DISCO ELYSIUM IS A COLOSSAL GAME

Let’s talk content richness and playtime.

We’ve had enough people finish the game from start to end now. We can finally say how big the game is. And Disco Elysium is, in every sense of the word, a huge game. It’s bigger than *giant* and (a little) smaller than *gargantuan*, so I would say it is about colossus-sized.

DISCO ELYSIUM - Announcement Short (30sec)

So — a colossal game.

How long is a colossal game? Well, it takes 60+ hours of continuous playtime to finish Disco Elysium if you’re a reasonably completionist player, as I am. It takes 90 hours if you’re absolutely savouring every detail. And 30 hours if you’re rushing it. Back-of-the-box, I would put playtime at: 60+ hours.

Map-wise, Disco Elysium takes place in one city district – Martinaise, in the city of Revachol. Martinaise is divided into five major areas – call them biomes if you like. Video game people love biomes:

1. Martinaise proper, comprised of modern, renovated buildings. A dilapidated cityscape.
2. The Industrial Harbour. Big machinery and containers upon containers of goods.
3. The wild, abandoned urban coastline, full of ruins from a long lost Revolution.
4. A plethora of underground areas meant to be explored with your flashlight.
5. And a fifth area that I won’t reveal here.

All four non-underground areas are one seamless, isometric open world that you can approach in any order.

The world is about the size of Planescape: Torment. Or a sizeable chunk of the first Pillars. A sizeable chunk of Fallout: New Vegas… But the resolution – the level of detail, content density – of these areas is, I would say, about 5 times denser than any RPG I’ve played. Disco Elysium is a detective game and thus you have to be able to put it under a magnifying glass. Any part of it. Every apartment, hallway, street corner, lamp, or even trashcan needs story, writing, details and interactivity that, to me, exceeds even the most detail-oriented adventure games.

None of these areas reuse assets or look the same like games that are asset-assembled do. Sure, people have the same radio every now and then, every little room is 100% unique when it comes to layout and art. And music, too.

There are four major weather states – snow, rain, mist and clear. And four times of day – morning, day, evening, night. These all combine to make an unpredictable, moody city where time moves in a very realistic manner. Getting through one day is a massive thing. Shadows fall. Sodium lights flicker. The music changes. Tomorrow brings new NPC’s to old locations, as the world changes each day. It takes about one real life day to complete one in-world day, if you’re being meticulous.

What is there to do with one massive day?

Disco Elysium has about 100 “quests” – or whatever you call them. We call them “tasks”. Tasks range from minor to-do’s a la “have a bath” to side-adventures that take a whole day to complete. We don’t differentiate between side-quests and main quests, by the way. It’s all one big thing — the story of your life in another world, as a detective of the Revachol Citizen’s Militia.

Let’s talk stuff too.

You have about 100 inventory items to mix and match from. These include tools – crowbars, guns, a boombox, a magnum sized bottle of wine… – and a plethora of clothes and even shiny armour to protect yourself with. Then we also have over 50 thoughts to choose from. These go in your head, they’re a kind of special item that evolves over time, giving you all manner of perk-like effects and role playing options. So – you’re playing physical and mental dress-up, draping your detective in ceramic armour, disco duds or tracksuit trousers – all the while filling your head with notions like: poetry, technology, para-natural nonsense, or trying to remember how old you are.

40 original pieces of music play as you explore the city. Some 6 different psychoactive substances get you high as you do so. Wine, beer, smokes, anti-radiation drugs… some good old fashioned trucker speed. And so on.

Jesus, and then there’s the skills! There are 24 of them and I swear to god – the least used has around 50 cases where it does something. The really active ones have (I’m not even kidding) around 500 uses. So yeah… There are thousands of skill checks. There are literally too many to count, for various technical reasons I won’t go into it right now. Safe to say, this is the skilliest game ever skilled. The skill list of 3.5 edition d’n’d is but a baby compared to Disco Elysium.

It is one million words long.

There are 70 characters, all have partial VO. Each you can spend hours talking to, each has hours of secret content.

Aaaaaand you’re gonna have to play the thing from beginning to end three times to get to see most of it. To see all of it… I don’t think a single human being can. But the internet has proven many a boast wrong, so let’s see.

It’s honestly inconceivable how we managed to do this. I guess time is the answer. Disco Elysium took 5 years to produce. We only managed to make it so fast because we had a head start with worldbuilding. A whopping 13 years worth of D&D style pen and paper games in the Elysium setting beforehand.

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So this is Disco Elysium. I think it’s gonna rock your socks off, to be honest. I realize listing all this made me sound like James Franco from Spring Breakers talking about all the “shit” he’s got, but it just had to be said…

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All of this shit is for you. We’re beyond excited to see how you’ll react to it. To a game that’s just… new. A new type of game — of which there’s suddenly a metric shit tons of. On your hard drive — to approach in your own way, order, and style.

