Now that Disco Elysium is out – and people seem to be diggin' it – let's talk about all the drugs you can do in it. Let's talk about Pyrholidon, The Lightning, Al Gul and the sumptuous Tabac herb. Think of this as a little designer-tutorial on how to get the best out of those bad boys. Or how to make due without them, because...

1. First, your detective doesn't have to do drugs. A straight edge run is a great way to play the game. (One favoured by our writers, for example). It makes the game more challenging and adds some extra role playing tension – in the form of temptation. After all, there is no temptation without abstinence.

2. Drugs kill. If you do go down that route, know this: drugs give flat bonuses to your main Stats. But they also damage your Health and Morale. Which can lead to heart attacks and giving up. This means you should at least aim to heal any damage immediately after taking a hit. Hands shaking from the Lightning? Smooth it over with some magnesium. Smoking got you groggy? Nosaphed will clean those sinuses!

3. Number one trick – drugs also raise the learning caps of your Skills. In Disco Elysium, your initial Stats decide how many points you can put in the Skills under them. Because drugs (temporarily) raise your main Stat, they also raise your learning caps. When the effect wears off, you get to keep the point you put into your Skill. (Fun fact: this started out as a bug, but we kept it because testers liked it.)

4. Most drugs have sub-types, or “brands”. (Cigarettes, for example, can be Astra or Tioumoutiri.) These are cosmetic. Just like in real life, brands do nothing. They're just random fetishism – speed is speed, nicotine is nicotine, wine doesn't kill you any less if it's expensive.

5. Drugs have charges. Electrochemistry gives you extra charges. The base amount of charges for all drugs is 3. If you have 4+ Electrochemistry at the time of first acquiring the drug, you get 4 charges instead; 7+ Electrochemistry gives you 5 charges.

6. You might wanna top up. One charge lasts 1 hour of in game time. Most big scenes take longer than that to complete. So if you blast your drug of choice before going in – in preparation, as you would a spell before combat – you'll run out half way through the ordeal. Amend this by further blasting in the thick of it! Bring that brewskie, that ciggy, or that anti-radiation drug to the lion's den by keeping it your held slot. Then keep an eye on the clock and take a preventive hit.

7. Containers with legal drugs (smokes and alcohol) are visible for all – while containers with illegal drugs (pyrholidon and speed) become visible only after first using the drug. There might be some surprises waiting in, say, Cindy's coal room. Or the fish market. But only for the initiated. If you're innocent you won't know what to look for.

8. There is one drug for each of the four main Stats in the game. You can use this to “fix” a weakness in your character build. Low Intellect detectives might find themselves smoking a lot, while low Psyche detectives have more to gain from doing Pyrholidon. Low Physiqe detectives are prone to sucking on a bottle. Even a low Motorics detective is stupid enough to try that jump when they're on the Lightning Rail.

Here is a summary on all the drugs in the game, where to find them and how they interact with your thoughts.


Bonus: +1 Intellect.
Damages: -1 Health (-1 Endurance)
Healed by: Nosaphed, Drouamine.
Get it from: Frittte, Rosemary, containers on the map
Brands: Astra, Tiomoutiri
Thoughts: “Boiadeiro” from passing Manana's Conceptualization check amplifies smokes.
Did you know: tracking the “Tioumoutiri” brand of smokes can lead to revelations in your main investigation.


Bonus: +1 Psyche
Damages: -1 Health (-1 Endurance)
Healed by: Nosaphed, Drouamine
Get it from: Roy, after passing an Electrochemistry white check.
Brands: none
Thoughts. “Cop of the Apocalypse” doubles Pyrholidon’s effect.
Did you know: Pyrholidon is an anti-radiation drug. Using anti-radiation drugs recreationally was a beloved pastime of Soviet hippies and punk-rockers. (Tareen was one such drug.)


Bonus: +1 Physique
Damages: -1 Morale (-1 Volition)
Healed by: Magnesium, Hypnogamma
Get it from: Fritte, Rosemary, from containers on the map
Brands: Commodore Red, Potent Pilsner, Pale-Aged Vodka
Thoughts: “Revacholian Nationhood” unlocks the full heroic power of alcohol. “Waste Land of Reality” does... the opposite.
Did you know: Disco Elysium is produced by reformed alkies who quit “the Ghoul”; turns out it's not possible to get a 60+ hour RPG and a drink on simultaneously.


Bonus: +1 Motorics
Damages: -1 Morale (-1 Volition)
Healed by: Magnesium, Hypnogamma
Get it from: Klaasje's medicine cabinet, a quest after passing Cuno's Empathy check.
Brands: Preptide, trucker speed with a straw in it
Thoughts: “Lonesome Long Way Home” makes speed also give +1 Psyche too.
Did you know: The logos you see for drugs, including the one for amphetamine, are their actual molecules. (Or, in Pyrholidon's case, their fictitious molecules). We enrolled the help of a chemist to make sure they make sense. Thanks, chemist!

