Since my team also made a story driven game using Articy that far less complex than Disco Elysium, but still complex. After we done it I can say for sure that whoever written Disco Elysium is trully insane, in a good way. While Articy is a good tool it's have own set of problems specifically awful performance on huge projects and I can't even imagine how developers of Disco Elysium managed to accompish it.
So I pretty sure Disco Elysium isn't just masterpiece of storytelling and writing, but also insane technical achievement of whoever managed to get it all working together using tools they had. Even on a project of much smaller scale getting it all debugged, loop-free and free of tons of logical errors is very hard. Knowing how much variables Disco Elysium have I truly believe developers are all geniuses.
PS: It's just everyone always wonder at how cool and complex modern rendering is or performance in game with millions of objects, but very few people understand how hard is to create story-driven game if there is more than 10 variables and not just int skill checks.
To quote Ben Yahtzee Croshaws review[0] from back then:
“For once, this is a game that claims that "every action has consequences" and actually means a consequence more significant than a character maybe wearing a different hat. For example, although the hub-based mission system lets you do the operations in any order, during the one I chose to do last, an informant mentioned the previous operations I'd completed in conversation. "Fuck", I said, "this game's just showing off now." So I immediately became an aggressive ponce and slammed his head into a desk. After which, there was more security in my next mission because the informant went crying to his big brother or something.”
With that said, I agree, the dialogue choices and "consequences" blew away everything else in the genre. In that sense, it felt like it better captured the spirit of the original Deus Ex over even its spiritual successor, Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
At the end of the first mission in Alpha Protocol, you confront a terrorist, and can choose to either kill him or let him go. If you let him go, he becomes a contact that you can call upon in later points of the game. He might give you information, assist on a mission, etc. It has a real payoff for keeping him alive.
In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, you are also confronted with a terrorist at the end of the first mission, and can decide to kill him or spare him. If you decide to spare him, he shows up in an alley later in the game and...gives you some money. That's it.
DE:HR was the far more polished game, overall, but it didn't understand "consequences" very well.
It's not much of a "game"... which is fine with me, because I'm not much of a gamer.
When I'm done I may go try Disco Elysium again. I tried once before, and got myself to an ending very, very quickly -- one that my friend had no idea was even an option.
I am pretty sure one could implement a mechanized, exhaustive checks for this kind of issues (well, at least the game-breaking soft locks) but no-one ever cared so far (:
Start by expanding the Search Dialogs section and type in a search term, then hit Search. Then click on one of the numeric results. Nothing will happen, but if you now expand the Build Conversation section, this will have filled a Conversation ID onto the appropriate box. Or you can input an arbitrary conversation ID into the Build Conversation / Conversation ID box (kelseyfrog posted some good ones).
Either way, if you now click Build Graph, you will get a conversation graph on the right. Red nodes are you speaking, or the voices in your head speaking to you. Yellow nodes are other people speaking (your non skill based voices, like Ancient Reptilian Brain, are also yellow). Blue and purple nodes are flow control (setting and reading variables, skill checks, jumping to other nodes). You can zoom into the graph and click the nodes - for red and yellow nodes, this displays the conversation text in the left sidebar, and lets you listen to the audio.
The graphs don't show actual skill check difficulties, just the results of them being read, and don't seem to show health/morale damage or items being gained/lost.
Quite a remarkable tool, despite the UI.
> Disco Elysium is a 2019 role-playing video game developed and published by ZA/UM.
For a more general description of the game: you are a detective, you must solve the case, and your fractured psyche will not let you do it alone.
DE is not a game for everyone. It's a point-and-click adventure game that feels like it is intentionally designed to be obscure and difficult to follow. The game is forcing you to role play as a alcoholic detective who woke up after a bender and has no clue what is going on. You the player are just as clueless about the world as the character you're controlling is.
FWIW, I completed the game four times, and it was only on the fourth play through that I really felt like I understood how to play the game. Not just from a mechanical perspective, but also a how to role play as an alcoholic-detective-who has-no-clue-what's-going-on. IME, the game only truly makes sense when you play the game as Harry would.
There's a point where Kim tells Harry that he's probably a phenomenal detective, as he was able to close an absurd number of cases. And to get the best experience from the game, you have to match Harry's true level of authenticity, intelligence, openness, and assertiveness. You can finish the game as Hobocop, Superstar Cop, or Detective Costeau, and you can blame all the world's problems on communism and you'll solve the mystery, but you won't have the full experience.
On the first playthrough when I woke up with amnesia, I simply played a cop with amnesia in all of my responses. It was goofy, I annoyed Kim for fun, I beat the game, etc.
