Ah, but how would the game unfold mechanically if the detective didn’t have amnesia? The game is set in a complex world that the character - a detective, no less - should have a great deal of knowledge about. Yet the player doesn’t know the first thing about this world at all. How, then, would the game answer the basic questions the player has - things that absolutely anyone in the game world would know, like “Who is Joe Biden?” or “What is New York City?” - without making the character seem like an idiot?
Giving the character amnesia sets the knowledge of the character to be (mostly) the same as the knowledge of the player, allowing narrative and gameplay to mesh instead of conflict. That’s why all kinds of games over the years have used the “You wake up with amnesia” trope as their premise, from Fallout: New Vegas to Planescape: Torment all the way back to Deja Vu.
The character not remembering what he’s done is also vital thematically. Because the character doesn’t fully remember their past, the game teases the player with the notion that they can fully define that character by their current actions - become a glamorous disco cop or a committed communist, etc. But in the end it turns out that, while those choices do affect some things, they don’t affect the past: the point of the game is that the character made specific past decisions that they have to live with and move beyond. It just wouldn’t have the same kick if, for example, the player knew the entire time that the main character was the one who had crashed the car.
I feel more or less the same way about all of these kind of point and click style games. It’s why I have a really hard time playing “traditional rpgs” anymore. Moving from place to place is just tedium that wastes time and gives me nothing in return, just clicking a piece of screen and waiting for a walk animation to play out. Disco badly needed a fast travel system. Fortunately there is a mod that adds one, although I haven’t had the opportunity to test it yet. Pathologic 2 is another game where it’s even worse. Most of the game is talking to people but you have to move slowly through a mostly boring and empty world to get to them. It’s just fetch questing but you’re fetching new dialogue instead of herbs or whatever (although sometimes you are also fetching herbs). I have never really played a visual novel, but the entire game in DE is making dialogue choices, aka a visual novel (some of those have skill checks, like Omen Exitio or Sir Brante). Call it a “gamebook” if you like. They bolted a point and click pixel hunt adventure onto it, and it brings the game down some.
Well, in novels you get the narrator/inner thoughts of the character to fill out the detail of the world. You can’t do the same with a video game, with a big block of text interrupting the flow. Unless you do a visual novel I guess, which is what you seem to want.
Did you play the same game as me? Because there is exactly zero pixel hunt. None whatsoever.
You have the tab key that highlights all things that can be frobbed introduced in the very first room you wake up in. Standard CRPG mechanics here.
Disco Elysium is not an adventure game. It’s a CRPG and analogous to Planescape: Torment without combat.
This is more a problem with you then the game itself you realize that? The game world here is super small. Try UnderRail and report back! Lots of moving from place to place, map to map. You’d certainly hate it, in spite of that game being a good CRPG. (I guess I see your gripe here as petty, you just want to teleport everywhere?..errr you want a visual novel)
The amnesia bit is a cliche, but it’s integral to what I see as the main point of the story- the protagonist has mentally dislodged himself from reality as a way of coping with trauma, and needs to rebuild his connection to the people and world around him.
Their argument can be reduced to ‘any game without -gameplay- (combat, stealth, whatever) and focused on the writing should cut the fat and be a visual novel’. I don’t agree with it. I thought there was a nice sense of place on DE.
Same page. I highly disagree with that. Disco’s world interaction and sense of place was very important to me. I see some of conversations as actual boss fights.
If the game was just a visual novel I wouldn’t have bothered to even play it.
I think there was definite value in exploring the environment: there were details to be found (both interactive and as background detail) that added to the story and the world-building in a way that I don’t think would have had the same impact in a VN format. It meant more to me because I made the decision to go and investigate some detail, and what I was thinking when I did that becomes part of my version of the story, in a way that following a script option wouldn’t.
On another forum I read about someone’s particular end game and it kind of blew my mind. HUGE END-OF-GAME SPOILERS FOLLOW, DO NOT READ IF YOU PLAN ON REPLAYING!They reached the end of the game with Kim in hospital, and Cuno as their partner! You don’t get a photo of the beast because Cuno’s too poor to own a camera. When your old squad turns up, he calls everyone fuckers and gets enrolled in a junior police academy. That this was even an option, which must have had a load of extra script, voiceover and testing effort that hardly anyone would see, just impresses me hugely.
Well, that’s paraphrasing just a tad, but broadly the idea :) I’ve never played a visual novel game though.
Disco is particularly poorly served by ‘unclear’ areas like the truck jam and the fishing shacks, combined with the minimal viewing distance and the useless map. As the sometimes directionless plot has you going back and forth looking for something to progress events… well, thankfully they have fast travel. But it’s only randomly available, so there’s that. Revachol!
Even with their current implementation I’d be tempted to patch in teleporting you to the thing you’re interacting with or the spot you double-clicked on…
In my unreliable memory Gabriel Knight 3 had a system where the player moved the camera in zippy first person, and when you interacted with something, Gabriel walked into shot and turned the doorknob or whatever. You didn’t have to steer the characters about - because there was no gameplay there.
Well, or we could just engage with what was actually said, which was that Disco Elysium should have been a visual novel because it was… (checks notes)… “boring.”
Which I disagree with, because I think then we’d just have a boring visual novel.
But hey, I probably also like some games that other people don’t like! It happens! Those games will continue to exist! And so will Disco Elysium!
I really like Disco and neither of us said the game was boring, Jesus Christ.
The fact is the game world was mostly static. I probably wouldn’t have complained if it had something like the system in The Last Door where you can fast forward walking through bits you’ve been through before (or even better a fast travel via the map, via the quest log).
Now Pathologic 2 is boring, even if I respect some of what it tries to do.
Well, yes, you did heavily caveat it that it was boring “for fair chunks of its length,” “at least for your playthrough,” because you justifiably were trying to avoid crucifixion. I opted for brevity when summarizing you. ;)
I did find it dull in a few ways, but taste is taste :)
I’m not sure why the leap to visual novels as the only alternative to Planescape-style is being made. I would have said it’s naturally a point and click adventure. Have Revachol locations but don’t make travelling tiresome.
