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Disco Elysium - An ambitious retro-futuristic dialogue/personality-driven CRPG

More_Badass

More_Badass

Member
Oct 25, 2017
23,631

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Been following this game for quite a while, and it just might be my most anticipated indie game post-Rain World. Most exciting is its approach to dialogue and "combat". Rather than traditional fights, you have confrontations. A hybrid of interactive fiction and RPG skill checks with gameplay. Smaller-scale, more intimate scenarios where the pace of the scenario is dependent on your inventory and actions and how you talk and react. Skills, weapons, mentality, appearance, and so on all have an effect. Your skills are equal parts physical and mental, and the developers want each to have effects both positive and negative; for example. having high Intellect makes your character overly confident, vulnerable to flattery, and lost in the details and minutiae of the world (which results in longer more detailed flavor text and descriptions), while having a low Intellect makes you dim, superstitious, and often making wrong assumptions.

http://zaumstudio.com/
Steam | Humble
Disco Elysium is a groundbreaking blend of hardboiled cop show and isometric RPG. Solve a massive, open ended case in a unique urban fantasy setting. Kick in doors, interrogate suspects, or just get lost exploring the gorgeously rendered city of Revachol and unraveling its mysteries. Tough choices need to be made. What kind of cop you are — is up to you.

- A massive, open-ended case you can solve however you choose.
- An utterly unique urban fantasy setting where bell-bottoms meet muzzle-loaders.
- Set-piece combat sequences you can avoid or dive into at your peril.
- Develop your own cop persona with 24 colourful skills.
- Ditch your cop uniform for real disco threads to impress, intimidate, or seduce.
- An inventory for your thoughts where you can research clues and then put them to use in the game.
- Original score by the rock'n'roll band British Sea Power.
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http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=10564
No Truce with the Furies is not some piece of forgettable East European shovelware. It is a work of art in progress, by a movement, of writers, musicians, artists, and programmers, at the same time madly ambitious and wildly sprawling, and invested with tight, coherent systems, an equally tight, coherent aesthetic vision, and an elegant and parsimonious core interaction design that just might suffice to keep the wild outgrowths of its dialogue trees within the realm of the achievable. Disco dancing on the ragged edge between madness and sanity, the possible and the impossible, it is at once a re-invention and a return to the roots of the genre.
...If it ever is completed, even as a barely-playable bug-ridden mess in the vein of Troika in its prime, it will be a truer spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment than any game advertised as such, a moment of beautiful lunacy hearkening to simpler days when people were able and willing to take real creative risks. I want to, nay, dare to believe.
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https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/10/01/disco-elysium-preview-egx-2018/
It's possible, and I know it is because I played with three different builds, to have entirely different playthroughs, and follow entirely different routes through the game. A character with more Fysique will have more punching solutions to problems, for example. And the more points you put into any of these skills the more likely it is that you won't be able to ignore those thoughts when they arise. They become compulsions. They become just who you are.
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This game has layers. Peel another one back and find more: when I played as a more imaginative detective I saw only that the bar's menu board had been wiped clean after MONDAY; when I played as an intellectual I noticed details about the handwriting. I found a girl outside a book shop and she told me it was cursed. Her mother said she was lying. I tried to break through a mysterious locked door in the back room, but could not. Neither could I persuade the mother to open it. That door consumes my thoughts. I spoke to two old men playing boules in a crater left over from an old war they'd fought in. I roundhouse kicked a giant man. I failed to assert dominance over a horrible child who was high on drugs and throwing stones at a body
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https://www.pcgamer.com/disco-elysium-is-shaping-up-to-be-the-most-original-rpg-of-the-year/
It's one of the most interesting RPGs I've played in ages, because it uses old fashioned systems to simulate social situations to a level of detail I'm not used to in games. I left the building I woke up in and asked an NPC for directions. In the middle of a polite conversation one of my traits rolled an impromptu perception check and informed me that the woman was black. It's a brilliant demonstration of implicit bias, and it shows how the personality system can explore important themes. If the rest of the game can keep this level of inventiveness going for its duration, it's going to be quite special.
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https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018...lute-blast-thanks-to-16-surprising-new-games/
Giving any game or demo a PAX West "best of show" designation is pretty misleading, especially when many of this expo's best games have debuted at previous events. (Quite a few good PAX West games, including Mega Man 11 and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, already made our E3 2018 list, for example; retreading that ground would be redundant.) But if you push me to pick a personal PAX West favorite, in terms of newness and surprise, that honor indisputably goes to Disco Elysium.

Do not mistake this dialogue-driven RPG for an interactive novel. This top-down point-and-click adventure, made by a small studio out of London, includes puzzles and inventory-driven mechanics that you might expect in a LucasArts classic. The difference here is the sheer breadth of branching dialogue paths and optional conversations packed into this early-2019 PC adventure game—not to mention the hilariously dark and brutal script driving its horror-loving humor forward.
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spam musubi

spam musubi

Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,383
The vocalist of Sikth, Mikee Goodman is doing the narrator's voice, and he's directing all the voice acting. Fun fact.
 