So that's it. Drugs are a multi-tool offering more flexibility and role playing options. But, on the other hand, they distort your personality and are completely incompatible with staying alive after you're 30 (trust us). And it's quite possible to make do without them. If there were a character sheet in Disco Elysium, the last field would be: Drug of Choice. The strongest DoC is the fifth, hidden drug we like to call Life and Your Mother's Love.

True bad asses get high on that :)

Until next time,
Roberto Kurvitzo, maker of RPG's; reformed Narcomaniac.

PS. Thank you for playing and sharing your stories in forums and media. It's you who make it all worthwhile.

WE HAVE LAUNCHED. Get it now!

When middle class people talk about foreign places, they like to talk about “contrasts”. Travel magazines, financial journals, regional reports on the news... it's all about those contrasts.

And what they mean by “contrasts” is that most people are pornographically poor while a few are obscenely wealthy. That's what they mean by contrasts. East of the river, monetary organizations promote regional stability, west of the river cops collect tare for cash and junkies shake so hard their bones come loose from their sockets.

There is no city in the world with more contrasts than Revachol. The broken, magnificent, disgraced former capital of the world. A great sky on fire, reflecting off broken glass. Revachol the Suzerain, Revachol the Commune, Revachol the Administrative Region where all forms of government have failed. Revachol the Resolver, the answer to the great burning questions of history. How should we live? Will the horror ever end?

Revachol sits on a fertile island in the middle of the Insulindian Ocean, the world's largest body of water; in the eye of a great archipelago called Face-A-La-Mer. To be from Revachol is to be Revacholian. To be deserted, destroyed. A drug addict with an immunodeficiency disorder. A joke and a clown and a loser baby.

It's like the hanged man behind the hostel cafeteria said: there's nothing funny about jokes.

There's nothing funny about you either. Your swollen face in the mirror. A past you don't recognize, a world you can't bear to remember. The river Esperance flows from north to south, splitting the city in two. In its delta, great ghosts rise to the sky – the financial district. To the east: Le Jardin. Houses with gardens rise along the mountainside, up to Saint-Batiste where two of the world's five largest companies keep their headquarters. But you don't wake up there – you wake up west of the river.

West of the river, it's funky-baby holocaust time all day every day. In East-Jamrock, wild animals roam the valley at night – giraffes that escaped from the Royal Zoo 50 years ago. Giraffes – even-toed ungulates from the savannah. The local kiosque chain Frittte (sic) employs a private army of 2000 men to guard its properties in Jamrock and Faubourg. That's how bad the crime rate is – you need a private army to run a kiosque chain. And deregulation? They built a citizen-funded primitive nuclear reactor on the river. And it immediately entered core meltdown. That's pretty deregulated if you ask me. Below Precinct 41 there's a kebab merchant called Kuklov who makes kebabs that make you immortal if you can eat three and survive. In Villalobos an entire street is walled off and turned into a poppy field by a deified gangster called The Mazda, while his mortal enemy La Puta Madre exclusively employs former narcotics officers to farm his own fields. Through underground tunnels, kids descend into Le Royaume, the resting place of three centuries’ worth of the royal dead, to bring up rat tails and the pearl-encrusted teeth of civil servants. Child labour dungeoneering is a cottage industry. Someone came up with a synthetic opiate called the hunch that has a high lasting for two seconds. You only feel it while you're injecting it.



Contrasts upon contrasts! So many juxtapositions of the old and the new. Dark shades and brilliant highlights. A city of opposites. A real mother fucking dialogue.

Loyalists (a euphemism for “fascists”) say it's all because of the failed Revolution, 50 years ago. If good, kind king Guillaume were still around, he'd drive the moneylenders and the homo-sexuals back into the ocean! Once we were an octopus that straddled the world, sucking up natural and human resources from Iilmaraa to South-East Seol. The city state that screwed the whole world. Then deranged commies pushed the king under a street car and lost the civil war to foreign intervention, damning us to financial servitude. The communists don't respond with anything – they're all dead. Okay, one is still alive and teaches cultural theory at the Ecole Normale de Revachol, east of the river. And there's talk of two more employed by a failed radio-game studio. But the rest are all dead, bulldozed into mass graves after the Coalition Army retook Revachol in '08.

In the ‘20s, the city was divided into zones de contrôle under foreign nations: the Mesque Zone, the Occident-Graad zone, and the International zone. The International Zone is west of the river. International means: no one gives a shit. It's no one's business.

Except yours.You've spent your entire life in the International Zone. As a police detective. In the Revachol Citizen's Militia, a citizen-funded police force as safe (and well-funded) as that nuclear reactor.

It has not been an easy life. Things have not gone well for you. That love thing didn’t work out. Radio networks criss-cross the air, spewing meaningless, feverish political rhetoric. Beyond the curve of the horizon, where the ocean ends, there is an unknowable anti-reality mass called the pale. It has been there for as long as human beings have written down history. And it's advancing.

The year is '52. It's the 5th of March and you're lying on the floor of the Whirling-In-Rags hostel cafeteria. In Martinaise, North Jamrock. The sound of Lieutenant Kitsuragi's motor carriage arriving on the scene interrupts what can only be described as an act of self-annulment through alcohol and amphetamine use. Your bell bottom pants make your ass look fat and, dear god, you think you've lost your badge.

It's up to you – and you alone – to save the whole world. To untie the great knot. To crack the case. To resolve reality. You are the last Revacholian hero. The Revacholian hero has nothing, but he must conquer everything. If he doesn't care, no one does. All of it will slowly roll into the heavens under the advancing pale, or it will contract into a singular miracle only the Revacholian hero can deliver.

All you have to help you in this – the last and the greatest of the cases undertaken by man on Earth, in the sheer face of death and history – is Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi from Precinct 57.

That's it.

There's a dead body in the tree. There are battle lines in the streets. 4 days remain until the district explodes in violence; 28 years remain until the end of the world. Every day, every second, every beat of your ailing heart matters

- Robert

You can get Disco Elysium on October 15th for 39.99 USD / 39.99 EUR / 34.99 GBP respectively.

We're excited to say CohhCarnage will be streaming Disco Elysium on Tuesday (8am ET)!

https://twitter.com/cohhcarnage/status/1180878673936867333?s=21

Be sure to follow him on Twitch and sign up for notifications so you don’t miss it:

https://www.twitch.tv/cohhcarnage

See you there!

Measurehead was voiced by the absolutely badass Moroccan rapper Dizzy DROS and designed by concept artist Mehdi Annassi. Check out our behind-the-scenes video with Mikee W Goodman and Jim Ashilevi in Gran Canaria. This is a wrap for our last character of the game.

"OCCIDENTAL HAPLOGROUP B4 IS DONE GIVING ORDERS AROUND HERE. THE INFLUENCE OF THE *HAM SANDWICH RACE* IS WANING."

Dizzy DROS @mr_cazafonia - https://www.instagram.com/mr_cazafonia/?hl=fr-ca

Mehdi Annassi @_annassi - https://www.instagram.com/_annassi/?hl=en

Mikee W Goodman @mikeegoodman - https://www.instagram.com/mikeegoodman/?hl=fr-ca

Jim Ashilevi @jim_ash - https://www.instagram.com/jim_ash/?hl=fr-ca

The time has come to talk about the Thought Cabinet, Disco Elysium's illustrious “inventory for thoughts.” Let me start by presenting an image. A rather detailed image. Of all the icons of all the thoughts you can get in Disco Elysium, woven into a single tapestry. The Thought Cabinet art is made by Anton Vill, a concept artist known for, among other things, his work on the film Mad Max: Fury Road.

The full-resolution version of this image takes 10 minutes to load, so we’re hoping to include it in the deluxe edition of the game. Here’s the web version:



Each little composition on that image is one “Thought”. It's impossible to get them all in one play-through, or even two. Each Thought comes into play face down. Only its name and some initial info are known to you. It takes in-game time to reveal its true identity by “internalizing” it. To truly uncover the mysteries of all these bad boys takes years of hard-core roleplaying. There are a total of 53 thoughts in the game. On average, a single character discovers and internalizes 16 of them in one playthrough.

And that, in a nutshell, is THC – how we're abbreviating Thought Cabinet :) This mega-feature has gone through multiple iterations. It's a unifying element that ties all the game's systems together. Thoughts are like Fallout's “traits” (back in the 14th century when Fallout had traits) crossed with Civ's “world wonders”. They're loot for your mind that you collect from the world by talking to people. They function as traits, perks, reputations and alignments.

You store Thoughts in your Thought Cabinet - your mind-lab, where you cook up new ideas and obsessions. Conduct research into futuristic armour, become a free market evangelist by thinking about indirect taxes, or just contemplate suicide. All with the power of your mind.

In Disco Elysium there are tags you can acquire that make people think of you in a certain way. Say something stupid and they will remember it, help someone and they'll remember that too. So far, so routine. But Disco Elysium also has an internal reputation system. Your skills – your faculties that talk to you in your head – develop notions about you too. Have you said three artsy things in the last hour? Been telling people you want your name to be Raphael? Trying to recall a lost memory, or your home address? Your skills can turn these into full blown Thoughts: “Actual Art Degree”, “Detective R.A. Costeau”, “The 15th Indotribe” and “Lonesome Long Way Home”. You can turn yourself into a deranged “Torque Dork”, constantly thinking about auto-mechanical trivia. Or torture yourself with the “White Mourning” – the shadow of someone you used to love. This adds a new layer of role playing options I like to call soul customization.

