoiler: sheet of the "splinter groups" for reference.

i think "Disco Apostles" is a bit disingenuous considering it has like 4 people from DE working on it, with only one of them being a writer that joined Longdue on March 12th (Martin Luiga, who was previously Red Info LTD and a ZA/UM co-founder, who literally admitted he was poor as fuck and amicably left Red Info to join Longdue purely because they bought him out with a sign-on bonus) literally less than a week before the Kickstarter dropped (didn't stop them from plastering his name and involvement in the project everywhere, look everyone!! we got someone from ZA/UM!!), the others being a freelance editor on DE (Abena Jones), some outsourced Unity engine guy (Piotr Sobolewsk) and the narrator from the Final Cut (Lenval Brown), because of course they fucking had to get the narrator.

as you can tell from the writing in this concept art, it's all painfully millennial, why does this game look like Disco Elysium if it were made by people who refer to dogs as "doggos" and have coffee mugs that say "adulting is hard" you ask? well, look no further than the creative director.


of course this is what a spiritual successor to Disco Elysium needed, some neutered asshole who worked at Sweet Baby Inc and is best known for writing the abortion known as Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

bonus: Samantha Béart (Karlach's VA from BG3) apparently was approached by Longdue to voice a character and she told them to fuck off because she watched some Disco Elysium interview that explained how scummy they were which i thought was funny.


this got very spergy, my apologies. i have no hopes for any of these games but this is easily the worst of the bunch.

 

[Something Awful]

the Kickstarter for "Hopetown" is here, and it looks like slop and people hate it, they locked Twitter replies and are manually approving YouTube comments.

Was not aware of this. Went very quickly from "Oh!" to "Oh....".



Wow, congrats for SMASHING that goal of £25,000. That's enough to develop a game, right? JFC.



Journoscum says "yes". Are they still "alumni" if they left their alma mater a grotesque husk?



What's with those fugly glasses? A way to signal to the world that you're a soy-based life form? Everyone already knows, buddy.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Hopetown

More like Copetown for the idiots paying for it. The protagonist is a journo nepo baby, and of course the game goes on how journos are the real heroes, as if any of them would ever go to such a place. It would probably be the usual shite where the mining town would be full of mystery meat quirky characters that have nothing to do with mining and instead sell pot.

The stretch goals are pretty shit:

Double the goal for a guy who wrote music for a different genre.
Four times for shitting a short story.
Six times for MORE CHOICES in a game that already overpromises on those.
Ten times for a physical booklet. Wow.

Wow, congrats for SMASHING that goal of £25,000. That's enough to develop a game, right? JFC.

Kickstarter hasn't been about funding games for years now. It's mainly to show publishers that they are good investment.

 

[regalterry]

of course this is what a spiritual successor to Disco Elysium needed, some neutered asshole who worked at Sweet Baby Inc and is best known for writing the abortion known as Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

I wonder how fucked the other Disco Elysium clone, Rue Valley, is.

The devs appear to be predominantly Croats, and mostly male. From a cursory glance at their LinkedIn profiles, this appears to be the first gaming project for most of them, so there's not much to go on there.

In the profile pictures they look like actual humans, instead of liberals, but I'm still suspicious.

 

[Get the rope Macaulay!]

..

The stretch goals are pretty shit

the stretch goals are where they make then real game, its literally taught to keep the goal low so you can get press about "making the goal in minutes" and the stretch goals is where you show the real cost. i guarantee the real goal is at least half a million. by all accounts the first three stretch goals were going to happen no matter if the goal was hit or not. i heavily suspect because the stretch goals haven't entirely been revealed yet, that it stops right around half a million, which is where the budget was originally set.

in general you get more praise and newsworthy stories if your kickstarter is funded X amount of times over versus having a high goal and having to struggle your way towards it. Kickstarter has been around for a dozen years now and plenty of people know how to most efficiently work the system. this is also why they have perks/achievements for if you retweet or follow on social media and for number of backers and tons of other complete bullshit.

 

[gay]

I wonder how fucked the other Disco Elysium clone, Rue Valley, is.

The devs appear to be predominantly Croats, and mostly male. From a cursory glance at their LinkedIn profiles, this appears to be the first gaming project for most of them, so there's not much to go on there.

In the profile pictures they look like actual humans, instead of liberals, but I'm still suspicious.

i'm cautiously optimistic about this one because of presentation alone, plus i trust indie devs more to create interesting games than any studio formed by ex-AAA vets.

Disco Elysium was lightning in a bottle, even if the original team had access to the IP and were given carte blanche to do whatever they wanted i doubt they'd repeat the success anyway, the best we can hope for is that the oncoming slew of games that DE inspired are interesting in their own right rather than trying to skin walk as Disco Elysium 2 (like that Hopetown game is cynically aiming for).

 

[The Grognard]

Personal predictions on what the successors will be like:

Rue Valley will likely be at the very least, an interesting failure. A group of nobodies from the eastern bloc with no publisher and plenty of passion will inevitably result in some good stuff even if it's mostly surrounded by jank and missed opportunities.

Hopetown will be well-polished shit-lib crap and only ever appeal to whiny troons from the UK who still bitch about Thatcher and americans who still hold highly anglophile opinions on how they do social democracy better or something. Fully expecting this being the flavor of the month by the incredibly irrelevant class of games journalism.

XXX Nightshift has potential and I'm carefully looking forward to how it progresses.

