Yu-No (and I don’t think it gets much more purist than that) would like a word with you.
I have never played a visual novel, but I understood they are basically novels (pages upon pages to read) accompanied of music and illustration, with a few dialogue options to choose from, and that only from time to time.
Here, have one of the most popular (edit, actually, the most popular) VN of all times
Not a lot beyond passive reading.
To be clear, the term “visual novel” is a term made up by western writers arbitrarily trying to distinguish Japanese adventure games from “more traditional” western point-and-click adventure games.
It’s a big genre, there’s exceptions.
I dunno the exact origins of the term but I think there’s a pretty clear difference between stuff like Fate and Muv-Luv and e.g. Monkey Island, and it’s not just that the former are Japanese (or that some versions of them contain sex scenes).
Yeah, I’ll have to agree - when I think of VNs I think of a game with a lot less player agency or input than a point and click adventure game.
[slaps forehead]
Doh, of course! I totally forgot about this in Disco Elysium. The skill checks partly determine your options! According to my understanding of what people mean when they say “visual novel”, this soundly disqualifies Disco Elysium from being confused with a visual novel, right? When I said upthread “whatever gameplay Disco Elysium offered, it came with the prose”, I was dead wrong. The skill checks and character development are totally gameplay.
Even with my limited playtime, I know there’s branching, even very early in the game (I’ve started two playthroughs specifically to explore this). I have no idea what constitutes “a ton of branching”, but I’m pretty sure branching is a fundamental part of the design. Hopefully someone who’s played more than us can verify one way or the other.
Right, but I’m asking you why you disagree with that.
You’re claiming Disco Elysium is a visual novel – which is a suspect claim to me, since I didn’t think character builds and skill checks were elements of visual novels – misrepresenting itself as an open world. I’m curious why you feel that’s a misrepresentation if there is indeed freedom to choose among various narrative paths. Perhaps you’re just applying a narrow definition to “open-world” so that it only means games like Grand Theft Auto or Assassin’s Creed, and when developers use it to highlight freedom among various narrative paths, it’s little more than a marketing bullet point? In which case I would suggest you’re tilting at a windmill that has long since left the barn. :)
-Tom
Disco Elysium is certainly not what I think of when I think open world, but since what I think of is largely aimless expanses with little bits of makework repetition dotted all over, I’m okay with that. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a lot of games that happen to be open world, but the vast majority of them, I would have had a better time if they’d been more traditional focused linear or at least constrained scopes with more vividly realized settings.
…none of this has that much to do with Citizen Sleeper, mind.
Oh, I only used that term because you introduced it, so I was hoping you had an idea what it meant. But I do suspect Disco Elysium has less than 2,000 pounds of branching.
That’s only, like, one tree.
I’ve only played through once, so I don’t have any first-hand experience of how much branching there is. But in the Disco Elysium thread I posted a summary of someone else’s playthrough I came across, and it was very different to what I played, and in surprising ways. Any details would be spoilers, but I’d also assume the branching narrative is a large part of the point of the game.
Whether there’s more than one tree’s-worth however, I couldn’t say.
Disco Elysium has a few core scenes that you will hit on every play. Between those scenes, there’s many different paths that you can take — the game both gives you freedom and makes the dialog very responsive to what you’ve done. Like information you learned in one side quest is referenced in another, or a character calls back to something you did hours earlier. There are many narrative threads that weave into each other.
Tying this back to Citizen Sleeper, I was disappointed that unlike Disco it has a pure “tree” narrative structure where different plot lines don’t interact with each other in any way. When you’re getting harassed by a bounty hunter, you might expect to get help from your mercenary friend or your criminal enforcer friend — but you won’t because each quest line exists in isolation and doesn’t take into account what else you’ve done.
There’s a classic blogpost by Sam Ashwell that discusses branching story structures and a follow-up by Emily short on how to create reactive experiences without using expressly branching structures (using her work on Falling London as a case study.)
This is also an interesting thread discussing that Josh Sawyer tweet from the perspective of folks who want maximum reactivity and player choice from their RPGs.
Modern RPGs suffer from procedural design. You must do A then B then C. Some of them even let you do A then B1 or B2 or B3 in any order then C! Some of this likely stems from video game writers largely having backgrounds in writing traditional books.
Contrast this with goal-oriented design such that the only thing that matters is the goal and how you get to that goal is a separate matter. This is something you’d see primarily in older games. If you drop a random person with no formal background in writing(or designing) linear stories into gamedev they probably are more likely to come up with something similar to this as it’s a more natural fit for video games.
Despite all the grousing in the RPG thread, none of them actually provide any example of a CRPG that actually provides player choice. They bring up Morrowind and Divinity:OS2, but I think even those have a narrative throughline and a set of tasks you have to accomplish in a certain order to complete the games. I submit goal-oriented gameplay is nearly impossible in narrative-based games and you have to step sideways to things like Thief or Hitman or Deus Ex to actually get what they’re looking for.
What Disco Elysium offers is a vividly realized world, top-notch writing, well-drawn characters with deep exploration of their sometimes illogical motivations, and an engaging narrative that goes unexpected places, all while involving the player pretty heavily in what’s going on mostly by allowing the player to define how the main character responds to events–by explicitly shaping the growth of that person’s personality. Is the choice in the game illusory? Yeah, but that’s kind of the point. Bioshock did this diegetic illusion-of-choice thing but in a clever but unsubtle way and Davey Wredden explores these themes even more hamfistedly. Disco Elysium suggests that choice is always a bit of an illusion and then literally maps out the contours of that illusion.
I think for someone who is looking for a visual novel, Disco Elysium isn’t what they’re looking for. That genre is old and well established enough to have conventions, and Disco Elysium doesn’t really hew to any of them. In that sense it’s not useful to describe it as a visual novel.
laughs in roguelike
I’ll have to try Disco Elysium someday, though I admit the muttonchops and word Disco were an effective gatekeeper for me.
It was still a marked improvement on the original game name which sounded like you were at war with the furry community.
And yet the term “visual novel” is still used to apply to a game like YU-NO, which is just a traditional point-and-click adventure from the '90s (including a puzzle that was so infamously hard in the original version that the modern remake added an option to skip it entirely!), albeit with more text, and with explicit sex scenes in the original release. Or the assortment of JRPGs that get called visual novels instead, like Aselia the Eternal. Or how about Galaxy Angel, which has real-time space combat gameplay with dialogue scenes in-between, and doesn’t even have the “it has/had porn” excuse for people to fall back on because it was all-ages from the very start?
For me, it was that every voice I heard somehow managed to be even more annoying than the last.
I haven’t played any of those but my impression was that there are lengthy VN style sequences between more interactive gameplay for at least Aselia, similar to things like Ace Attorney or Zero Escape that I mentioned earlier as hybrids. But if not… shrug. There are still thousands of games in the Fate or Muv-Luv mold that warrant a genre descriptor and visual novel is both the one in common usage and relatively appropriate. And lord knows people constantly misattribute genres to particular games, like people trying to claim Zelda is an RPG.