In addition to producing dialogue options and story events, thoughts have mechanical implications. Once processed, they can provide bonuses and – more often – diabolical side effects. Each is a riddle, posing a question for you to answer. The bonus (or penalty) is the Aesop at the end of that story. Thinking of love lost corrodes your soul, but it also gives you an expanded perspective: Your maximum zoom-out range is increased, letting you take in breath-taking vistas. Recalling that memory can lead to drugs being more powerful for you. When the Art Cop uses his Conceptualization skill they gain XP for every criticism. There's even a thought that (temporarily) makes you fail all your skill checks, turning you into a walking disaster, which in turn, can lead to new thoughts.

You need to “internalize” most Thoughts for them to reach their full potential. For this, your Thought Cabinet has slots to put them into. Prior to this, you only have a vague idea of what a Thought might do. You have a set-up. A picture on a closed box.

Each Thought has an internalization period. This can range from 30 in-world minutes to 3 in-world days. Some mental projects are massive, others fleeting. When the process is complete you get an animation -- not unlike finishing a world wonder in Civ. This is where you open the box, read the punchline. Face whatever wondrous and terrifying mechanical effects this revelation has on your character.

If you don't like the conclusion you’ve reached, you can always “forget” the thought by spending one “skill point”, the currency commonly used to improve your skills. If all your internalization slots are full, you can spend a skill point to open up a new slot. Since there is a finite number of slots in your Thought Cabinet you need to curate your thoughts carefully. Players start forgetting old thoughts to make room for new ones, as they mature and reach their final form: The Soul Reaver.

(Note: Disco Elysium doesn't actually feature soul reaving, I just made it up to sex up the paragraph.)

You can finish a thought, then read its description and see that it tells you to go and ask a specific person in the world a specific question. This creates a rhythm where you talk to someone, mull it over, then return to them with a new (often revelatory) topic. Personally, I adore this part of the Thought Cabinet so I just wanted to point it out.

Not all Thoughts are created equal. Some have a larger effect on your character than others. None more than the four Ideologies and four Copotypes. Ideologies are as close as Disco Elysium gets to an alignment system. Copotypes are how you view yourself as a police detective. Combine these two and you can be a socialist Superstar Cop. Or a centrist Sorry Cop who apologizes profusely. You can also dual-Copotype, or even mix and match ideologies. This, combined with the choices made in character creation – and the rest of the Thoughts – makes for hundreds of different builds.

So, as you can see: THC does a lot of things. I think we've gotten it quite nifty, to be honest.

You can get Disco Elysium on October 15th for 39.99 USD / 39.99 EUR / 34.99 GBP respectively.

- Robert

Let's talk content richness and playtime.

We've had enough people finish the game from start to end now. We can finally say how big the game is. And Disco Elysium is, in every sense of the word, a huge game. It's bigger than *giant* and (a little) smaller than *gargantuan*, so I would say it is about colossus-sized.



How long is a colossal game? Well, it takes 60+ hours of continuous playtime to finish Disco Elysium if you're a reasonably completionist player, as I am. It takes 90 hours if you're absolutely savouring every detail. And 30 hours if you're rushing it. Back-of-the-box, I would put playtime at: 60+ hours.

Map-wise, Disco Elysium takes place in one city district – Martinaise, in the city of Revachol. Martinaise is divided into five major areas – call them biomes if you like. Video game people love biomes:

1. Martinaise proper, comprised of modern, renovated buildings. A dilapidated cityscape.
2. The Industrial Harbour. Big machinery and containers upon containers of goods.
3. The wild, abandoned urban coastline, full of ruins from a long lost Revolution.
4. A plethora of underground areas meant to be explored with your flashlight.
5. And a fifth area that I won’t reveal here.

All four non-underground areas are one seamless, isometric open world that you can approach in any order.

The world is about the size of Planescape: Torment. Or a sizeable chunk of the first Pillars. A sizeable chunk of Fallout: New Vegas... But the resolution – the level of detail, content density – of these areas is, I would say, about 5 times denser than any RPG I've played. Disco Elysium is a detective game and thus you have to be able to put it under a magnifying glass. Any part of it. Every apartment, hallway, street corner, lamp, or even trashcan needs story, writing, details and interactivity that, to me, exceeds even the most detail-oriented adventure games.

None of these areas reuse assets or look the same like games that are asset-assembled do. Sure, people have the same radio every now and then, every little room is 100% unique when it comes to layout and art. And music, too.

There are four major weather states – snow, rain, mist and clear. And four times of day – morning, day, evening, night. These all combine to make an unpredictable, moody city where time moves in a very realistic manner. Getting through one day is a massive thing. Shadows fall. Sodium lights flicker. The music changes. Tomorrow brings new NPC’s to old locations, as the world changes each day. It takes about one real life day to complete one in-world day, if you’re being meticulous.

