Disco Elysium: The Final Cut

[surreal]

There's a lawsuit in progress, though, we'll see how it turns out in the long run.

There's a really deep dive into all the mess here if anyone is interested:

[Mister Six]

Cheers, I've heard of this but I think it would just really bum me out so I'm deliberately avoiding it!

[Schlippy]

From what I remember there's a really wierd bias in that video, they conflate the vultures coming in with the leads being bad at their jobs and basically having no idea how to run a business. The two things are separate, you can be a shit boss who's not got their eye on the big picture and who treats their staff badly, and venture capital vultures can be unutterable bastards who deliberately stole the company from the founders using underhanded techniques; the latter isn't the fault of the former, necessarily, but that's how PMG present it. Been a while since I watched it and fucked if I'm sitting through two and a half hours again to find out tho.

Edit: giving it two seconds thought this is most likely the result of the vultures wanting editorial veto for participating and refusing to allow anything that makes them look too amoral / cuntish, but still.

[Thursday]

Yeah it annoyed me really. No doubt Kurvitz seems quite unpleasant, is a terrible boss, built a cult of personality around himself, but that's nowhere near the same as financial crimes, or operating in grey areas to steal from people. It's not even the same as workplace abuse and misogyny stories that were coming out around the same time from Activision Blizzard or Ubisoft, but it implicitly get's put into the same area as those.

I like Chris Bratt, but I think he's a well-meaning but very naive liberal, that got played by some truly despicable people into presenting the whole mess as "well both sides are bad!" The video is excellently researched as well, but the presentation and editing undermines that. The video get's praised to the skies, and there is a lot of good about it, but it's partly just that it blew people's minds to see Games Journalism that involved actual on the ground research.

You'll notice in the comments of the video lots of people saying things like "I got the world most embarrassing centrist achievement and I'm proud" which I think says it all really.

[Schlippy]

This looks like the final nail in the coffin:

https://videogames.si.com/news/disco-elysium-dev-zaum-layoffs-last-writer-speaks-out

Quite the interview, fucking hell.

[bgmnts]

Capitalism rules.

[Mister Six]

Infra-materialism your way out of THIS.

[Dr M1nx PhD]

Said principal writer, Dora Klindžić, agreed to speak to us on the record as well. She joined ZA/UM in 2022, which she likened to "being born into Yugoslavia in the '90s: you've just missed the party and now all you get is the bloodshed."

I genuinely laughed at that. Fucking hell indeed.

[Memorex MP3]

This looks like the final nail in the coffin:

https://videogames.si.com/news/disco-elysium-dev-zaum-layoffs-last-writer-speaks-out

Quite the interview, fucking hell.

Wasn't Argo Tuulik the guy who was ultimately most damning of the trio that got sacked? With an interview like this one he's really gonna have to explain himself from the doc last year.

Probably just a bit of a useful idiot who bought into the company narrative because his life was probably somewhat at their mercy wrt visa status and whatnot.

[Thursday]

I wouldn't hold it against Argo, as he seemed genuinely quite devastated with how everything turned out and wasn't wishing for it.

Stumbled across this, which I think is a decent critique of the PMG video if anyone is interested https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDtfcknELe0&ab_channel=stushi

[Memorex MP3]

Wasn't Argo Tuulik the guy who was ultimately most damning of the trio that got sacked? With an interview like this one he's really gonna have to explain himself from the doc last year.

Probably just a bit of a useful idiot who bought into the company narrative because his life was probably somewhat at their mercy wrt visa status and whatnot.

Listening to the full interview atm and it feels like they edited him rather unfairly to make him more damning than he actually was. The unspoken aspect that the team is largely relying on work visas is fairly massive too

[Schlippy]

[Thursday]

Listening to the full interview atm and it feels like they edited him rather unfairly to make him more damning than he actually was. The unspoken aspect that the team is largely relying on work visas is fairly massive too

Felt very bad for them that they all had to move to the UK to make this game.

[Vodkafone]

Sounds like ZA/UM relocated to the Doomed Commercial Area. Maybe next they can spend a lot of money developing an RPG oh wait.

