Hello everyone!

It's that time of year again, and we're as busy as ever. We recently returned from a very successful show at PAX West (hopefully some of you were able to drop by and say hello) and now we can talk about where our next adventure is taking us...

EGX!!

That's right, in less than 2 weeks myself & the team will be heading to the NEC Birmingham for the UK's biggest gaming event! We'll be there all 3 days, 20th - 23rd September. Follow the neon sign.



Are you intrigued about how Disco Elysium came to be? Want to get inside the developers minds? Then you're in for a treat this EGX. Alex Wiltshire will be hosting a developer session with our very own Aleksander Rostov (Art Director) and Robert Kurvitz (Lead Writer & Designer) exploring the making of Disco Elysium. Friday 21st - 1pm. You won't want to miss this 😉

We'd appreciate it if you could help spread the word by sharing our Facebook & Twitter posts, and we'd love to know if you'll be at EGX!

See you there
Dani :)

Hello everyone!

Your friendly Community Manager is here to remind you that we have less than ONE week left until PAX West! Myself and the other ZA/UM team members can’t wait to get to Seattle & show off Disco Elysium to everyone there. Let us know if you’ll be going in the comments, we’d love to see you!

Don’t forget to keep an eye on our social media accounts as we’ll be posting lots of photos over the next week of what we are getting up to in Seattle and at PAX West.

Disco(rd) Elysium
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Recently on our Twitter we have been sharing some of the awesome games showing alongside us with the IndieMEGABOOTH, so I thought I’d put them together into a post to share with you all. A great thing about being part of the IndieMEGABOOTH is the community amongst the developers, and we love any opportunity to show our support to the other teams. Whether you’re attending PAX or staying home and following it online, be sure to check these games out! Remember to follow #PAXWest2018 and #IMBPAXW18 to keep up with action.


"Boyfriend Dungeon is an action-RPG dungeon crawler in which the weapons you use transform into beautiful people -- take them on dates to level them up and become more powerful together."
Our friends at Kitfox still have 21 days left of their Kickstarter!



"AFTERCHARGE is a 3 vs 3 competitive game pitting invisible robots against an invincible security squad in high-octane tactical skirmishes."
Check out their Steam page!



"The World Next Door is a narrative-driven, action adventure game that follows Jun, a rebellious teen girl trapped in a parallel world inhabited by magical creatures."
Check out their website & find out where to wishlist it!


"The Gardens Between is a surreal puzzle adventure that follows best friends, Arina and Frendt, as they fall into a mysterious world of beautiful garden islands. Manipulate time to solve puzzles and discover the secrets of each island."
Wishlist it on Steam!


"In Bloodroots, you’ll smash, slice, crush, blast, crack, slam, burst, break, split, slit, gut, tear, gash, gouge, scoop, cut, chop, dice, hash, grind, and more as Mr Wolf enacts his revenge."
Check out their Steam page and add it to your wishlist.


Hope you've enjoyed our little dive into some of the incredible games on show with the IndieMEGABOOTH at PAX West, we can't wait to get a chance to play them ourselves. See the full line up here. And just a reminder that you can find us at Booth 857 all 4 days of PAX West. Feel free to share the image or this tweet on social media and let your friends know that you'll be checking out Disco Elysium.



Until next time,
Dani :)

We're thrilled to be able to tell you that we'll be showing off Disco Elysium at PAX West 2018 with the amazing IndieMEGABOOTH!

Be sure to tell your friends, get yourself a ticket (there's still some left for Monday) and get August 31st - September 3rd marked down on your calendars.



Don't forget to check out all the other amazing indie games that are appearing alongside us to get you in the spirit - IndieMEGABOOTH Lineup

IndieMEGABOOTH Lineup - Youtube

Only 3 weeks to go!
Let us know in the comments if you'll be attending. What are you most looking forward to playing? Other than Disco Elysium of course ;)

We can't wait & we hope to see you there.
Dani

Motorics (MOT) covers your peripheral nervous system, your five senses, and your vestibular system. It’s our take on the classic Dexterity and Perception stats, but not only. Motorics also has an added mental aspect – your street smarts, the ability to think on your feet and maintain a poker face in stressful situations.

Above all, the Motorics skills make you cool.

And, unlike the other skill sets, they doesn’t come at a huge cost. Put too many points into Physique and it turns you into a violent animal – something like Marv from Sin City. Overdo Psyche and you’re Dale Cooper on MDMA. Too much Intellect turns you a Holmesian pedant. The twist with Motorics is – there is no such twist. Ultra high levels of the Motorics skills surprise you with expanded functionality. It’s the stabilizing element of your build, the binding agent.