Disco Elysium has about 100 “quests” – or whatever you call them. We call them “tasks”. Tasks range from minor to-do's a la “have a bath” to side-adventures that take a whole day to complete. We don't differentiate between side-quests and main quests, by the way. It's all one big thing -- the story of your life in another world, as a detective of the Revachol Citizen's Militia.

You have about 100 inventory items to mix and match from. These include tools – crowbars, guns, a boombox, a magnum sized bottle of wine... – and a plethora of clothes and even shiny armour to protect yourself with. Then we also have over 50 thoughts to choose from. These go in your head, they're a kind of special item that evolves over time, giving you all manner of perk-like effects and role playing options. So – you're playing physical and mental dress-up, draping your detective in ceramic armour, disco duds or tracksuit trousers – all the while filling your head with notions like: poetry, technology, para-natural nonsense, or trying to remember how old you are.

40 original pieces of music play as you explore the city. Some 6 different psychoactive substances get you high as you do so. Wine, beer, smokes, anti-radiation drugs... some good old fashioned trucker speed. And so on.

Jesus, and then there's the skills! There are 24 of them and I swear to god – the least used has around 50 cases where it does something. The really active ones have (I'm not even kidding) around 500 uses. So yeah... There are thousands of skill checks. There are literally too many to count, for various technical reasons I won't go into it right now. Safe to say, this is the skilliest game ever skilled. The skill list of 3.5 edition d'n'd is but a baby compared to Disco Elysium.

There are 70 characters, all have partial VO. Each you can spend hours talking to, each has hours of secret content.

Aaaaaand you're gonna have to play the thing from beginning to end three times to get to see most of it. To see all of it... I don't think a single human being can. But the internet has proven many a boast wrong, so let's see.

It's honestly inconceivable how we managed to do this. I guess time is the answer. Disco Elysium took 5 years to produce. We only managed to make it so fast because we had a head start with worldbuilding. A whopping 13 years worth of D&D style pen and paper games in the Elysium setting beforehand.



So this is Disco Elysium. I think it's gonna rock your socks off, to be honest. I realize listing all this made me sound like James Franco from Spring Breakers talking about all the “shit” he’s got, but it just had to be said...

Click here for the clip from Spring Breakers.

All of this shit is for you. We’re beyond excited to see how you’ll react to it. To a game that’s just... new. A new type of game -- of which there’s suddenly a metric shit tons of. On your hard drive -- to approach in your own way, order, and style.

On October 15, 2019.

- Robert

Hey all!

Disco Elysium will launch on October 15th and we can’t wait for you to check the game out.

Disco Elysium is a 60+ hour open world RPG. It’s over one million words long (a little less than Baldur’s Gate 2 and a lot more than Planescape: Torment, but who’s counting.) And you’ve never played anything like it.

• Over 60 hours of game time in a unique urban fantasy setting.
  
• An open world you can approach in any order – the bad part of the bad part of town with unforgettable characters.
  
• One massive open-ended case and tons of side investigations.
  
• Countless tools for role-playing: 24 mad skills to upgrade, over 80 different clothing items to wear, 12 tools to use, 6 psychoactive substances to discover, more than 50 unique “thoughts” to analyze and so on.
  
• A hauntingly beautiful original soundtrack by British Sea Power.

We really appreciate all of the support for Disco Elysium and we thank you for being so patient. See you soon with more news!

Thanks again to Izual at Canard PC for conducting this interview and Steph Noviss for the translation.


Robert Kurvitz, lead designer and lead writer for Disco Elysium, fills us in on how to lose at role-playing and what his RPG sets out to achieve.



Canard PC: In an RPG, if a player gets something wrong you can generally expect negative consequences. But how do you punish the player for their mistakes if their character is already a massive loser?

Robert Kurvitz: "You never prevent them from accessing a part of the game. A mistake should affect how you react in future, by responding to what just happened. It should make you feel embarrassed, afraid, regretful. Most of all, it has to be a genuine experience, written in such a way that the player sees the value of it as they build their character and doesn’t just want to restart the game straight after. We’ve worked really hard to make these mistakes some of the game’s best moments in terms of role-play, and I think people feel closer to their character when he gets something wrong than when he gets it right. For example, there’s one scene where you have to interrogate eight armed guys, just you and your partner. They own up to having committed the crime, but they start taunting you. “Get your gun out – you’re finished!” There’s nothing you can do against these eight guys; you’re utterly powerless, but at the same time you’re still a cop (who has to arrest them – Ed.). But if you fail to bring the situation under control too many times, you start doing truly CRAZY things. You pull out your gun, put it under your chin, and threaten to kill yourself! That would be the worst decision ever! Your partner tries to help you and it goes on for ages... Everyone will remember that moment. It’s very powerful for your character to go through that. You discover things about him that you wouldn’t have found out otherwise, and all of this will have consequences later on. Or even straight away, as it’s much harder to be convincing towards these guys now that they see you as that unhinged cop who tried to kill himself. So then you have to do a little minmaxing and redistribute points (in the character profile – Ed.), reconsider your strategy, go and speak to their boss, and think how you could manipulate them. Getting it wrong makes the game more fun."