[badaids]

I got this game and I like it but fuck me there's a lot of reading.  Proper Monkey Island vibes.

[Vodkafone]

I got this game and I like it but fuck me there's a lot of reading.  Proper Monkey Island vibes.

There is also a lot of running back and forth, but it's given me more proper guffaws than any other game I think.

[Poobum]

Tempted to replay because I missed

Spoiler alert

the whole church quest because I got too into character and told the rave lads in the cave to fuck off just to show Kim I could be a proper cop, all for his approval.

[close]

[Vodkafone]

Tempted to replay because I missed

Spoiler alert

the whole church quest because I got too into character and told the rave lads in the cave to fuck off just to show Kim I could be a proper cop, all for his approval.

[close]

I did that and it was worth it but

Spoiler alert

the rave was pretty underwhelming. The best bit was working out how to have a sensible conversation with Egghead. It reminded me of the 90s

[close]

[Utter Shit]

Started playing this last night and I haven't got a clue what is going on. All the narration before the game didn't really make any sense to me. I'm into the game proper now, and have just met a Chinese lad with a French accent who has taken against me.

Can someone explain the dice stuff? I understand the percentage chance of winning, but that's about it - what does winning actually mean in that context? And if my chance of winning is low, can I improve it by choosing other options for a while and then coming back to it?

I've been playing for an hour or so, and beyond "I'm a detective who presumably has to solve the murder I've been briefed about" I don't know how it all works or even really understand what type of game this is.

[sevendaughters]

Started playing this last night and I haven't got a clue what is going on. All the narration before the game didn't really make any sense to me. I'm into the game proper now, and have just met a Chinese lad with a French accent who has taken against me.

Can someone explain the dice stuff? I understand the percentage chance of winning, but that's about it - what does winning actually mean in that context? And if my chance of winning is low, can I improve it by choosing other options for a while and then coming back to it?

I've been playing for an hour or so, and beyond "I'm a detective who presumably has to solve the murder I've been briefed about" I don't know how it all works or even really understand what type of game this is.

You can improve your chances by coming back to white checks (red fail, but failing is not always bad) but you can also improve your chances by wearing the right clothes that add to various traits, boosting those traits, or temporarily improving them by smoking, drinking, taking speed, or taking the heroin/opiate/anti-radiation drug whose name I forget.

You're doing the right thing shambling around, it is in the spirit of it. You'll get it.

[Mister Six]

Started playing this last night and I haven't got a clue what is going on. All the narration before the game didn't really make any sense to me. I'm into the game proper now, and have just met a Chinese lad with a French accent who has taken against me.

Don't worry, since your character has near-total amnesia, that's the perfect way to play the game.

Can someone explain the dice stuff? I understand the percentage chance of winning, but that's about it - what does winning actually mean in that context? And if my chance of winning is low, can I improve it by choosing other options for a while and then coming back to it?

Winning means different things depending on the context. Sometimes losing actually has a more useful (or just funnier) outcome.

The core of dice rolls is the relevant skill (which is usually given to you in the description - DRAMA; IMPOSSIBLE if it's an incredibly high Drama check - although you can still win the "impossible" checks), with the roll getting easier if you put points (gained by levelling up) into that skill. But you can also modify the rolls by wearing clothing that increase or decrease those skills (you'll see by how many points, if relevant, in the item description), and by doing stuff in the game world that gives you boosts to particular rolls. For example, if you find out a certain piece of information while exploring, it might give you a +1 or more to a dialogue check because now your character knows something that gives them the edge in the conversation. Sometimes you may have penalties, however, due to things you have done.

Red dice rolls can't be retaken so you only get one shot, but white dice rolls can be retaken if you put a point into the relevant base skill. If you get stuck on a white dice roll, you can pootle about doing side quests until you have another point to into that skill. (There's another way to reset certain dice rolls, but that's a sidequest thing and I'll let you find it yourself.)

Aside from dying, which is easy to do if your Volition (for mental health) and Endurance (for physical health) are low and you don't have healing items yet (you'll pick some up shortly if you rifle through all the cupboards etc), there's no real way to get stuck even if you fuck up dice rolls. This is a game about failure, and the protagonist is an especially big failure, so you can mostly bumble through the game and fail almost every dice roll and still complete it.

