The PC Gamer team return for a freewheelin’ discussion about (mostly) PC gaming. Pip is annoyed by a fish, Phil is confused by a jungle, and Sam is nauseated by a corpse. Also, a mysterious signal; a transmission from a far off land. But who is its sender, and why are they surrounded by cardboard?
The PC Gamer UK Podcast is a weekly podcast about PC gaming. Thoughts? Feedback? Requests? Tweet us @PCGamerPod, or email letters@pcgamer.com. This week’s music is from Tomb Raider 3.
Now that we have a flashy screenshot to illustrate it, let's talk about combat in Disco Elysium.
1. There are only a handful of instances of it. These are half-scripted, pseudo turn-based, set piece combat encounters. They are not cheap to animate and program. They come along as the pace and style of your investigation dictates. When you get cocky. When you push a violent angle. When you don’t move fast enough. When you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is the narrative logic of a cop thriller, or a hardboiled novel, not a war game.
But they will come along (although only one of the encounters is entirely unavoidable).
2. There are tactical choices to be made. Let’s take the screenshot as an example. The entire scene is one nerve-racking tumble of choices. These bad dudes are trying to get to what’s behind you. (Spoiler territory – not shown in the screenshot). Do you try to talk them down, try a peaceful angle? Or shoot first? As you deplete topics, the conversation will return you to this hub. Taking the shot may have gotten easier if you lulled them into a sense of security – or harder if you’ve been tricked. Your skills will advise you, guide you. But are they right? Maybe they’re just scared?
And that’s only the foreplay. When you do decide to shoot, you do so by clicking on that Hand/Eye Coordination red check. (If it’s your attack of choice of course – what’s available depends on your weapons: more on that later).
What follows is what we writers call a whirl. Think of it as a pseudo-turn. First you either hit or miss with that Villiers 9mm. The resulting havoc will play out in cool and insanely budget-consuming animations. The opposing force will then try to retaliate. At that point the screen will freeze into a time-stop. During this time-stop you take in your immediate surroundings and consult your skills. This is the titular whirl, since you’re constantly directed back to a hub of choices. You may gain tactical information from your surroundings. See what your partner is doing. All the while you’re confronted with a Reaction Speed red check to dodge the incoming enemy fire. That active check becomes harder or easier depending on your skills guidance via passive checks: Visual Calculus has drawn your attention to the angle of attack, Half Light has gotten scared and wants you to run! Once you click on that red check, you either get shot or dodge the bullet, and enter another whirl.
3. As demonstrated, there are dice rolls, with percentages. A ton of them. We use active dice rolls of the red check variant, where both the negative and positive outcomes are played out. The stars of the show here are: Hand / Eye Coordination, Physical Instrument, and Reaction Speed, but others feature too. And as always, you can buff these rolls with the Electrochemistry system, by carrying a bottle and a ciggie into combat, bad cop style.
4. Your items decide what you can do. No gun – no shooty, etc. They also provide old fashioned bonuses and penalties to the active checks you’re rolling. Wearing a heavy armour makes dodging that shot harder. Having a better gun makes hitting that shot easier. A sports visor keeps the sun from your eye and makes you more likely to get that Visual Calculus tip during the second whirl.
And not only that – thoughts in your thought cabinet may also contribute. These mercenaries are wearing a strange new type of ceramic armour. Research it – for weaknesses! – and that Hand/Eye Coordination gets one of those massive bonuses game devs like to talk about.
5. It’s not all number crunching, it’s also about style. You’re going to want to have a high Pain Threshold character for a combat encounter, just to get painfully immersive information about your body breaking down, in exquisite, spleen rupturing detail. It’s like Nabokov said: dying is fun. (Only it’s really not). Or max out on Shivers and see what this muzzle flash looks like from the perspective of the wind; hear it echo down the street. And you can still use Rhetoric, Drama, Authority etc too — you don’t have to stop talking the opponents down, or taunting them, or relaying information to your squadmate, because the “battle grid” came out. Dialogue options can be part of the whirls.
