May 4, 2018

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut - ZAUM_Dani

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:

Apr 28, 2018

Disco Elysium is shaping up to be the most original RPG of the year

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut

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.

Apr 12, 2018

MEET THE SKILLS - PHYSIQUE

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut - ZAUM_Dani

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!