I’ve been playing Disco Elysium for a few months, a few hours here and there on weekends.
It’s so interesting. I don’t usually play games that are so clearly based on tabletop RPGs.
There are obvious rolls, but also lots of passive rolls that happen behind the proverbial GM screen you might not notice if you’re not used to TTRPGs.
There are also clever ways to “no, but” after failed rolls. Situations where a game master would just want to railroad the players into success, for the benefit of the narrative. Having been in that position, I respect the way this is pulled off.
I also enjoy the options for doing completely unhinged things. Obviously counterproductive things that may bring up a “you can certainly try” or a “sure, why not?” at the table.
In terms of accessibility the interface text gets pretty big, the highlighting for points of interests isn’t bad at all and the voiceover for speech is very nice, even if a lot of text ends up not being read.
This is essentially a point and click game, so I ended up having to buy a vertical mouse for it.
Overall, it’s been a great experience. I’m into it.
God, I love Disco Elysium so much. For me it’s the best game of all time. It’s funny you single out what you call DM railroading, because it was one thing that was talked about a lot around the release, but they called it a “fail-forward” design philosophy. And it’s so important to the game because failure is such a major theme of the game, and trying and failing checks is a big part of that. That’s why there are several red checks right at the start of the game that actually have advantageous outcomes on failure - to teach you that trying and failing is okay. A lot of my favourite moments in the game comes from failed checks.
And the same goes for all those “wacky” dialogue options. A lot of people miss out on so much because they are afraid to “sound crazy”, because we have been conditioned by every other RPG that picking stupid options leads to being punished. Buy Disco doesn’t really work like that, it’s one of the least punishing games ever in that sense. You’re more often than not rewarded for picking those dialogues. There is even a loading screen tooltip encouraging them.
Anyway sorry my latent hyperfixation got awakened and I’m ranting…
I’ve been playing Disco Elysium for a few months, a few hours here and there on weekends.
It’s so interesting. I don’t usually play games that are so clearly based on tabletop RPGs.
There are obvious rolls, but also lots of passive rolls that happen behind the proverbial GM screen you might not notice if you’re not used to TTRPGs.
There are also clever ways to “no, but” after failed rolls. Situations where a game master would just want to railroad the players into success, for the benefit of the narrative. Having been in that position, I respect the way this is pulled off.
I also enjoy the options for doing completely unhinged things. Obviously counterproductive things that may bring up a “you can certainly try” or a “sure, why not?” at the table.
In terms of accessibility the interface text gets pretty big, the highlighting for points of interests isn’t bad at all and the voiceover for speech is very nice, even if a lot of text ends up not being read.
This is essentially a point and click game, so I ended up having to buy a vertical mouse for it.
Overall, it’s been a great experience. I’m into it.
God, I love Disco Elysium so much. For me it’s the best game of all time. It’s funny you single out what you call DM railroading, because it was one thing that was talked about a lot around the release, but they called it a “fail-forward” design philosophy. And it’s so important to the game because failure is such a major theme of the game, and trying and failing checks is a big part of that. That’s why there are several red checks right at the start of the game that actually have advantageous outcomes on failure - to teach you that trying and failing is okay. A lot of my favourite moments in the game comes from failed checks.
And the same goes for all those “wacky” dialogue options. A lot of people miss out on so much because they are afraid to “sound crazy”, because we have been conditioned by every other RPG that picking stupid options leads to being punished. Buy Disco doesn’t really work like that, it’s one of the least punishing games ever in that sense. You’re more often than not rewarded for picking those dialogues. There is even a loading screen tooltip encouraging them.
Anyway sorry my latent hyperfixation got awakened and I’m ranting…
The game has a really vocal fan base, I love it!
Making failure fun is one of the hardest things to learn when running games and it’s super understood that they managed to do it in this format.