Naturally, this increases replayability, as different skill combos and dialogue choices (including the different "copotypes" and political vision quests) lead to very different playthroughs.

I've been playing for an hour or so, and beyond "I'm a detective who presumably has to solve the murder I've been briefed about" I don't know how it all works or even really understand what type of game this is.

It's a detective mystery game where the detective is the mystery. Just go with whatever reactions feel appropriate to you, take on side cases, explore, talk to everyone, learn about the world. If you get in a pickle, Kim - the French guy - can help.

There are no real deadlines (even if the dialogue makes it sound like you have some), although you may wish to talk to the old men playing boules before (IIRC) day three. You can literally beg, borrow and steal the money to pay your room for the night (and also pick up bottles and cartons that can be turned in for cash at the pharmacy once you find the plastic bag outside the book store).

But mostly, just go for it. Fail. Try. Fail again. Fail better.

[Schlippy]

This is a game about failure, and the protagonist is an especially big failure, so you can mostly bumble through the game and fail almost every dice roll and still complete it.

This is super important, and worth highlighting - savescumming and retrying rolls until you "win" means you'll miss out on some of the best stuff the game has to offer. Failing will often give you just as good (if not better, sometimes) results as "winning", the game isn't great performance-wise but has had a ton of thought put into it in terms of balance and how all the different scenarios play out.

[Utter Shit]

This all sounds good, so I think the issue is more just me not getting what the game is yet. It's basically a somewhat-interactive story, like a choose your own adventure book? I think the insanely good reviews - Metacritic have it down as the best PC game of all time - made me think it was something more complicated or high-concept.

[Pink Gregory]

Planescape Torment is also one of the highest rated PC games of all time and it's basically a book, is my understanding.

[kidney]

Hope you enjoy the game Utter Shit, I wish I could experience it for the first time again.

A piece of advice I give to new players is to treat it like a book, so if you find yourself skipping through a lot of text for whatever reason maybe take a break and come back to it later.

[Vodkafone]

Yeah, just make whatever decisions seem right. Or insane. Or reckless. It's all about the world building and the writing, everything else is just scaffold to make it into a game.

[Mister Six]

This all sounds good, so I think the issue is more just me not getting what the game is yet. It's basically a somewhat-interactive story, like a choose your own adventure book? I think the insanely good reviews - Metacritic have it down as the best PC game of all time - made me think it was something more complicated or high-concept.

It's an RPG, minus all that boring fighting nonsense. Talk to people, examine objects, find clues, fumble your way to the answer - and to more questions. Make decisions about who you are, and see if you're right.

There's not a lot in the way of gameplay systems, yeah, and I guess "interactive story" is about right. It might not be your jam, and that's fine - I love reading, I love labyrinthine dialogue trees and I love exploring elaborately constructed and lavishly detailed worlds. If you don't dig those things, you might not like this.

[Utter Shit]

I'm definitely going to stick with it - so far I've been playing 'as myself', I assume that if I approached a new save with a different personality the entire game would play out differently?

[Vodkafone]

I'm definitely going to stick with it - so far I've been playing 'as myself', I assume that if I approached a new save with a different personality the entire game would play out differently?

The key plot details won't change as far as I can tell, but your character evolution and experience would be different. If you make sure your health and morale are kept up you can take more risks with alcohol and drug use or just generally reckless and foolish decision making to spice it up even more - I didn't catch on to this until a bit late.

[Mister Six]

Yeah, the key plot points are the same, but there's a lot of stuff - conversations, worldbuilding details, solutions to those key plot points, side quests - that are only accessible if you have certain levels of particular skills or made certain decisions, and obviously dice rolls have different outcomes too.

Ultimately this isn't a game for people who are only interested in mechanical aspects of gameplay. It's a lot of reading and a lot of story, and the "game" element is pretty pared back.

But it does have some of, if not the, best writing in a video game I've ever seen, and the world and characters are fascinating. That's not for everyone, though.