Project [C4] either will be a paint-by-the-numbers game or surprisingly good; because while the corpos who stole the company are unpleasant, they at least have an understanding of what the market wants and respond to the demand by creating things that actually stand out from the masses.

Red Info's project will either be in eternal development hell or come out with extremely little fanfare but at the very least, be actually communist in spirit compared to the shitlibs that only do it out of fuckyoudadism. Kurwitz also seems like the most capable writer out of the whole lot anyways so let's see who he can work with and if he can a budget for it.

Summer Eternal will likely get nothing done because they seem like the sorts of militants who spend more time arguing each other about inane crap than getting any real work done.

 

[White_N]

Since we're talking about DE knock-offs, here is a Ukrainian one.
Coming out this year, and my only hope is that it's not boringly mediocre.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2362070/Hollow_Home/

 

[Max Weber]

..

the stretch goals are where they make then real game, its literally taught to keep the goal low so you can get press about "making the goal in minutes" and the stretch goals is where you show the real cost. i guarantee the real goal is at least half a million. by all accounts the first three stretch goals were going to happen no matter if the goal was hit or not. i heavily suspect because the stretch goals haven't entirely been revealed yet, that it stops right around half a million, which is where the budget was originally set.

in general you get more praise and newsworthy stories if your kickstarter is funded X amount of times over versus having a high goal and having to struggle your way towards it. Kickstarter has been around for a dozen years now and plenty of people know how to most efficiently work the system. this is also why they have perks/achievements for if you retweet or follow on social media and for number of backers and tons of other complete bullshit.

There's also the fact that if the goal is not hit, Kickstarter refunds everyone and you get nothing. So you really want to set the goal as low as you reasonably can to get at least some funding.

 

[2mm and 99 others]

It would probably be the usual shite where the mining town would be full of mystery meat quirky characters that have nothing to do with mining and instead sell pot.

I know authors who don't know shit about mining but write about mining towns anyway are a widespread thing, but did you have the visual novel Scarlet Hollow on your mind?
(On such places, you just aren't gonna get a plant guy's special cake with perfect coffee in a hipster café as if it was next to an art college, ffs. A more realistic experience is ending up at local gas station, maybe getting your coffee if the person in charge of the machine bothered to wake up and come to work, and listen to rambles of a drunk wreck of former miner NPC who sits on a barrel 24/7 apparently.)

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I know authors who don't know shit about mining but write about mining towns anyway are a widespread thing, but did you have the visual novel Scarlet Hollow on your mind?
(On such places, you just aren't gonna get a plant guy's special cake with perfect coffee in a hipster café as if it was next to an art college, ffs. A more realistic experience is ending up at local gas station, maybe getting your coffee if the person in charge of the machine bothered to wake up and come to work, and listen to rambles of a drunk wreck of former miner NPC who sits on a barrel 24/7 apparently.)

Nah, I thought of Life is Strange with the "empath" protagonist

Also Scarlet Hollow looks like shit. Not surprising but a shame since Slay was pretty good even if it had most of its body stuck up its own ass.

 

[gay]

recently there was a leak about Locust City: An Elysium Story (Project X7), an internal sequel where you play as Cuno & Cunoesse that was scrapped.

a vertical slice of the game/presentation by the devs shown to shareholders was uploaded by Jamrock Hobo (prominent DE content creator) but it was DMCA'd by ZA/UM, i saved the video here.

Spoiler: concept art

Spoiler: maps/rooms

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

I'm not hopeful about DE knockoffs because it seems like they're trying to imitate the game without understanding what made it work.

The roll system was great because there's 70,000 avenues to progress the game towards its conclusion, so failing something necessarily meant that there was another way still open, and that the failure might even open a new one or incentivize you to go look for another avenue. This was baked into their being so many different skills, such that the player couldn't meaningfully be good enough to avoid failing some of the time. This also makes different playthroughs, even with identical stats, have the opportunity to veer wildly. Taking this system, but expecting the player to succeed most of the time in their given 'specialty' is making it like any other RPG, just with more steps.

The personalities-talking thing was a way to characterize Henry, but it isn't in and of itself interesting. I've seen this one lifted a lot, and I just roll my eyes at it.

The art style was cool, but it complemented the story. Ultimately the story was about finding purpose in an ambivalent, terminally-declining world and of the false-promises that political ideologies offer to this end, whose dreary seaside locale benefitted the gouache vibe and color palette. Just going for that look, again, but getting the circumstances wrong makes it look like you were just copying someone else's homework.

Most importantly, while the lead story of DE could be written by anyone with some chops, the setting and worldbuilding and secondary characters like Joyce or Evrart were clearly written by someone with a passion for postwar European history and politics... who also happened to have experience and perspective. I am personally of the opinion that games-writers in the modern era are some of the most sheltered, raised-by-the-internet internet-is-reality types on the planet, and I think it's a poor stock to make a narrative of any worth out of. Which means that lack of experience and grit is going to come through, and the finished product is going to taste like a whole lot of plastic.

 

[Chapalapachapa]

Samantha Béart (Karlach's VA from BG3) apparently was approached by Longdue to voice a character and she told them to fuck off because she watched some Disco Elysium interview that explained how scummy they were which i thought was funny.

repace every single game voice actor with AI

 

[IrishGuy088]

I'm not hopeful about DE knockoffs because it seems like they're trying to imitate the game without understanding what made it work.

Implying Disco Elysium even worked. It was okay but why it gets the accolades it does is totally lost on me. It is barely even a video game.