A high Motorics cop is one smart, streetwise operator, closest to the classic Detective archetype: your Johnny Dollar or Sonny Crockett. It’s also the flashiest attribute animation-wise, and definitely the best-dressed.

Which is not to say that the Motorics skills make you perfect. You may come off as jumpy or high strung. A bit of a cokehead, even. But, honestly, that’s nothing compared to the trouble you can get into with the other three.

Let’s have a look at what these six desperados can do for you.




H/E, as we shorten it, makes you fire that gun. Makes you fire it good. The more H/E you have, the more precise your aim. And, be it a Villiers 9mm, a Kiejl Armistice, or a banged up old Liljeqist in your hand, you’re going to want to be very precise, because bad, bad, very bad things will happen if you aren’t.

Not only is H/E for aiming, or throwing – it’s also for catching. You’d be surprised how useful that is. Your partner just threw you the keys to your patrol vehicle. It’s a cool moment, but Benny Shitfingers drops them in the sewage. Vehicle inoperable. Mob boss flips a coin in your direction: here’s a tip rent-a-cop. Blam, he pokes your eye out with it.

It’s incredibly uncool to not catch things.

Oh and remember when I said it’s for using firearms? Well, the twist here is: it also analyzes them. Pick up a gun and H/E will tell you things about it: weight, calibre, reliable range. Good to have in a murder investigation if firearms are involved. And they always are. Revachol is a very gunny place.




Reaction Speed also gets a little gunny. Let’s you dodge incoming gunfire. It’s the yang to H/E’s yin. The anti-gun. Your danger sense. Your dodge skill.
On the mental side of things, it’s also your mental alacrity and street smarts. It helps you dodge snipes of the verbal sort: quick jabs and cheap shots, dramatic moves people try to pull on you. Reaction Speed is an alarm system.

Overdo levelling this one and you’ll develop that jumpiness I mentioned. Surely a small price to pay for not being, you know, dead. Or standing there with your mouth agape, trying to come up with a cool comeback after the she’s already gone.

If you want to build a mental powerhouse, max up on INT Skills like Logic, Conceptualization and Visual Calculus, then throw Reaction Speed in there too. They’ll call you Johnny Big-Brain now! It’s possible to be very intelligent without it, but it’s a slow, studious intellect. Reaction Speed gives you smarts.

It’s perhaps the quintessential hardboiled detective skill in the game…




…second only to Perception. This one’s a giant. It’s the magnifying glass in your hand that allows you to see the drop of blood in the fish tank. The keen ear that catches the sound of breathing under the floorboards. Perception governs your sight, smell, taste, and hearing.

Because it’s so all-encompassing, it’s better to say what it doesn’t do. Perception does not read tells and body language (that’s Composure, another Motorics skill). And it doesn’t detect microscopic details with your fingertips (that’s Interfacing, another one). But you’re still going to want to put a few points into this one, believe me. And, yes, it does yield clues too. A lot of clues. Even too many, perhaps? A high Perception cop is going to be drowning in little notes about the things they saw, heard, or smelled – some of them extraneous, or even misleading.

But still, be careful – too little of this one and you’ll be on an experimental playthrough of Disco Elysium: The Adventures of Johnny Blind.

Perception does all sorts of nice things outside of dialogue too, affecting how you interact with the game’s ultra-detailed art. It detects hidden containers for you to loot, and reveals hidden objects in the world – footprints on the floor, for example. Then you can use Visual Calculus (an Intellect skill) to read their size, make and so on – another example of Intellect and Motorics having great synergy for a classic detective build.

Also, expect to find hidden areas: secret rooms, doors, and rooftop paths in the city of Revachol.

The city’s also littered with these little green orbs you can click on; classic “question mark” moments that provide quick observations like: “someone left the stove on,” “water’s dripping from this tap.” Some of these orbs are only visible to higher Perception characters. You can use these hidden, golden orbs to question people: “You just renovated, but the tap’s leaking?” This is one more way environmental exploration (crime scene analysis) and questioning people (interrogations) are connected in Disco Elysium.

Finally, there are certain Thought Cabinet projects that allow you to auto-succeed, say, all hearing-type Perception checks. So there are workarounds for a low Motorics character who wants to play the “blind saxophone player” cop. (Please don’t. Also, there are no saxophones in Elysium.)




Savoir Faire is all about style, subterfuge, flair. Even sexiness to a certain extent. It’s our combined Acrobatics and Sneaking skill, with an added zest of verbal flare every now and then. The full package for a slippery roguish detective. You’re basically a ninja-cop, or what our worldbuilding calls a Sambo artist. (Sambo, short for Samaran Boxing, is a communist martial art from Sapurmat Ulan.)