What kind of story are you aiming to tell in Disco Elysium?

"First of all, it’s a very meticulously structured detective story. The cop is a modern-day knight. He’s the main character, and his job is to meddle in other people’s business. Everyone HAS to speak to him; he can open any door. Writers have been using police detectives ever since the French invented them in the 17th century. (To the interviewer, who suddenly becomes a representative for all French people) Thank you, thank you! Best character ever!... So, yeah, I have a lot of respect for crime novels. Everything has to be so carefully thought-out. You need to have insane plot twists, and your internal logic has to be flawless. And so we have huge plot twists and the storyline takes some completely wacky turns, but at the same time there’s also that need for realism and raw brutality. All of this is still no more than a method, a tool.

What this story truly aims to do is to express, at a very primal level, what it is to live inside this lump that sleeps eight hours a day and spends the rest of the time thinking. How this bag of flesh with a squishy head on top somehow manages to muddle through with his money. You’re stuck inside a body, inside a brain, strolling through life yet never knowing how you ended up there and why something called nature, after having created this troubled lump of a human being, is quite happy to just fling him against a wall and leave him for dead. I really wanted to use the RPG as a way to look more deeply into this problem and how ridiculous it is; its comical side but also its tragic side. And then the feeling of utter triumph when you get it right. It’s incredible – highly unlikely, but truly incredible – to get it right as a human being. Not many people manage to get it right; most of us fail. Basically, overall, it’s sort of a complete novel which works by making use of the cool and funny side of crime fiction."

Have you identified any traps to avoid in video game writing?

"Oh... All of it, I reckon. So far, the entirety of video game writing has been one giant trap. I should clarify right away that, in my opinion, real quality can only happen when you write for video games specifically. Not when you write in the same way as you would for a film. You can produce excellent cinematographic writing in video games, for example The Last of Us among others. These are very well written, but real video game writing has to be interactive, with choices, consequences, and a story that’s a bit like a big Rubik’s Cube which adapts and changes depending on what the player does. There is huge potential in this non-linear approach, but so far all it’s done is fall into traps.

The first is never to let your skills system support your writing. You read the text as if you were reading a novel. In general, skills are useful in combat, but peaceful skills are boring, or else they are there to overcome obstacles passively. And actually it’s this under-used side of the skills system that has the most influence on the game’s writing! So there are obstacles to overcome, like “when you reach 90 you unlock this option”, and there are dice rolls where a failure doesn’t strictly change anything. Even the RPGs with the best writing, such as Planescape: Torment, are constantly battling with the Dungeons & Dragons-style skills system they’re based on. So that’s the first trap, but... Oh my god, there are so many others. So many others."



There has been less and less tolerance of lore dumps over the last few years. How do you convey the full breadth of your universe to the player without using them?

"There are lore dumps in Disco Elysium. As long as they’re done well, it’s not an issue: they mostly happen with the “encyclopedia” skill, which provides information on the game’s universe. It doesn’t give essential, well-structured facts, though – it gives random information, pretty much however it pleases. But passing on bits and pieces of knowledge like this is one of the best ways of building a world. In real life, nobody has a user manual to explain everything – you hear little snippets all over the place. You don’t know where everything is or how everything works. This is why we shouldn’t be afraid of confusion, because in real life people are very confused when it comes to the ‘lore’ of their own world. They are faced with contradicting news sources, for example. So I like the idea of this “encyclopedia” skill, because if your character hasn’t invested in it enough there are certain things in the Disco Elysium world you won’t even notice. I think it’s good that you need to make an effort to create a character who will actually ask for these little lore dumps."

What can Disco Elysium bring that’s new to gaming?

"I won’t beat around the bush – I want to completely revolutionise role-playing games. We need to fine-tune our game until we make that revolution possible. To revolutionise the use of stories, choices, and consequences. The use of skills. What “skill” means. I want there to be peaceful skills that actually represent real life, human imagination, sadness, the power of suggestion, dance... you know, that whole range of authentic experiences you get from tabletop RPGs and from reality. I don’t want all those body-counting shoot ’em ups, structures that encourage aggression, all those weird and idiotic things that games generally use.