Brashnir

Brashnir

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,236
Yeah this game looks cool. Not sure it'll be my cup of tea exactly, but it's definitely on my radar.
 
Soph

Soph

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,503
Been following this project for a while on the Codex, looks very promising!
 
MaskedNdi

MaskedNdi

Member
Oct 25, 2017
294
This looks incredible! I love RPGs that focus heavily on social skills; those kinds of interactions are incredibly interesting from a gameplay perspective. I'm also a huge sucker for anything that involves detective work and mysteries. Really appreciate you spotlighting games like this! I probably never would have found it on my own.
 
godofcookery

godofcookery

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
949
That teaser trailer has one of the nicest day night cycles i have seen in a game of this type. Indie or not.
 

Deleted member 873

User requested account closure
Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,463
This is incredible. Reading in games is something that I love. Story heavy, a bunch of text, but not a book. Your decisions matter, or at least you control the character.

I even love hidden lore like Kingdom Hearts or even Breath of the Wild. More games should have text!
 
Pancoar

Pancoar

The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
1,551
"No Read it Again" I admit I had to do a double take. Never heard of this game, but now I have and I'm looking forward to it, seems interesting and right up my alley.
 
Arulan

Arulan

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,571
Thanks for the thread More_Badass. This is one of my most anticipated games. If they come anywhere close to their ambitions towards dialogue and reactivity design, it'll be something really special.
 
Samimista

Samimista

Member
Oct 25, 2017
961
Wow, that art is absolutely breathtaking. I never heard of No Truce until now, but count me in; I appreciate what they're going for with the variety in choices and etc.
 
Li Kao

Li Kao

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,734
Art is stunning and it seems the game has some pretty original mechanics too. I didn't know I couldn't wait for it but I do now.

That being said and with full awareness that this is nitpicking, the teaser, that maybe is not representative of the final game, shows npc that don't seem to move and live their life as time goes by. So I get that the teaser is here to show the great day and night cycle and that the rest is secondary. And I admit to relatively disliking npc with occupations where you always waste more or less time just looking for them. But here it's jarring. Hey, I said I was nitpicking.
 
Viale

Viale

▲ Legend ▲
Member
Oct 25, 2017
11,620
Oooh, I'm always interested in games with more social combat takes. Is there any ETA besides 2018 by chance?
 
OP
OP
More_Badass

More_Badass

Member
Oct 25, 2017
23,631
Li Kao said:
Art is stunning and it seems the game has some pretty original mechanics too. I didn't know I couldn't wait for it but I do now.

That being said and with full awareness that this is nitpicking, the teaser, that maybe is not representative of the final game, shows npc that don't seem to move and live their life as time goes by. So I get that the teaser is here to show the great day and night cycle and that the rest is secondary. And I admit to relatively disliking npc with occupations where you always waste more or less time just looking for them. But here it's jarring. Hey, I said I was nitpicking.
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Here's some PAX 2017 gameplay:
 
dgrdsv

dgrdsv

Member
Oct 25, 2017
11,893
More_Badass Hey man, just wanted to say that I've regularly lurked Toma's monthly indie threads as this was my primary source at finding indie games worthy of attention. Hopefully you both will continue making them here, it was a great source of info.
 
Oreiller

Oreiller

Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,865
I really hope this game delivers, it's probably the upcoming CRPG I'm the most excited for.
 
King_Moc

King_Moc

Member
Oct 25, 2017
4,129
I played half an hour of this at EGX and really enjoyed it. It was pretty well written, has a good sense of humour and the style of it is excellent. I didn't really play enough to get a handle on what it was about, but you seem to be playing as an alcoholic detective who can't remember the last few days and is having to pretend to a less than impressed police force that he's competent.

It also has one of my favourite bands, British Sea Power, doing the soundtrack, which is fairly brilliant.
 
Radishhead

Radishhead

Member
Oct 30, 2017
1,568
I actually did read the title wrong the first time, so that made me laugh. This game looks super interesting, I haven't heard of it until now. Love the art style.
 
OP
OP
More_Badass

More_Badass

Member
Oct 25, 2017
23,631
King_Moc said:
I played half an hour of this at EGX and really enjoyed it. It was pretty well written, has a good sense of humour and the style of it is excellent. I didn't really play enough to get a handle on what it was about, but you seem to be playing as an alcoholic detective who can't remember the last few days and is having to pretend to a less than impressed police force that he's competent.

It also has one of my favourite bands, British Sea Power, doing the soundtrack, which is fairly brilliant.
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That's good to hear. Any other thoughts?
 
orthodoxy1095

orthodoxy1095

Banned
Oct 28, 2017
1,453
I've looked at this game so many times, and I still read that title the wrong way. I don't think I'm ever going to get over it.
 
AbbaZabba

AbbaZabba

Banned
Oct 28, 2017
628
Your excellent title got me to open the thread and now I am actually interested. Nice work OP.
 
Spoder

Spoder

Member
Oct 24, 2017
234
A great story is important for this game imo, since the majority of playtime is going to be about reading. I hope they get it right.
 
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