On October 15, 2019.

Introducing The Thought Cabinet

Disco Elysium - The Thought Cabinet

The time has come to talk about the Thought Cabinet, Disco Elysium’s illustrious “inventory for thoughts.” Let me start by presenting an image. A rather detailed image. Of all the icons of all the thoughts you can get in Disco Elysium, woven into a single tapestry. The Thought Cabinet art is made by Anton Vill, a concept artist known for, among other things, his work on the film Mad Max: Fury Road.

The full-resolution version of this image takes 10 minutes to load, so we’re hoping to include it in the deluxe edition of the game. Here’s the web version:

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Each little composition on that image is one “Thought”. It’s impossible to get them all in one play-through, or even two. Each Thought comes into play face down. Only its name and some initial info are known to you. It takes in-game time to reveal its true identity by “internalizing” it. To truly uncover the mysteries of all these bad boys takes years of hard-core roleplaying. There are a total of 53 thoughts in the game. On average, a single character discovers and internalizes 16 of them in one playthrough.

And that, in a nutshell, is THC – how we’re abbreviating Thought Cabinet. This mega-feature has gone through multiple iterations. It’s a unifying element that ties all the game’s systems together. Thoughts are like Fallout’s “traits” (back in the 14th century when Fallout had traits) crossed with Civ’s “world wonders”. They’re loot for your mind that you collect from the world by talking to people. They function as traits, perks, reputations and alignments.

You store Thoughts in your Thought Cabinet – your mind-lab, where you cook up new ideas and obsessions. Conduct research into futuristic armour, become a free market evangelist by thinking about indirect taxes, or just contemplate suicide. All with the power of your mind.

THC is the game’s reputation system.

In Disco Elysium there are tags you can acquire that make people think of you in a certain way. Say something stupid and they will remember it, help someone and they’ll remember that too. So far, so routine. But Disco Elysium also has an internal reputation system. Your skills – your faculties that talk to you in your head – develop notions about you too. Have you said three artsy things in the last hour? Been telling people you want your name to be Raphael? Trying to recall a lost memory, or your home address? Your skills can turn these into full blown Thoughts: “Actual Art Degree”, “Detective R.A. Costeau”, “The 15th Indotribe” and “Lonesome Long Way Home”. You can turn yourself into a deranged “Torque Dork”, constantly thinking about auto-mechanical trivia. Or torture yourself with the “White Mourning” – the shadow of someone you used to love. This adds a new layer of role playing options I like to call soul customization.

THC is also the game’s perk system.

In addition to producing dialogue options and story events, thoughts have mechanical implications. Once processed, they can provide bonuses and – more often – diabolical side effects. Each is a riddle, posing a question for you to answer. The bonus (or penalty) is the Aesop at the end of that story. Thinking of love lost corrodes your soul, but it also gives you an expanded perspective: Your maximum zoom-out range is increased, letting you take in breath-taking vistas. Recalling that memory can lead to drugs being more powerful for you. When the Art Cop uses his Conceptualization skill they gain XP for every criticism. There’s even a thought that (temporarily) makes you fail all your skill checks, turning you into a walking disaster, which in turn, can lead to new thoughts.

Thoughts evolve over time.

You need to “internalize” most Thoughts for them to reach their full potential. For this, your Thought Cabinet has slots to put them into. Prior to this, you only have a vague idea of what a Thought might do. You have a set-up. A picture on a closed box.

Each Thought has an internalization period. This can range from 30 in-world minutes to 3 in-world days. Some mental projects are massive, others fleeting. When the process is complete you get an animation — not unlike finishing a world wonder in Civ. This is where you open the box, read the punchline. Face whatever wondrous and terrifying mechanical effects this revelation has on your character.

If you don’t like the conclusion you’ve reached, you can always “forget” the thought by spending one “skill point”, the currency commonly used to improve your skills. If all your internalization slots are full, you can spend a skill point to open up a new slot. Since there is a finite number of slots in your Thought Cabinet you need to curate your thoughts carefully. Players start forgetting old thoughts to make room for new ones, as they mature and reach their final form: The Soul Reaver.

(Note: Disco Elysium doesn’t actually feature soul reaving, I just made it up to sex up the paragraph.)

Some (very special) thoughts open up big things in the story.

You can finish a thought, then read its description and see that it tells you to go and ask a specific person in the world a specific question. This creates a rhythm where you talk to someone, mull it over, then return to them with a new (often revelatory) topic. Personally, I adore this part of the Thought Cabinet so I just wanted to point it out.

Finally, Thoughts are also how Disco Elysium handles classes and alignments.