Okay, so to recap: each whirl begins with all actors moving in a totally unique way, animated by Eduardo Rubio, our animation lead — one hell of an animator, that guy. We use time-stops at the end of each whirl. Then there are options to consult your senses, where skills jive in. And each whirl is exited by rolling another red check that begins another animation, etc. Until the situation is resolved, or you’re dead.
Oh and:
6. If someone gets killed during all this – someone important to you or the case – they stay dead. There is no disconnection between story and combat in Disco Elysium. The results of each decision you make – or fail to make, because you were trying to be diplomatic – is played out. People die, people have their bodies broken. They remember that you tried to punch them and fell over, because you were drunk. This stuff stays with you. You sustain a wound and people say: hey, you don’t look so good officer, stop bleeding in my fishing village.
If this sounds like a lot to produce, then that’s because it is. Do not expect an encounter to await behind every corner. But I thoroughly believe this approach is, if not the future of RPGs, then an early warning of that future. Consider the possibilities: fisticuffs in a burning building, a direct artillery hit on your Station, an exchange of fire during a car crash. These are all action scenes we’ve told in the pen and paper version of the Elysium role playing system. It’s our brand of pen and paper action scene – and this set piece centred combat system is our way of getting it to you, in a video game. The beauty of the system is — we can just as well put you in a squad based combat situation, as we can have you jumping over a chasm to get into the harbour. It’s a one-size-fits-all solution for action scenes, comprising both combat, and acrobatics / environment interactions. Both use whirls and time-stops.
It is powered by Metric, our downright vitruvian character customization that represents the human mind and body in a realistic manner, and was made possible with some pretty complicated animation programming.
Next time we’ll talk about those Motoric skills that are crucial to surviving a situation like this:
Disco Elysium is part isometric RPG, part 'hardboiled cop show', so say the developers. The game has been getting a lot of attention lately, and we've played about three hours combined of a super early build, which represents about a quarter of the game and is very much meant to be a work-in-progress.
Tom Senior, online editor: Disco Elysium is ostensibly an RPG about solving a murder mystery, but you spend much of the game defining your character through internal dialogue with aspects of your personality. It’s one of the few games I’ve played where it makes sense for the protagonist to have amnesia, because without an established sense of the character you’re playing you’re free to be the freewheeling incompetent drunk detective you want to be.
In Disco Elysium your personality is a state of compromise between your brain and your character s urges, and this often has hilarious consequences.
The game cleverly uses the cRPG format to simulate your internal conflicts. Your stats—volition, authority, empathy, and so on—behave like party members that live inside your character’s head. They can barge into your conversations to try to offer help. Sometimes they can take over to push social situations in unpredictable directions. You can nurture them as you would any RPG stat, but instead of increasing damage output or defence, you’re angling your character’s entire personality in that direction.
I find the results completely engrossing, even when not much plot is really happening. The typical RPG approach offers you a collection of outfits to slip into: do you want to be paragon right now, or renegade? In Disco Elysium your personality is a state of compromise between your brain and your character’s urges, and this often has hilarious consequences. Thank god there are jokes in it. It would be unbearably dense otherwise.
Samuel Roberts, UK editor-in-chief: "Making a mockery of yourself is a recurring theme in Disco Elysium," is what Lauren Morton said in her preview of the game earlier this month. I agree. I'm not sure about you, Tom, but my time spent with it so far mostly involved trying and failing to achieve certain things in the line of duty: being too pathetic to lift some dumbbells, injuring myself by trying to barge open a heavy door and mostly being mocked while questioning potential witnesses.
Of the four 'characters' you can select at the start of this early build—there's logician, sensitive, predator and detective—I picked the last one. An all-rounder, but great at nothing. And that's how I felt. I've spent two hours wandering around the city of Revachol, looking into mysteries and little sidequests, and not achieving much. I sense this is a valid way of playing the game, though: not taking the time to rush everything, but to speak to every NPC, to investigate each detail, and to see who you can annoy in different ways.
