9/20/2023 0 Comments Best skills disco elysiumThey’re less about dungeon crawling and combat, and more about creating interesting narrative problems that the player characters can then use their skills to solve in a creative, bespoke fashion that doesn’t involve a dozen rounds of swinging a sword. That might seem like a bit of an odd thing to say seeing as how Baldur’s Gate adapted the 2nd edition D&D rules fairly faithfully more than two decades ago, but RPGs have moved on a little since then. Yes, the game is text-heavy, but that’s because Disco Elysium is actually the strongest attempt yet to translate the concept of an actual pen-and-paper RPG into a videogame format that I’ve ever seen, and it works wonderfully well. I had a strong suspicion that that’s where Disco Elysium was heading prior to release and was somewhat worried that it’d end up being little more than a glorified text adventure 2, but fortunately that’s not the case. This involves a lot of walking around and talking to people - in fact, that’s pretty much all you do, as even interactions with inanimate objects and action scenes like jumping up to a raised balcony are conducted via the game’s dialogue system. Memory loss or no, you’re still a cop, and you have a case to solve: a man has been lynched just outside the hotel where you’re staying, and the larger part of Disco Elysium is about your journey as you figure out how and why he was killed. It’s exactly the kind of place where you can believe that fifty years of pain and anger would bubble over and they’d start killing outsiders who they see as responsible for their predicament. The architecture is a mix of run-down shacks, slum tenements and ruined buildings still left over from a revolution that took place fifty years previously the “civilized” nations of this fictional world came together to crush the revolution in its infancy before it threatened their precious capital, and Martinaise never recovered. The district - Martinaise - is a particularly deprived area of the city, filled with people who have been betrayed by the system, and they’ve all got painful stories to tell. The game takes place solely within a single district of the city of Revachol, and while there’s plenty of locations within this district to explore you can never move outside of it. It’s a much smaller, much more personal story full of messy human fuckups. The relative mundanity of it sets the scene, and the stakes: Disco Elysium isn’t going to be some world-spanning adventure culminating in a final battle between the forces of good and evil. It’s the most mundane explanation possible, and while you can discover the personal story of how he wound up in the hotel in the first place there’s not really any bigger mystery behind it he just overcommitted to the tortured genius cop archetype by becoming so much of an alcoholic he lost his memory. Disco Elysium also makes use of it, but it does so in a way that almost makes me think the game is taking the piss out of its predecessors: your detective partied way too hard the previous night, got absolutely blackout drunk and woke up in his hotel room the next morning unable to remember anything but the most fleeting details of his past life. This is a tired mechanic that’s still very beloved of narrative RPGs, because it lets players define their character while giving them a built in Mysterious Backstory of uncovering who they were before the amnesia struck. It knows the player is probably going to have expectations on how it’s going to work based on their previous experience of the genre, which is why it immediately sets out to subvert them.Ĭase in point: the amnesia. Planescape is nearly 20 years old now and was unnecessarily constrained by the relative infancy of the story-driven CRPG, while Disco Elysium is a game that’s fully aware of what it is and where it’s coming from. If anything, though, that description is hugely underselling what Disco Elysium is trying to do. Because of these themes - and not least because of the amnesia - it has been described as a successor to Planescape: Torment, which is one of the most powerful curses in gaming 1. Disco Elysium is a text-heavy narrative RPG in which you play a cop with amnesia trying to solve a murder case in a sci-fi city.
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