On the second playthrough, I chose all of the dialogue options that honestly explained how the character became an alcoholic. It changed the vibe of the whole game to somber, and I was fascinated that the relationship with Kim felt different. It also felt natural to explore all of the lore and sidequests of the game involving the pale in this mood.
And then I went on a completionist binge and found some great social commentary in the "high-net-worth individual" sections.
the dialog, trees, and story were the game, everything else was kinda clunky
Perhaps I'll look into it again in a few years time, when I finally finish Factorio.
The political history, nature of reality and shape of the world, even things about how computers ("radiocomputers") work are all fascinating to me. It's a shame what happened to the studio. There deserve to be more stories told in that universe.
And there's an extremely funny winking self-reference in the game:
https://fayde.co.uk/dialojue/4600609
For context: ZA/UM was, for a time, called Fortress Occident.
Hah! I've spent some time reading trivia about the game recently, but I hadn't come across this. That makes a lot of sense.
Its one of the few direct hints you get to HDB's backstory before the literal last scene, which can actually give you actionable insight in a couple scenes IIRC.
A preposterously complex dialogue web for a weird throwaway conversation so few would ever come across. Love this game.
---
Problem
People think Communism was some crazy idea that had its comeuppance 40 years ago. A fever that shook the world, never to return again. They were right. Until he woke up today – a spiritual corpse responsive only to the call of Commodore Red, prostitutes, and Kras Mazov. For him, Communism is still a thing. He will single-handedly raise the Commune of '02 from the oceanic trench where it has been resting, covered in ghosts and seaweed! He is the Big Communism Builder. Come, witness his attempt to rebuild Communism in the year '51!
Solution
0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself sad. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov fucked him over personally with his socio-economic theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth. Instead of building Communism, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world.
then again, it feels wonderfully apt that it is on some random ip
Alas, once the game gets going I found Disco Elysium way too preachy and it completely lost me. Then I saw that it was scripted in part by the guys in el chapo trap house, which I find insufferable and it all made sense. I really really wish they had done away with all the political stuff, it could have been so good.
And in Disco Elysium (in least in my playthrough and my impression) everyone gets criticized equally at some point, even though the writers are nostalgic communist. But it doesn't feel to me like blatant propaganda.
The union workers are depicted as useful idiots for corrupt scumbags at best and parasites at worst, communists as delusional losers, the moralintern as ultimately functional, yet brutally oppressive. The script does very clearly come from a left-wing side of things, but I feel it shows the most when it comes to leftist ideologies which are brutally criticized.
Funny enough, one of the most liked characters is the unfettered capitalist,which is depicted as far more humane than the general ideologue in the game.
I must assume that you disagree with some or all of this?
Disco's world is an amazing melting pot of ideologies, history and clashes of those.
Not sure how someone could create a world like the one in Disco Elysium without having some kind of political ideology or why anyone would want them to be fixated on moderating themselves to the point of killing any sense of individuality in the work. It'd be like checking out the new Mel Gibson film and being annoyed that it comes across as having a conservative Catholic ideology.
they would be considered "moralists" on the DE scale of politics
>It'd be like checking out the new Mel Gibson film and being annoyed that it comes across as having a conservative Catholic ideology
Yes, but I know Mel is a catholic, I knew nothing of ZA/UM beforehand, I wonder if all of its spiritual successors will be tainted in the same way, if so I'll know for the future that their games aren't for me.
I might miss something, but my recollection is that the setting itself is a post-communist revolutionary ruin. Ruin in many ways, we see literal ruins as a visual setting, I don't think there is any piece of building that's intact, and the people are chewed out as well, and often full of some kind of negativity. Many of the game's political discussions flew over my head, but never once have I felt that whatever I'm shown is endorsed in any way, or that any system, like communism, is a good idea. My gathering was that systems usually just grind down the individual, and so, participation is questionable, and value is coming from caring for one another, in a personal way.
I wonder if it's perhaps the requirement that I actively engage in activities that I would ideologically object to in reality, for the sake of someone else's narrative, but that also seems spurious as I have no real issue with participating in the mass-murders of titles like Grand Theft Auto...DE just rubbed me the wrong way, even if some of the mechanisms were intriguing, maybe it's the smugness oozing from it which again brings us back to Mieville.
I guess I just didn't like DE and I have trouble reconciling that with the expectation that I would like it...because it very much seems like something I would like.
Wouldn't say it endorses it so much as dreams of it (or maybe longs for something like the hope it provided in the past when the ideas were new), I get that that's a very muddy perspective though.