Occasionally, though, I'll have a breakthrough moment where I'll convince a shopkeeper to let me investigate the 'cursed' part of her store that's supposedly been the scourge of many businesses before this one, by convincing her I've previously investigated 'paranatural situations' even though I'm lying. I feel like I'm an idiot detective who'll sometimes happen across a break in a case by accident, because I got a lucky dice roll. And I quite like playing as a character like that.
Tom, did you feel like you made much progress in investigating the actual mystery at the heart of this early part of the game?
Tom: Pretty much none, and I’ve played for over an hour. I think that’s because it’s very easy to get sucked into incredibly detailed situations. Just looking in a steamed up mirror triggers a lengthy identity crisis. I used my partner’s radio to call back to base, just to see what would happen, and ended up in a long, tragically funny exchange with my colleagues. Every little situation is examined in minute detail. This could so easily get boring and frustrating, and it might feel that way to some, but I’ve enjoyed it a lot so far because the writing is so good. I can see how it will stand up to replays really well.
Samuel: Oh thank heavens, I thought it was just me making no progress. I played it for a couple of hours and similarly found myself achieving very little. Like you say, it's a game of tangents where the funny writing draws you deeper and deeper into something that might go nowhere—I badgered someone reading a book outside a store who described herself as "no one, just a working class woman." Clearly, she wanted to be left alone, but I responded with "Shouldn't a working class woman be working?" in response to what the logic part of my character's brain was thinking. They're often granular conversations about nothing, and sometimes I'll just pick a dickish choice just to see the results. But they're really enjoyable, and you can keep poking at them, providing and receiving funny responses.
I like that Disco Elysium superficially reminds me of older RPGs but has a totally different execution.
What I did accomplish was checking out the details of a crime scene, just outside the building where you wake up. A dead body has been hanging from a tree for a week, and you have to investigate the circumstances behind it. First of all, my character vomited twice just while trying to get a closer look at and remove the body, even though I'd gone looking for something that could prevent that the second time. But then I pieced together that the nearby boot prints probably belong to some dock workers, and I started to get a sense of why they might have had a motive to murder this particular person.
I like that Disco Elysium superficially reminds me of older RPGs but has a totally different execution. I could see myself just wandering around the city, talking to as many people as possible, and stumbling across progress to the actual case.
Tom: Even the art is a cool mashup of ‘70s cop show and futuristic shanty town. It’s grotesque in the truest sense of the word, comically twisted and ugly. You wake up after a massive bender and everyone is cross with you because you were supposed to clean up the corpse in the yard that’s been there for a week now. You’re a bleary, boozy cigarette monster but no-one can quite bring themselves to tell you to sod off because you’re police.
I hope the murder mystery gives the game enough momentum to keep me hooked beyond this first area. I don’t have a sense of how long the game is going to be from the first hour, but I expect each person’s playthrough will vary depending on how far you want to poke and prod every single object.
It’s one of the most interesting RPGs I’ve played in ages, because it uses old fashioned systems to simulate social situations to a level of detail I’m not used to in games. I left the building I woke up in and asked an NPC for directions. In the middle of a polite conversation one of my traits rolled an impromptu perception check and informed me that the woman was black. It’s a brilliant demonstration of implicit bias, and it shows how the personality system can explore important themes. If the rest of the game can keep this level of inventiveness going for its duration, it's going to be quite special.
Disco Elysium - The Final Cut - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Astrid Johnson)
It s a podcast special! Astrid Johnson takes us through the halls of London game show EGX Rezzed, on a search for oddities and weirdness. And she finds plenty of both. There s Stereopolis, a game projected onto a disc of frosted glass, or Wobble Garden, which is played entirely by twanging a bunch of springy door stoppers (pictured above).
It s an overview of the show for those who couldn’t make it this year. We also learn about the plane tinkering of Above, two-player sausage-dog cooperation in Phogs, and Disco Elysium, an isometric RPG featuring an alcoholic detective having an unconscious argument with his lizard brain. And then there’s the tale of Fernando’s chicken… (more…)
Disco Elysium - The Final Cut - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Astrid Johnson)
It s a podcast special! Astrid Johnson takes us through the halls of London game show EGX Rezzed, on a search for oddities and weirdness. And she finds plenty of both. There s Stereopolis, a game projected onto a disc of frosted glass, or Wobble Garden, which is played entirely by twanging a bunch of springy door stoppers (pictured above).
It s an overview of the show for those who couldn’t make it this year. We also learn about the plane tinkering of Above, two-player sausage-dog cooperation in Phogs, and Disco Elysium, an isometric RPG featuring an alcoholic detective having an unconscious argument with his lizard brain. And then there’s the tale of Fernando’s chicken… (more…)
There were plenty of things to play, too, and it was arguably the strongest year yet - with studios big and small showcasing fascinating new games, and some truly innovative things to play them with in the Leftfield Collection, RPS area and elsewhere.
As with previous years, this isn't a definitive list, but a personal selection from the team at Eurogamer as we roamed the show, and will hopefully serve as something to keep an eye out for in the coming months.
Disco Elysium is my secret side infatuation in 2018. First the game was operating under the name “No Truce With The Furies” which the devs didn’t think stood out enough (!!) and then each new look I get at the game reveals a more complicated and exciting RPG about crime solving and I just want to be playing it now. Not even for first play-though; I want to be on my third play-through where I’m deliberately trying to break the game. Bonus: there’s an original score by the rock n roll band British Sea Power. What isn’t to like here? Well, depending on how upset you are by complicated moral choices, this new set of skills listed for player development might be your cut-off point — because it gets dark.
These six skills are probably my favourites of the whole bunch. They were certainly the hardest to come up with. We finished Physique (FYS) while already deep into production, whereas the other three were ready years before. It’s surprisingly difficult to depict the physicality of a character – their flesh, blood and tendons – in a rule set. This is reflected in RPG tradition, where physical characters are one dimensional musclemen, somewhere between an athlete and a joke. It’s paradoxical how uninteresting it is to play a physical character in a genre that is built around them – nothing interesting happens inside the body of Conan the Barbarian.
This was our starting point: what kind of physical character would we want to play in a desktop setting? They would have to be murky, dangerous, sinewy beings. Mysteries even to themselves. More Nameless One than Torgen the Axe-Dude. To achieve this we had to come up with a set of skills that is – surprisingly – the most esoteric and out there of all the four Attributes. Instead of getting the most basic experience, you get probably the most advanced and experimental playing with a high FYS char.
Physique skills are also the most silent of the bunch. They don’t speak as often as INT for example. But the times your body does speak to you hold more weight.
Physical Instrument
Physical Instrument is your primary corporeal tool: your muscles and your skeleton. Physical Instrument is your hand to hand combat skill, your inner coach. He likes to be addressed as “Coach Physical Instrument”. You can call him Coach, or you can call him Coach Physical Instrument.
Put points into this guy to punch a suspect in the face. Or 360 degree spin kick the living daylights out of them. But it’s not just violence. You can use this skill to physically analyse the qualities of a “beat” on a dance track. (Coach Physical Instrument thinks it needs more bass).
In addition to being the voice of your musculature, Physical Instrument tries to give you social advice from time to time: be less sensitive, stop being such a sissy, drop down and give me fifty. Coach Physical Instrument is all about masculinity, with little to no self awareness. I like to think it governs your muscles, skeleton and your sweat glands. Add Suggestion to dial things back a little, add some sensitivity training? He turns you into a raging gym trainer if you let him run the show.
Electrochemistry
Physical Instrument is nothing compared to Electrochemistry, who turns you into a lecherous drug addict. I’ll level with you – it’s one of the funnest skills in the game. Not only does it crave for any and all substances on Earth, it’s also a treasure trove of knowledge on each of them. For some reason this cop knows exactly what GABA receptors do, what serotonin syndrome means, and what kind of cocaine the Filippian kings did four centuries ago.
But beware – Electrochemistry also governs your other dopamine responses. That is: your sexuality. Electrochemistry inserts lurid thoughts into your head, with absolutely no filter. It does not play nice either, it’s an animal. Yet it has its own atmospheric, ruinous take on reality. You should exercise caution with this guy and make sure you have some Volition to keep things in check.