Not all Thoughts are created equal. Some have a larger effect on your character than others. None more than the four Ideologies and four Copotypes. Ideologies are as close as Disco Elysium gets to an alignment system. Copotypes are how you view yourself as a police detective. Combine these two and you can be a socialist Superstar Cop. Or a centrist Sorry Cop who apologizes profusely. You can also dual-Copotype, or even mix and match ideologies. This, combined with the choices made in character creation – and the rest of the Thoughts – makes for hundreds of different builds.

So, as you can see: THC does a lot of things. I think we’ve gotten it quite nifty, to be honest.

You can get Disco Elysium on October 15th for 39.99 USD / 39.99 EUR / 34.99 GBP respectively.
GOG.com

Disco Elysium Preview (PC)

We take a deep dive into the mind of an unstable Sherlock

It's completely wrong to try and play a detective adventure game with a character that has the IQ of a chimpanzee, but that's totally cool in Disco Elysium. Indeed, you won't have an easy time, but playing a dumb but strong detective in a decrepit world is perfectly viable in this game.

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Disco Elysium is a quirky RPG where you play an alcoholic detective who wakes up in a pool of his own puke with no recollection of what happened. Depending on what skill you chose before the opening sequence, your monologue will be shorter or longer, but keep in mind that the longer it is, the more information you'll learn about who you are.

There are 24 skills and at least half of them are quite unusual for an RPG, such as encyclopedia, drama, conceptualization, visual calculus, esprit de corps, shivers, savoir-faire and a couple more. Disco Elysium is a game that throws at you a lot of checks that require a wide range of skills. You can have all the skills, but those that you have will help you overcome some challenges using a specific path.

The game is split in days, which means that some things won't happen until one or more days have passed. The more things you manage to discover in a day the better, and while there might be deadlines to solve certain puzzles, it seems that you can take your time to unveil the whole plot.

DISCO ELYSIUM - Release Date & Features Trailer (Official)

I've been given access to a preview version of the game that allowed me to play through the first day, but I died after 4 hours reading a letter addressed to me, probably because my heart couldn't cope with the shock.

Morale and health are the only two stats that matter in Disco Elysium and you get them in very short quantity at the beginning of the game, so any shock or fight can kill you fast. There are plenty of objects in the game that replenish either morale or health, but they're useless if you're one-shoted.

Disco Elysium is a “game of words.” There are way more than one million words in this game, so be ready for a lot of reading and less combat action. I confess I didn't understand everything that developers probably wanted to convey to the player, but I did feel the emotions.

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I also love the oil paint art style, I think it fits perfectly with a psychological thriller like Disco Elysium. I haven't got into a fight yet since I went the Sherlock way and boosted my “deduction” skills instead of trying to get physical, but my next playthrough I'll try another path.

I did see a lot of what the game has to offer during my several hours spent in Disco Elysium to know that this game will be eye-opening. Developer Za/UM says the game could take between 60 to 100 hours to finish, so I'm ready to take their challenge.

Thankfully, I won't have to wait too long, as Disco Elysium is scheduled for release on PC via GOG on October 15.

Disco Elysium- An Explosion of Creativity and Unbridled Ambition

“Revolutionizing RPGs”. In the many decades of Computer Role-Playing Games, such a statement has been thrown around so much that it has lost its gravitas. A bold statement for sure, but one that’s easier said than done. From Betrayal at Krondor to Pathfinder: Kingmaker, the obsession with shaping limited and contrived VRPGs in the mould of Pen and Paper RPGs, an endless ocean of creativity and possibilities, is an ongoing process. A hit and miss process, to be sure. While Original Sin 2 and Pathfinder have been successful in emulating tabletops digitally, compromises are always made, especially in balancing the mechanical complexity with reactive world-building.

ZA/UM, A European video game developer comprised of artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and activists that initially wanted to bring forth a cultural renaissance before turning to full-time game development, is now taking the shot at ‘Revolutionizing RPGs‘. As if that wasn’t weird enough, the title of the game that is supposed to bring this revolution is even weirder. Disco Elysium, they call it. An isometric detective RPG with the prime focus on bringing the complete tabletop experience to your PC. Sounds ambitious? It is.

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Calming the voices in my head, I wake up with the worst hangover in a sleazy motel room. Naked. I have no idea who I am or how I got here. The mirror told me that I had a face showing years of alcohol abuse and suppressed pain. Collecting my scattered clothes, I head outside, only to be greeted as ‘officer’ by the tired lady in a jumpsuit just outside my room. She told me that I was a police officer and has been in the small city of Revachol for three days, most of which I spent stone-cold drunk. To this, I replied, “why would anyone let ME be an officer of the law?”. With this, I had taken the first step in defining how I wanted the world to perceive me. I was the ‘sorry cop’ and no one would be safe from hearing me wallowing in self-pity and disgust.

