Disco Elysium - Making Detective Games Work

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RockPaperShotgun chatted to the writing lead for Disco Elysium Robert Kurvitz, about the details behind making a detective RPG game work.

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RPS:: Is Disco Elysium something you can be bad at?

Robert Kurvitz: Yeah, Yeah, definitely. It’s a hardcore RPG: You can fail at it. You can be a bad detective who just doesn’t solve the case at all, and everything goes really badly – and you can die. You can also be too scatterbrained, just not a good enough detective generally, to piece together what happens.

RPS: Right, so there might be bits where you just can’t deduce what’s happening?

Kurvitz: Yeah, and you can also build yourself a build that doesn’t work for what you might try to do. You have to be strategic, and you have to think “right, how am I going to go about this? How am I gonna get out of this? How am I going to get these guys to face up to what they did?” Because some people are just gonna stonewall you. And then we have active skill checks, white checks we call them, and when you fail them you can try them again – but to try them again you have to put one point into what you did, and you may not be able to do that because you don’t have that kind of character, or you don’t have enough experience yet, or you’re at max points already. Then you have to find modifiers in the world, and you have to think “what character would influence these guys?”

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More information.
 
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The game that will make Larian's hogwash look like wee buns
 
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BoboTheMighty said:
Lol common man, now Swen&Co is also blacklisted? Anything you do like?
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Larian is a leper's colony, a cancerous ulcer on the RPG community's body, should have never come to success. If I would be a time traveler, I would make sure he & his gang never gets into game development. Larian is dangerous, toxic, hurting the RPG genre.
 
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Stingray said:
They've been blacklisted for a while in belduraxworld, due to being "anti-Christian" :lol:

Sources:
https://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1061468885&postcount=17
https://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1061439058&postcount=6
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Well that'd explain all those talking crabs, cats, chickenz and whatnot. The Devil's got a hold over'em!

tenor.gif
 
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mercy said:
Larian is a leper's colony, a cancerous ulcer on the RPG community's body, should have never come to success. If I would be a time traveler, I would make sure he & his gang never gets into game development. Larian is dangerous, toxic, hurting the RPG genre.
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I wouldn't go that far, but I do think Larian's games are very overrated. I find their silly humor off-putting & and they focus on all sorts of features I have zero interest in: ridiculous amounts of (randomized) loot, crafting, multiplayer, console ports, trash encounters, etc. But that's fine really, not every RPG needs to be made for me. At least they're making turn-based games now, even if I find DOS combat rather tedious, they're popularizing my favorite battle system, in a way helping bring it back into the mainstream. Swen seems like a nice guy, too, I just don't expect Larian will ever make an RPG I love.

Anyway, not much point in comparing D:OS to Disco Elysium; very different kinds of RPGs (and some here will continue to claim DE isn't an RPG because it won't have combat outside of dialogue / skill checks).
 
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daveyd said:
ridiculous amounts of (randomized) loot, crafting, multiplayer, console ports, trash encounters, etc. But that's fine really, not every RPG needs to be made for me.
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Did you play D:OS2?

- Crafting was way less useful than D:OS1, the whole thing could easily be ignored entirely other than crafting runes for your weapons/armor, in fact I know people who did just that.
- I don't think the multiplayer or (planned) console ports really hurt the main game, like they obviously do with most games. The multiplayer was 100% unintrusive, unlike D:OS1; for example, no more playing rock-paper-scissors with your party members.
- Very few "trash" encounters in the whole game.

I do think D:OS2 had problems, just not in those areas. Well, randomized loot bit is subjective of course, I don't mind it personally.
 
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Stingray said:
Did you play D:OS2?

- Crafting was way less useful than D:OS1, the whole thing could easily be ignored entirely other than crafting runes for your weapons/armor, in fact I know people who did just that.
- I don't think the multiplayer or (planned) console ports really hurt the main game, like they obviously do with most games. The multiplayer was 100% unintrusive, unlike D:OS1; for example, no more playing rock-paper-scissors with your party members.
- Very few "trash" encounters in the whole game.

I do think D:OS2 had problems, just not in those areas. Well, randomized loot bit is subjective of course, I don't mind it personally.
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No, I was so underwhelmed by DOS1 that I didn't back or buy DOS2. Maybe I'll pick it up someday when it's on sale (for less than $10).

My problem with the loot isn't necessarily that it's random, but rather that there's such a huge amount of equipment to pick up, not to mention all the junk items for crafting. In fantasy RPGs I much prefer the relatively rare / unique magical items with lore & backstory behind them then thousands of generic elemental weapons with tiny incremental differences between them that make inventory management a chore (one thing BG tended to do right).
 
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mercy said:
Larian is a leper's colony, a cancerous ulcer on the RPG community's body, should have never come to success. If I would be a time traveler, I would make sure he & his gang never gets into game development. Larian is dangerous, toxic, hurting the RPG genre.
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Very well played. I'd use a similar set of words to describe a certain president.
 
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