Having low Electrochemistry makes you a calmer person, more in control of yourself. Having high Electrochemistry makes you not turn up to work the following day, yet more fun to be around after 10PM.
It also has a nice mechanical function. Disco Elysium lets you use potions (ie drugs) mid-dialogue. Equip cigarettes in one hand and a vial of speed in the other. Encounter a difficult check? Spark one up and then toot a line! (In secret of course, turn around a bit first – it’d be pretty strange if a cop just did a line in front of you wouldn’t it?)
Blasting a substance gives you a cute little animation and adds a temporary bonus to your Attributes. Alcohol gives +2 to Physique, for example. Electrochemistry adds extra charges to these items, so a high Electrochemistry character gets more out of their drugs. The skill also leads you down a path of substance abuse, giving you quests to procure amphetamine, or just buy a magnum sized bottle of wine.
These quests are often non-refusable.
Endurance
Endurance is your metabolism and your circulatory system. It’s what keeps you alive. Endurance determines the amount of health points you have. Health is our primary resource pool, in addition to morale. Run out of health and you have a heart attack. Have too many heart attacks and you die. (It’s a known fact that cool cops can shake off one or two cardiac arrests like it weren’t a thing).
Endurance makes you a more robust person. The more robust a person you are, the more fun you can have. And by fun I mean drugs and silly things. Remember that vial of speed you sniffed? In addition to depleting charges, it straight up damages your health. There are medicines to heal yourself up, of course. I hear doing magnesium, GABA-max, speed and the psychedelic anti-radiation drug Pyrholidone is great, because you get to feel like a superhuman, have beautiful visions and there are NO DOWNSIDES! (Until you run out of magnesium and GABA-max).
This mad scientist’s lab is one of Disco Elysium’s more strategic elements. If it turns out the way we intend it to, it should be a pretty fun balancing act. And you get to do more of it if you have a high Endurance.
So far so normal. Until you find out that Endurance is also your gut feeling. And what your gut feeling tells you is – immigrants are bad for the economy. There are varied multistage reasons why women get paid less. You should return Revachol to the likeness of the Holy Sun In The Sky.
Yes. If you play a certain way you may find out this guy’s a fascist, much like the Rhetoric skill under INT tends to be a little socialist…
Half Light
Fear! Aggression! Half Light is your fight or flight response. This one’s definitely the chattiest of the bunch. Not only does he mix well with a high Physical Instrument, telling you to smash everyone in the face before they strangle you in your sleep, Half Light also has some pretty keen observations.
There is a saying in Estonian: fear has big eyes. So Half Light and its big bulging fear-filled eyes may notice things the other skills miss. Half Light does not only get scared of people, it also gets scared of ideas and concepts. Sometimes a person’s name can fill you with terror. Why? Perhaps they’re more than they seem to be.
Perhaps you’re paranoid?
One of the nicest things to do with Half Light is aggressively interrogate suspects. Barraging them with nonsensical, frightening questions: did you kill him? Why did you kill him? Are you going to kill me like you killed him?!
A low Half Light, strangely enough, makes you both less aggressive and less afraid. In a way braver.
Pain Threshold
Pain Threshold lets you shake off that heart attack I mentioned, like it was nothing – a pin prick. It’s your get out of jail free card for physical damage – it’s what makes you crawl forward, bloodied, ready for revenge.
Pain Threshold also doubles as your inner masochist. You like this stuff. Please, can I have some more? And not only physical pain, but also psychological. Pain Threshold seeks it out and enjoys it. Painful memories? Nice. Excuse me, bookstore woman, what’s the most excruciatingly sad book about human relations you have? I want one where they love each other but it really doesn’t work out.
High Pain Threshold turns you into a pretty unhealthy person, paradoxically.
Shivers
Shivers is the strangest one out there and it’s proven to be a favourite for many people who’ve had the chance to play the game for longer. You know those hair follicles you have on your arm, on the back of your neck? Notice how they stand up sometimes? Accompanied by a cold sensation? Shivers controls that – your shiver response. It’s a residual leftover from hundreds of thousands of years ago, when you had a use for it…
What it does now, in the city of Revachol, in the early fifties, I can’t tell you. It’s a secret. This skill has its own storyline. The signals your shiver response relays to you seem to come from somewhere. The sensations want to tell you something.