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Apparently I’m here on official duty. There’s been a murder 7 days ago. Tensions have been on the rise between the union of dockworkers and a mega-corporation. A corporate mercenary has been hanged and the suspects are, obviously, the union workers. The fact that the corpse is still hanging in its original position and the alcohol-induced retrograde amnesia insinuates that I’m not a really good cop or a well-functioning human being for that matter. But the murder can wait. The top priority is the philosophical back and forth between me and the dozens of voices in my head.

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Much like what Planescape: Torment did 20 years ago, Disco Elysium plans presents the player with a unique and bizarre world to explore, humongous walls of texts to stare at, wads of ways to get through quests and giving the complete reigns of the pre-determined hero to the player. Similar to Torment, Disco Elysium puts you in the shoes of a fixed character from a fixed designation but the real magic lies in how much freedom you get in shaping character both physically and intellectually, as well as influence the events of the world and shape its outcomes through your actions. Not even a single dialogue escapes the gaze of over 20 skill checks the game employs. Even though every skill check doesn’t affect the dialogue drastically, it results in well-written lines of texts to pop up. It’s a thinking man’s RPG for sure, but one that will not be much interest to people that dislike reading.

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Now, you may have seen RPGs try to do these things before; presenting a reactive world, a character who can be moulded to your liking, choice-driven gameplay and more. The difference between those games and Disco Elysium is the degree of success in doing so. Within 2 hours of playing the game, I had mapped out the initial traits and behaviours of my detective. Not just by putting points into shiny columns but also by putting myself in his shoes and confronting the world with his worldviews. It’s not my avatar I was staring at. It was Det. Harry Winsor, a confused, pathetic excuse for a human being that can’t do anything right. Within the next two hours, I had taken up neo-communism, lost my gun, badge and crime reports, got bullied by a substance-abusing teenager, crashed into a wheelchair-bound paraplegic, burst into tears in front of a union leader, and die due to a cardiac arrest before the day was over.

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But the city of Revachol wasn’t ready for Det. Dushyant Phillauri, the baddest of the bad. The daddy of the baddy. Within the first two hours, I had taken up racial theory, lost my gun, badge and crime reports, hit the substance-abusing teenager in the face and made him respect my authority, mishandled a 7 day old corpse and tried to steal its shoes, asked the wheelchair-bound paraplegic out, beat the union leader at his own game and told cardiac arrest, “not today”. The third playthrough had me play a pseudo-feminist who said things like “do you have a phallus in your ear” to male chauvinists. Disco Elysium is self-conscious and doesn’t shy away from ridiculing the modern socio-political climate and propagandas. It expects you to take the game in the same spirit as well, which may be off-putting to some people. Just chill out, will ya? It’s a video game.

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Aside from the variety of role-playing possibilities to be found within, one unique aspect of Disco Elysium is The Thought Cabinet or THC. THC is the main way through which the game lets you be one with your character. Disco Elysium keeps track of all things you say, how you say it and who you say it to. Then presents the summarised version of commonalities as thoughts to the player. You can internalize the thoughts in the thought cabinet to reveal its true identity and how it affects your detective. They function as traits, perks, reputation, and alignments; and gives defining or even contrasting personality traits to your character. Pursuing traits like good cop, bad cop, asshole cop, superstar cop, suicidal tendencies, hell even an art degree is possible thanks to THC. There are about 54 thoughts in the game but the player will only see about 16 per playthrough.

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Disco Elysium is a visual treat and I expect no less from a collaboration of artists. The hand-drawn world looks something out of an oil painting and ushers in the retro-nostalgic feel of the ’70s and ’80s. Even though most of the interaction is in the form of text, they are accompanied by well-designed animations to give them visual flair. Though I have given so much praise to the game, there are several kinks to work out. The option to pan edges of the camera, more responsive and smooth character handling, ability to customize UI, font size etc are really needed if Disco Elysium is to deliver on all fronts.

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It’s not possible to say if Disco Elysium is going to re-invent the RPG genre with just the 15 hours I spent in the preview version. But what I can say is that it is a massive game made with lots of love and care. The sheer amount of brilliant writing and creativity in Disco Elysium is seldom present in any other game in the genre. It’s a thinking and reading man’s RPG that continues to reduce the gap between PnP RPGs and VRPGs. It’s a very ambitious and experimental game that’s not going to be everyone’s cup of Masala Chai. The lack of traditional combat, text-heavy gameplay and slow pace might turn casual players away. Truth be told, I haven’t been this impressed with the narrative of an RPG since Torment. Hopefully, the rest of the game continues to keep up and polish this excellent formula. Expect a full review once the game launches on October 15.

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