You may also be… a bit of a douchebag, to be honest.

A police detective who sneaks out of conversations and pulls acrobatic moves can come off as an exhibitionist. The other Motorics skills affect your personality in surprisingly (for the Metric system) agreeable ways, but this one’s a wild card.

On the other hand, it’s extremely useful for sneaking into places. It lets you interact with the game’s environment in some pretty flashy ways, where our combat system blends into an acrobatics system for jumping, climbing, etc.

The twist here — and the importance of this cannot be overstated — is that
Savoir Faire also lets you dance.




Composure is your poker face. The Motorics firewall for your inner turmoil. And also its reverse – your ability to read other people’s body language and tells – to see beneath their facade.

Composure and Perception go well together, making for an ultra-vigilant cop. Composure and the Psyche skill Volition are a good combination for a man of steel who never cracks under pressure. And you’ll be under a lot of pressure in Disco Elysium. Or, if you want to be the expert in reading people, combining Composure with another Psyche skill, Empathy, gives you X-Ray vision into people’s mental states.

If Savoir Faire sexes you up in a slightly douchey way, Composure does the stomach-in, shoulders-back type thing. A trustworthy sexiness. Great posture.

The big twist here is that very high Composure becomes your fashion sense. First of all, it criticises other people’s sartorial choices – not only are they sweating and obviously hiding something, they also have a lame floral shirt. Second, it lets you push your fashion sense on them. Make your partner wear a stupid orange pilot cap. You look too cool for others to not trust your advice.




Interfacing is the final piece of the puzzle as your fine motor skills. Digital dexterity. Fingerworks. Oh boy, does this one do a lot of things — it basically does all the rest: takes notes and helps with handwriting analysis; interprets electrical circuitry; instructs you on how to use a simple blue button; runs your hands across the gear shaft of a motor-carriage; disentangles a Stereo 8 tape from a hawthorn tree, patches it up, and plays it at night on your short stint as a tape-jockey; runs diagnostics on a motor lorry; picks locks; does a great massage; finds microscopic tears in body cavities…

In some extreme cases (very high Interfacing needed), you can even perform what we call a phenomenological transfer: put your hands on the steering levers (motor-cars in Elysium do not use wheels) of a Coupris Kineema and know precisely what its mileage is, how it was treated by its last owner, and what road it was last driven on.

Interfacing is one of those rare skills in the Metric system that sometimes borders on the extraphysical. Extraphysical is what we call the realistically supernatural. The real deal. Reality-breaking. Interfacing’s extraphysical effects are much, much more subtle than those of the Physique skill Shivers, which puts you in touch you with the city of Revachol, but they’re there, connecting you to machinery, electrical circuits, and, most curiously, radiowaves.

You see, in Disco Elysium you can circuit-bend into radiocomputers. These machines have on-air processing. Large prime number stations criss-cross the air. Advanced tape computers use arrays of antennas to sieve through their calculations to perform advanced calculus on site: to run programmes and communicate between the remote corners of the world. There’s a Ream A24 Prefect console somewhere down there, in a hidden basement – or a church, who can say? – that you can use to circuit-bend into remote units. Access personal information, read love letters, learn ancient secrets.

Tape computation has existed in this world for hundreds of years. Who knows what you’ll find…

Oh, what’s that, mom? What am I doing? I’m playing a seventies-style cop with a handlebar moustache who frequency-hacks into ancient radio stations. It’s not basic dungeons and dragons.

–

That’s all for Metric, the system that powers character creation in Disco Elysium. We hope you’ve enjoyed these posts and have gotten some interesting ideas for your build.

Next time we’ll talk about the Thought Cabinet, where you develop character traits for your cop, giving your skills new and strange side effects.

After that we’ll finally be ready to talk about the Elysium setting – its technology, geopolitics, schools of thought, and culture.

Till then.

Hey folks!

We recently created a shiny new Disco(rd) Elysium server.
Come & hang out with our ZA/UM devs, ask questions, and see sneak previews/behind the scenes of your favourite upcoming Detective RPG ;) Join us here

We also now have a Twitch Channel!
On Friday, Kaspar, Aleksander & Helen hosted a stream of Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire with George Ziets from inXile Entertainment. George is well known for his work on Torment: Tides of Numenera, Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer, and the original Pillars of Eternity.
We had a great time, thank you to everyone who dropped by, including Obsidian themselves! If you missed it, catch up here.

And don't forget to keep up to date with all our social hijinks on:
Twitter
Facebook
Instagram

Thanks!
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: