Disco Elysium - Insane Drunken Cop Simulator RPG GotY 2019

[Caligura]

Anyone try the demo for Zero Parades: For Dead Spies? Its out from ZA:UM, being advertised as FROM THE PEOPLE WHO BROUGHT YOU DISCO ELYSIUM, which is pretty rich considering none of the OG Disco masterminds are still working there really. This game comes off as a cheap imitation, feels like theyre trying to recreate the Disco magic beat for beat, nearly the same opening of waking up in a hotel room with amnesia. Hopes ae not high for this

It's Diet Disco Elysium and for what it is, it's ok. Can never top the original but it works fine as something to whet an appetite for the original.

 

[Lt. H. DuBois]

It's Diet Disco Elysium and for what it is, it's ok. Can never top the original but it works fine as something to whet an appetite for the original.

Agreed Ill still give it a shot, just not expecting to have my socks blown off or anything. I have much more interest in Esoteric Ebb, which I know is out already, but Im just waiting to pick it up on the cheap cheap. Or the real longshot of a Disco Final Cut situation and the game gets voice acting, but pretty sure EE is pretty much a 1 man game so that's probably not likely

 

[Gimmick Account]

Ebb doesn't need voice acting, half the text is massive lore dumps you're gonna skip anyway.
Even if you're in the mood to read that shit it's always distracting when there's some dramatic voiceover slowly plodding through the walls of words.

 

[2mm and 99 others]

Now hear me out... A disco elusium followup taking place in the apocalyptic pale era.
And a prequel or side game where you play different characters in different segments of the country/continent that Elysium is wedged in. It's a huge fucking map they drew out. Jamrock, the quarry, etc. If it was managed by a good company and not political NZ retards we could honestly have gotten good expansions too like with what say, Grim Dawn or some good puter games do. But with different protagonists focusing on different countries and different storylines. Now I'd buy that for a dollar. Basically a fully realized anthology like the book sort of is. Only headache is coming up with unique and completely new skills for the new characters maybe with the core skills kept.

Since I am not watching those 9 hours long and other documentaries to see if it's not there by chance, now I gonna present a completely ass-pull theory.
One of the reasons the original team had their IPs taken from them, was that the DE world is bound to end. The new ZA/UM could have made money by finally publishing at least Sacred and Terrible air in proper English translation, fans were calling for it for years. But they did not, they pretend the book doesn't even exist, let alone the concepts of the other planned books in the series.

The majority of fans absolutely hate the idea of ending world, you don't see many fan theories, fanarts and headcanons, that would connect the dots between the book and game. They are more likely to make a Kim/Harry Bakery AU, High school AU and beach episode AU, and millions of ''Jean Vicmere is sad'' fics (I know how it's written, I just disrespect Suresne).
Many changes and updates the studio made to the game after the takeover, were fanservicey (like the Harry's mod). So is, presumably, erasing the idea of total nihilism victory, because they likely had, at some point, different plans than Kurvitz had. But they had underestimated the DE fanbase, that keeps rejecting their work.

 

[Lizard Machine Bugs]

One of the reasons the original team had their IPs taken from them, was that the DE world is bound to end. The new ZA/UM could have made money by finally publishing at least Sacred and Terrible air in proper English translation, fans were calling for it for years. But they did not, they pretend the book doesn't even exist, let alone the concepts of the other planned books in the series.

Honestly, it feels like the team as a whole hadn't made their mind up about the total Nihilism victory, Shivers can warn Harry about it the entroponetic bomb and you get clued into some sort of second revolution brewing in the background. Although the next part is kind of theoretical, I remember reading some stuff about how Pale might now only be caused my Magpies like Harry causing history to happen before it arrives, effectively creating Pale in the future as something is pulled into the past, but by the stagnation of history which the Moralintern is inadvertently causing by trying to stabilize the situation and kidnapping Magpies to Shepard history.
Although that depends on what ending or events the team would have canon for a potential sequel, the point is that I think they left themselves wiggle room.
Personally, the whole end game of the series always felt strangely out of scope for the type of video game DE is. I don't think it's a coincidence the hypothetical sequel is from Cuno's perspective which could have given the team even more wiggle room about the events of DE, if they wanted to give themselves it.

 

[Alabama Gamer]

Does anyone have the meme image about DE successors? If not, I'll have to dig through my phone and find it myself.

 

[Nick Obre]

This?

 

[Lt. H. DuBois]

Im just now learning there was supposed to be a Cuno and Cunoesse game called Locust City

 

[harbringer883]

The fascists ingame are mostly presented as people stuck in the past wishing for a monarchy that wasn't even really theirs.

Honestly, they could have gone harder on it, but communism and liberalism are more of the relevant yoke on Revachol's neck so they get more focus

Fascism in disco elysium also doesn't really work. I think a monarchist/reactionary path might have worked better, considering that their universe has no equivalent to Mussolini, or even hitler. Especially when communism's rise in universe is literally a one to one of the soviet unions.

 

[The oxymoronic European]

Im just now learning there was supposed to be a Cuno and Cunoesse game called Locust City

Yup. Can't quote the post but
@2mm and 99 others
Did a good summary of what it was supposed to be like on page 25
It was pretty far along as well, until Zaum collapsed and it got canned.

 

[Vlad the Implier]

Im just now learning there was supposed to be a Cuno and Cunoesse game called Locust City

It was actually quite promising considering that even after Kurvitz was ousted, Argo Tuulik was still on board at ZA/UM and he was (iirc) the main writer behind Cuno. So at least that sequel would've been authentic insofar as having the protagonists' original writer on board.

Fascism in disco elysium also doesn't really work. I think a monarchist/reactionary path might have worked better, considering that their universe has no equivalent to Mussolini, or even hitler. Especially when communism's rise in universe is literally a one to one of the soviet unions.

Fascism in real life didn't really work either lol.

The Fascist route in DE isn't so much a historical Fascist movement so much as critique on the modern "alt-right". You have Renee who's an actual monarchist and decorated veteran, you have the racist lorry driver who's a fat, incel Revacholian chauvinist. Gary, the evasive shitposter, who becomes passive when confronted directly. And then Measurehead, the Semense supremacist and race scientist who has never seen his own homeland, doesn't date his own race, and also doesn't believe in ever reaching an orgasm or actually reproducing. Do you see any parallels here?

Also Communism in DE isn't a one to one of the USSR, there's quite a lot of inspiration from the Paris Commune.

 

[Gay Sex Enjoyer]

Fascism in real life didn't really work either lol.

Have you ever seen a single on-time train in Revachol?

It's just kind of strange that the fascist route in the game doesn't follow actual fascist political theory and is instead just a vague mishmash of being vaguely racist and/or patriotically nostalgic. Like imagine if the communist storyline didn't involve any kind of actual communist agitprop or iconography and instead exclusively revolved around Harry living with his parents and spending all his free time listening to a nepobaby radio talk show host with a tiny head.

 

[Vlad the Implier]

It's just kind of strange that the fascist route in the game doesn't follow actual fascist political theory and is instead just a vague mishmash of being vaguely racist and/or patriotically nostalgic.

You literally just described /pol/ which was basically my point.

imagine if the communist storyline didn't involve any kind of actual communist agitprop or iconography

My guy, the communist path has you join a book club consisting of two college students and stacking matchboxes with them. The game's devs are communists but they're self aware; this is them making fun of the uselessness of modern "intellectual" communists who spend all day listening to podcasts and sperging out over theory/books instead of any meaningful revolutionary action.

 

[2mm and 99 others]

Honestly, it feels like the team as a whole hadn't made their mind up about the total Nihilism victory, Shivers can warn Harry about it the entroponetic bomb and you get clued into some sort of second revolution brewing in the background. Although the next part is kind of theoretical, I remember reading some stuff about how Pale might now only be caused my Magpies like Harry causing history to happen before it arrives, effectively creating Pale in the future as something is pulled into the past, but by the stagnation of history which the Moralintern is inadvertently causing by trying to stabilize the situation and kidnapping Magpies to Shepard history.
Although that depends on what ending or events the team would have canon for a potential sequel, the point is that I think they left themselves wiggle room.
Personally, the whole end game of the series always felt strangely out of scope for the type of video game DE is. I don't think it's a coincidence the hypothetical sequel is from Cuno's perspective which could have given the team even more wiggle room about the events of DE, if they wanted to give themselves it.

In the book, the Pale is spread by killing a lot of people at once by the nuke, a normal one, not some entroponetic magic, (thus closing off the possible futures those could make happen?). Right after the nuke, the rest of the world reports they had lost some land. What makes connecting the dots not quite straightforward is, that before the nuke, Revachol is described as a nice and luxurious place. Either the Retour got suppressed, or it wasn't bound to happen in that timeline. Or it wasn't that important in the larger scale of things - much more likely ''there was some civilian unrest in one city district in Waterworld's mainland'', than ''visiting an aunt in Sarajevo '92''. That, or Kurvitz did not think things through in details back then.

Another thing is, that while for the reader it may seem the point of the church quest was to make the book make any sense, no one in the book comes up with a theory, that the girls could have disappeared in a pale hole on a beach or something.
It can be explained that in the book, the Coalition has a secret special unit for damage control of mysterious disappearances and likely entroponetic mishaps and shenanigans too, but it's not presented even as a pseudoscientific theory which are already a thing, at least in Revachol (as mentioned by Jeanvic, HDB himself and the Dicemaker).

The magpie theory is kinda hated because who voices it in some form, is Gary the Cryptofascist talking about Seolites, and racism is le bad. But there is the moralist quest part, where they accidentally receive Kim's voice message from a near future, when you mess with the fortress radio. They get this message, even when Kim does not make it to the island at all, which is pointed out as strange by one of the skills, and that it was not supposed to happen like this.

It's all quite frustrating.
All the original authors are still alive, likely still active on the internet, and yet what the fans get, is lost media archeology of deleted devlogs, frames from Locust City videos enhanced and ocr read to make out what it was even supposed to be about and whether it's canon or not, and there is that grifter dev who is selling pieces of concept materials under a threat of lawsuit. And one cumbersomely samizdat-like translated and confusing book originally written in a language, that has about as many active speakers as one bigger euro city. It's a gift that keeps being taken away.

Anyway, for non-redditors or those who are fairly new to the game, here is the amateur translation of the Sacred and Terrible air book in pdf and epub, hope it works.

 

[Vlad the Implier]

Anyway, for non-redditors or those who are fairly new to the game, here is the amateur translation of the book in pdf and epub, hope it works.

I've been meaning to read this but I don't like reading books on screens. I'm thinking of going to a local printer to get a physical copy made.

Unrelated, but I'd really love to see the details/ruleset for the TTRPG Kurvitz and friends played way before Disco Elysium for lore purposes.

 

[Slap47]

Have you ever seen a single on-time train in Revachol?

It's just kind of strange that the fascist route in the game doesn't follow actual fascist political theory and is instead just a vague mishmash of being vaguely racist and/or patriotically nostalgic. Like imagine if the communist storyline didn't involve any kind of actual communist agitprop or iconography and instead exclusively revolved around Harry living with his parents and spending all his free time listening to a nepobaby radio talk show host with a tiny head.

It's just kind of strange that the fascist route in the game doesn't follow actual fascist political theory and is instead just a vague mishmash of being vaguely racist and/or patriotically nostalgic.

I feel like thats kinda the point though.

Its making fun of the far-right for not really caring about ideology. Its about national restoration, chauvinism and revenge. You can look at all of the fascist philosophers and Conservative Revolution thinkers, but at the end of the day the actual policies of the actual fascist leaders are clearly incoherent and them just going off of "vibes". The actual rank and file who embraced these ideas also knew very little of these philosophers and writers. Mussolini got his salute and image from popular movies. Hitler's economic policy switched from borderline neoliberal deregulation/privatization to mass nationalization in preparation from war. Franco attempted fascist organization/autarky, but bent the knee to more economically liberal social conservatives pretty soon into his reign.

The game is clearly inspired by the interwar/post-ww1 era and like today that far-right were not reading theory. They were "men of action" and leaned into that aesthetic. Although the ending of the fascist route is more of a commentary on the modern far-right, being less men of action and instead men stoically fetishizing their own suffering.

 

[Gay Sex Enjoyer]

Its making fun of the far-right for not really caring about ideology. Its about national restoration, chauvinism and revenge. You can look at all of the fascist philosophers and Conservative Revolution thinkers, but at the end of the day the actual policies of the actual fascist leaders are clearly incoherent and them just going off of "vibes". The actual rank and file who embraced these ideas also knew very little of these philosophers and writers.

I mean that's fair, it's just that at the same time it's not like there's a true and honest fascist philosophical basis that Harry is caught up in and the intellectual side of it is merely ignored in favor of the usual "man of action" pursuit of vibes, the intellectual side (as far as we know) just flat out doesn't exist. There is no theory behind any of it, it's just Harry wandering around like the suave homeless man that he is and making shit up as he goes along.

It works as commentary on post-philosophy far-rightism but it just shows up out of nowhere, literally out of Harry's ass. Kraz Mazov and Scientific Communism get to exist and be actual things in-universe along with the communist path, but the inverse is just people's vague desire for the monarchy to come back and not liking foreigners with zero cohesion beyond Harry watching too many Ryan Gosing edits.

It just feels kinda shallow compared to the other ideas in the game.

 

[Nick Wilde]

So... What real life fascist theory should it be drawing on? Genuine question, if you know some books I don't know of, name them.

Part of the problem here is that communism has concrete foundational texts, and it has a continued legacy into the modern day. Fascism doesn't have so much of that. You have Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and maybe Mosely, but those guys were all quite different from each other, politically. There was no bible of fascism for them to base their ideology on, and of them, neither Franco or Hitler even identified themselves as fascist. There are no modern day fascist parties, there's no fascist movement, it's more of a historical description of a certain type of mid-20th century authoritatianism than a coherent ideology. Most of the "theory" about fascism is post-hoc analysis of regimes that are already extinct.

Honestly I think they did their best with the source material here, the issue is that fascism actually just isn't that deep or well defined as an ideology (that's also why it's annoying, and hard to effectively refute, when people describe anythign they don't like as fascist).

 

[Gay Sex Enjoyer]

Part of the problem here is that communism has concrete foundational texts, and it has a continued legacy into the modern day. Fascism doesn't have so much of that. You have Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and maybe Mosely, but those guys were all quite different from each other, politically. There was no bible of fascism for them to base their ideology on, and of them, neither Franco or Hitler even identified themselves as fascist.

This could've all been solved if there was a Revocholian philosopher with a big ass mustache and a hard to spell last name smh my head.

 

[Gay Sex Enjoyer]

I think a lot of the confusion around what "Fascism" is and isn't comes from people stretching the term to include very different things in very different places, to the point the term becomes borderline useless. Germany's Nazism and Spain's Francoism were not interchangeable with actual Italian Fascism, as Fascism doesn't have the same philosophical scope or rationalization that something like Communism does, it's fundamentally about a singular nation and it's specific history at a specific point in time. It cannot simply be slotted into any nation where workers and class struggle exists and "work out of the box", as it were.

As for what Revocholian Fascism, if it were a thing, should draw on I'd just say Italy as that's where it came from, but even then it would probably look nothing like Italian Fascism simply because Revochol isn't Italy and there isn't even an Italy stand-in for them to copy their homework off of like a certain Austrian painter. Fascism at the end of the day is fundamentally Italian, it cannot be separated from it's origin without losing half of what makes it what it is.

When you try to widen it's scope into being more universal like communism then it just gets watered down into authoritarian nationalism and maybe some central planning, which isn't much of anything, and the rest is filled in by whatever that nation has pumping through it's veins at the time.

But what we see in-game isn't even that, what's presented as the fascist path isn't fascist even by a watered-down knockoff metric. It's just that Harry got a stomachache, resents his wife, and lives in an aimless nation. He has more in common with my uncle than he does with even modern day self-described fascists, retarded as they are.


I think 99% of my issue essentially comes from them just calling it fascist when it simply isn't, and especially considering there isn't any form of fasces in this setting to begin with so even the word itself is nonsensical.

If it was a completely different word then there would be no issue but the devs felt like they had something to say. (and no the "well you could just call it traditionalism tee hee" lampshading doesn't count, that's just more commentary )