All I can tell you is – Shivers connects you to the atmosphere of the city of Revachol. To the side alleys and the burnt down city blocks far away. It’s the sound of the streets, the ghost that rises old newspapers from the cobblestones. It turns you into a lightning rod for sudden temperature shifts, barometrics and changes in weather. Shivers even reacts to the weather our randomly generated climate system summons. If it’s raining Shivers tells you one thing, if it’s snowing, it’ll tell you another.
Ultimately, a high Shivers lets you hear and feel the city of Revachol. It is the only clearly supra-natural ability you have in the game. Figuring out what it all means and who speaks to you through those rising hair follicles, is a mystery for you to solve.
I suspect it will take quite a few playthroughs, though. This game really has a crazy amount of little things hidden in the way the skill system reacts to the things you see and do in Revachol.
–
Coming soon – Motorics. The cool, down to Earth counterpart to Physiques’ unholy mysteries. Also if you're London based, we'll be at EGX Rezzed all weekend at the Tobacco Dock! Hope to see you there!
I am a cop. At least, I suspect I am because the woman outside the hotel room I woke up in told me so. I don’t actually remember being a cop. Or how the hotel room window got shattered. Or why my face looks like I lost a fight with the pavement. Or my own name. I don’t remember anything about the case I’m supposed to be solving: a dead body strung up in a tree outside the hotel I’m staying in. Not a good day to be me, it seems, but if I'm someone who can solve murders, maybe I'm the type of person who can solve the mystery of his own identity. Maybe.
Disco Elysium begins with these amnesic questions. You open the isometric RPG in the retro-futuristic city of Revachol, an ugly urban locale whose dilapidated architecture and stone-eyed citizens are rendered with the beautiful long brush strokes and contrasting colors of an oil painting. Disco Elysium is being developed by Estonian studio ZA/UM, from its new location in London.
A case of disco fever
After clicking around to collect my clothes and limbs, I find my way downstairs where a morose-looking bartender is itching to hassle me. I gather from his scorn and sarcasm that I should have been dealing with the dead body in the tree out back instead of drinking myself stupid and losing my memory. There’s someone waiting for me at the door, another cop, who doesn’t seem too impressed with the fact that I’ve gotten nothing done. I pretend that I’m still somehow in control of the situation by just giving deadpan answers to his questions without elaborating. “Have you gotten the body out of the tree?” I look through my dialogue options: outright lying, deflecting, or just telling him no. “I haven’t,” I say, as if I might have a reason for it. He doesn’t seem to buy it.
We head through the back alley into an ugly lot where a body is hanging from a single tree in gross contrast with the colorful planks of wood nailed to its trunk for children to climb. The only child nearby is not interested in climbing trees. He’s throwing rocks at the body and shouting obscenities at me, and isn't in the mood to answer questions. When I try to assert my authority, he and his friend scream bloody murder that I’m about to assault them. I retreat with my partner/handler, whose name I can't remember any more than my own.
My only solace is that by choosing a character type focusing on intellect I seem to have a natural ability to read the crime scene. My partner can’t make anything out of the mess of footprints at the base of the tree but I take a shot at it. The right side of the screen records our conversation history, with my options to either make an uneducated guess or attempt a skill check against my intellect below. Thanks to my character class, I handily pass the skill check and identify eight separate sets of shoes and their sizes. One has a funny gait. One weighs significantly more than the others. That one was carrying the victim, most likely. After walking back and forth several times, the group stood around the tree together. A lynching, I decide.
A very particular set of skills
Rather than lengthy exposition, Disco Elysium delivers the bulk of its information through dialogue. Sometimes it’s a conversation with an NPC, but just as often it’s a discussion with the protagonist’s own mind. This concept extends to Disco Elysium’s character attributes, which aren't the standard strength, dexterity, and intelligence. Your detective invests in improving his mental acuity. He may become a skilled orator who excels in persuasion or he can roll a little more Holmesy to dissect visual clues around him. The downside is that the detective’s warring inner narrative has ways of forcing itself out.
While interviewing the disgruntled bartender who is unfortunate enough to have caught my attention, one of my gut instincts speaks up in the dialogue window to insist this guy is trying to hide something. Push him, it demands. I do, and it turns out my hunch is ill-informed. I press the poor man harder and harder, unable to stop myself from declaring that he in fact strung up the fellow in the tree. The bartender grows more disgruntled until I’ve made a fool of myself in front of the partner/handler who’s here to nudge me along.
The skills you invest in give you impressive abilities but may also urge you to express yourself in inconvenient ways.
There’s an inverse relationship between your mental skills and your ability to trust them. Like my aggressive attempt to grill the bartender, the authoritarian side of your detective’s personality may believe that someone is disrespecting your authority and suggest you put them in their place. Is it necessary? Or are you just a man with a hammer who sees a bunch of nails?
Making a mockery of yourself is a recurring theme in Disco Elysium. ZA/UM’s writing team has found that the detective’s failure is often more amusing than his successes. The skills you invest in give you impressive abilities but may also urge you to express yourself in inconvenient ways. I knew that accusing the bartender was probably a dead-end conversation but as the detective accrues more skills, each pushing their own agenda inside his head, distinguishing a wild theory from an astute observation may become more difficult.
Disco Elysium’s other novel concept is the Thought Cabinet, a kind of inventory from which the player can equip thoughts and ideas they’ve collected to the detective’s active memory. Ruminating on these thoughts in various combinations can lead to new realizations about yourself or about the case. They can also irreversibly change your personality.
ZA/UM’s driving force, both in the game’s design and it’s development, is the idea of the alternate present. While the city of Revachol is a vision of the present where cars and phones never took on their final sleek and sexy physical forms, ZA/UM imagines an alternate present of our own where the classic Infinity Engine RPGs of the '90s spawned games obsessed not with action combat but narrative delivery. They imagine themselves having followed the path not taken, skipping over some twenty years of theoretical evolution, and arriving at what they believe RPGs would have looked like in 2018 under different influences. It’s an ambitious thesis, but one which makes Disco Elysium feel different from your standard RPG even in the short time I spent with it at PAX East.
As mentioned in the last post Meet The Skills: Psyche, our Lead Designer Robert Kurvitz previously talked about the Intellect Skills on our website.
In Metric (our character system) there are six skills that comprise your Intellect: Logic, Rhetoric, Drama, Encyclopedia, Conceptualization and Visual Calculus. They are represented here by their work-in-progress portraits.
Logic
Logic is raw intellectual power. If you want to analyze the living daylights out of the case, take Logic. Formulate theories about what happened, or detect inconsistencies in the statements people make to you. It’s useful for not getting bamboozled.
Logic loves being right, however. To a fault. It’s a brilliant lie detector until faced with intellectual flattery. Then it starts tooting its own horn. Your Drama skill might interfere: people are pretending, manipulating you, while Logic – blinded by its own brilliance – yammers on about how infallible it is.
In heroic difficulty rolls, Logic can induce near-transcendence-like pleasure from performing raw operations on events and numbers. (It also does maths for you.) And it states the obvious. Logic loves an easy challenge, whatever it’s claims.
Rhetoric
Rhetoric is your ability to debate. Nitpick, make intellectual discourse. It doesn’t need to be an argument, you can just shoot off your mouth and take hearty pleasure from it. But let’s be honest – mostly Rhetoric just bickers. About politics.
All political discourse falls under Rhetoric. You can mold it into a weapon of fascist sable rattling, evicting potato-loving kojkos and deformed himean pygmees left to right. Rid Revachol of aliens in transit! Or become the ultimate liberast (perpetrator of the sin of liberasty), extolling free trade and slimy personal freedoms at the expense of the downtrodden. This is achieved through researching political projects in your Thought Cabinet, then having them supercharge your Rhetoric skill.
A souped up, ideologically informed Rhetoric is an impressive beast, but it gets you into trouble. The twist here is that Rhetoric – our persuasion ability – doesn’t really persuade anyone. Most of the time it just makes you new enemies. While your beliefs calcify.
Encyclopedia
Enclyclopedia is your knack for trivia. It’s perhaps the talkiest of all the skills, pulling out drawers of fascinating if questionable tidbits of knowledge. Sometimes real nuggets of gold too. It’s up to you to discern between the two.
Encyclopedia adores brands, marks, makes of pistolette and motor-carriage, street names, addresses, species of cockatoo, Great Century military leaders, rock music icons, Messinian ceramic manufacturers … Buy it and max it out, if you want a deluge of lore.
You may even find special, reoccurring places within your Encyclopedia. Like visions: a blackboard of names with all the cops in East Revachol on it, with all their confirmed kills and cases solved. Or a mysterious index of radio frequencies…
Drama
Drama is a god damn liar. Deliver believable deviations from reality, sometimes with the goal to deceive people, but not necessarily. You may just want to entertain as well.
We thought long and hard about how deceit is handled in RPGs and decided it needs to be more about performance in No Truce With The Furies. We want each of the skills to be a little world of it’s own, an investment worth considering. So lying became stagecraft, an amalgam of fourberie and deceit, with entertainment – and even singing. You can do karaoke with Drama, or perform spot on imitations of people.
Drama is also the counter to Drama. It informs you when Drama is being used on you. And although Intellect skills in general are more mentally oriented, Drama has its uses in combat as well. Feign death. Do drunken fighting. Maybe even quadrupedal movement…
Conceptualization
Conceptualization is your capacity for original thought. Make fresh associations, really delve into the concepts of the world – from Jan Kaarp’s postmodernist karperie, to Revachol’s arabesque architectural style dideridada, or even the concept of hardcore as deployed by the burgeoning dance music scene – then add your own contribution to these works! It’s your general purpose cultural theorist, used for both criticism and creation.
Okay, I’ll level with you. Conceptualization makes you into an Art Cop. You get extra lines of description in scenes, and you get to come up with stuff like poems, one-liners and a cool nom de guerre for yourself. An artist’s name, if you will. Conceptualization is the difference between hanging yourself and jumping into a live volcano. (No literal live volcanos are present in No Truce With The Furies for the time being.)
Visual Calculus
Visual Calculus is your forensics skill. It represents your grasp of the laws of physics, motion particularly. Create models of past events in your mind’s eye, trace dotted lines across the room, read tire tracks to recreate an automobile accident. Even notice tactical opportunities in combat situations – then take advantage of them. (Perception + Visual Calculus = the ultimate sniper)
We’re building a special, stylistic overlay that covers the world when certain Visual Calculus checks succeed. This lets us visualize shards of glass falling out of the window, a car backing into the fence, or political prisoners standing in front of a firing squad, half a century ago… all painted into the isometric world around you.
It looks great and I’m really sorry we haven’t shown it off yet. Just a few more tweaks first though…
I’m going to be candid and say Visual Calculus is a really cool skill and you should probably take it if you don’t want to miss out on all the cool. The only reason not to take it is that it’s a luxury. You need more essential stuff to stay alive and on top of things.
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So to wrap it up – Intellect does not make you get on well with yourself, or with other people. It lets you peel off layer after layer from the world, getting to its inner workings, modelling its events and bending it’s structures. If that’s what you want, stick five or six points into it at character creation and later buy two or three skills to boot.
It’s been my ambition as a pen and paper DM to make heavy mental labour as engaging and wildly entertaining as combat, or even more so. Of the four main Attributes, Intellect was perhaps the hardest to nail. What it really comes down to is how the actual situations are written in the game — and most of all, how interestingly you play them out. The skills are just prompters in the play you’re starring in, whispering suggestions to you from within. It’s up to you to decide whose ideas you want more of, and what to do with them. But naming and dividing between areas of juristiction is everything in systems — and I’m certain this cast was worth getting together all these years.
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We'd love to know what your favourite skills are so far, from the Psyche and Intellect posts! Let us know below!