I want people to expect a lot more from video game writing. I want writing to become so good that we start seeing a brain drain. With ambitious novelists and scriptwriters coming to write for games, and understanding that you can genuinely use a video game to say something that will still be of value in a hundred years. That you can express what you really want to express through our characters, and not just produce what the licence requires. I want there to be fictional universes that talk about our own real life experiences. About the political problems we’re facing, the geopolitical structures around us, the problems of the modern world, etc. Universes which don’t leave us feeling numb, alone, and abandoned after we have finished exploring them. Universes which actually equip us with life tools and provide context for what’s happening to us. Which give us the strength to carry on with our lives, instead of making us feel empty to the point where we say, “Oh my god, I want to go back to the land of the Elves, but I can’t; I’ve already seen it all”.

The best aim behind this revolution in how worlds are built is that of changing how people interpret escapism. I want them to feel good when they return, better equipped, ready to accomplish things, with new tricks to use as they go about their business. Siths and Jedis are really just tired metaphors for talking about politics. They’re dulling our minds; they don’t explain anything.

Voldemort can’t help us understand what Trump is about. It’s senseless; it makes you stupid. Fantasy worlds provide tools with which to face the world, but the wrong tools will render us incapable of doing that. I want us to build worlds which make us capable. Which help us deal with the world better."

Thanks for joining us for Part 2, hope you enjoyed this Canard PC feature!

Original article by written by Izual and published in Canard PC. Translation by Steph Noviss. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to share this article with the world!



Back in 2015, strange rumours began wafting from Estonia like whispers in the wind. Whispers of a visionary role-playing game, an artists’ collective turned video game studio, a story featuring a blackout-drunk cop in a universe that’s totally new. With influences from Planescape: Torment and Kentucky Route Zero, the game which was then called No Truce With The Furies promised to change our relationship with narratives, dialogue, and role-playing. But did this game, developed in far-off Tallinn, even exist? Or were the official screenshots no more than a series of tantalising montages? A question mark remained for several years. And then, at the end of April, I boarded a train to meet with its creators and spent many hours playing it. Those whispers in the wind were not exaggerating: if anything, they should have been louder.

I’m a cop. I don’t know much more than that – probably because I woke up with amnesia, lying face down on a hotel room floor, still reeling from an apocalyptic bender the night before. I’m a cop – and I’m sure of that, because the people at the hotel don’t seem best pleased that my investigation is getting nowhere. What investigation? Well, I’m damned if I know, and I’m going to have to ask them, even though I have a feeling it will annoy them. I’m a cop, but I have ambition. A little voice in my head even said I was definitely a superstar, and that makes sense because superstars also pass out in their own vomit when they have too much to drink. So, when another hotel guest asks me my name, I tell them I’m the harbinger of doom. And there you have it – not even ten minutes since I started playing Disco Elysium and already I’ve created a character for myself. I should point out that, in this game, everything can be used as a tool to develop your relationship with the hero and take him in whatever direction you find interesting. You might choose a dialogue option because it makes you laugh, and you’re pretty sure things will then just move on – but the game grabs the opportunity, delves deeper into that superstar backstory, and stashes it away for future use. In my case, it will even ask whether I want to roll the dice to see if I can flash a winning smile.




Superstar in a funk. Obviously, this attempt will fail miserably. You see, the hero in Disco Elysium isn’t just a cop: he’s also a massive loser. The vomit on the hotel room floor is merely the first in a long series of grim revelations, from his ungainly physique and completely irresponsible behaviour to his truly awful taste in clothes. Not quite the energetic young adventurer you’d normally be playing in an RPG, but it’s no big deal. On the contrary, it’s actually better: this guy’s eccentricities force the player into a whole load of insane, unconventional situations. After a colourful conversation as I call the police station to report my lost badge, or perhaps it’s after I try to arrest the hotel manager to get out of paying for my room (a particularly unsettling scene), I realise the game has me hooked, convinced that this loser detective’s misadventures are worth more than a thousand medieval quests to save a village from bandits. Not just because these scenarios are so original, but also because every piece of dialogue in Disco Elysium is an absolute delight to read. With countless jokes that could elicit a hearty laugh even from my colleague Kahn Lusth on MOT day, situations you can push further and further into the ridiculous, and entertaining, multi-layered characters, these are conversations you will want to linger over for a long time rather than skimming through them.

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

ZA/UM is where the heart is. Very little information has filtered through about ZA/UM Studio since Disco Elysium was announced. I therefore took advantage of my meeting with a few of its team to reassure myself that they weren’t all just actors roped in by some wealthy corporation to set up a giant hoax, because, well, you do hear about that sort of thing on the internet... But no: Disco Elysium is definitely being developed by an Estonian artists’ collective who fantasised about starting a cultural movement back in the late 2000's. Doubtful as to whether it would take off in Estonia (a country with a small population of around a million and also a very conservative environment, where they felt very little sense of belonging), this group of poets, writers, sculptors and painters decided to turn their attention to English-speaking culture in 2014. Wanting to adapt the pen-and-paper role-playing game they had spent a decade working on into a video game, the collective recruited programmers and transformed themselves into a proper studio, complete with business hours, team meetings and a UK office. The transition was far from painless, but the developers’ soul remains intact: staff in the Brighton office are lucky enough to have a gold bust of Lenin casting a watchful eye over them as they work.

The name of the prose. Quality like this didn’t happen all by itself. In the UK office of ZA/UM (pronounced “Zowm”), near Brighton beach, I had a long chat with Robert Kurvitz, Disco Elysium’s lead designer and lead writer – an Estonian native who has what he himself describes as an unreasonable degree of perfectionism. Even the place names in the game took a ridiculous amount of work: as Kurvitz explains, “Paris, Berlin, London... All these names have evolved over thousands of years. We as humans have adapted and refined them to a point that goes beyond comprehension. This is why our place names have to be excellent too, otherwise I wouldn’t find them credible myself.” I didn’t dare point out the existence of places like Cockermouth and Lickfold, proof that human beings don’t always think things through – I was already sold on the Disco Elysium universe. Admittedly, the game could hardly have left me cold and indifferent, with its isometric viewpoint in 3D and stunning graphics reminiscent of an oil painting complete with brushstrokes showing through. But best of all is the fact that the game’s contemporary society, unpredictable climate and industrial-meets-rustic backdrops make you feel as if you’ve stepped into a sleepy coastal resort somewhere by the Baltic Sea. The vast city of Revachol is not, however, any place on Earth – you can tell by the deliciously retro technology, the strong French influences (the game starts in a harbour area called Martinaise) and a history that is just familiar enough to spark curiosity. “I wanted to create a world for people who have more or less run out of interesting history articles to read on Wikipedia,” says Kurvitz.

Text appeal. Fittingly, the multi-layered, intriguing history of this universe is not explained to the player through the usual lore dumps, but instead comes through in snatches and fragments, which is infinitely preferable. Those particularly hungry for information could always spend a few points on the “encyclopedia” skill, which will interrupt the dialogue to bring you an impassioned history lesson – but there are so many other enticing skills available that you’ll find yourself faced with a real dilemma. Where other RPGs would normally use just three or four skills (at most) to influence dialogue, here you have a whopping twenty-four. And all of them are useful, desirable, and smart – so much so that I sat looking at the character customisation screen for a good few minutes, unable to choose between a sixth sense, an ability to lie, or hand/eye coordination: a fiendishly difficult decision.




The human condition. What I found craziest is that these skills do more than just unlock frivolous dialogue options. Although they are sometimes used for dice rolls (“composure”, for example, will help stop you from passing out like a sack of potatoes when you have to remove a hanged cadaver while your partner looks on in dismay), their usefulness lies mostly in their ability to butt in on your conversations, as though they were characters in their own right. “It’s as if there were 24 people having a big party inside the hero’s body,” says Kurvitz. “By distributing points, you can vote to decide which ones get the most power.” What power? The power to give our hero questionable advice while he’s mid-conversation, the power to roast him, or the power to try and lead him in another direction. “Endurance” is one skill that voices itself particularly crudely, from the depths of the hero’s gut: it gave me grief for a good five minutes, trying to turn me into some kind of macho halfwit obsessed with the idea of sending women back into the kitchen.



Off the beaten pacifism. Yes, it went on for a good five minutes – a dialogue in Disco Elysium can easily take a quarter of an hour. This would seem an eternity in any other RPG but in this game it flies by, precisely because these conversations are never just straightforward question-and-answer exchanges. What with the different skills chatting away, the slippery customers you have to interrogate, the hero making pathetic attempts to outdo everyone else the whole time, and the game’s unique responsiveness, every discussion feels more like a festival of warped thinking, joking and role-playing which always goes one step beyond the detective game you were expecting. And I’ve not yet mentioned the “Thought Cabinet” – this is a screen that lets you tap into the hero’s recurring thoughts (such as becoming a superstar), which can change over time to generate powerful bonuses. Before visiting the studio, I was of course concerned about the lack of traditional combat sequences. For the last ten years, dialogue in RPGs has existed merely as a filler or to serve a specific purpose (take up a mission, find information about the mission, conclude the mission), so I would have been within my rights to panic at the idea of a game where dialogue is everything.



Comes the resurrection. However, Disco Elysium not only has some combat sequences (with a highly promising sort of turn-based system that progresses through dialogue, which means it can, and I quote, “describe precisely how much it hurts to take a bullet to the pelvis”), but the in-game text is more than enough to bring a sense of rhythm, freshness, powerful emotion, and originality to the adventure. The urge to whip out a gun and zap all the bad guys becomes immediately less pressing when every conversation turns out to be a fast-paced confrontation of rhetoric, a wrestle with a hideous tie, or a battle of wills with a merciless twelve-year-old (who stands a pretty good chance against our hero). It may not seem like a big deal, but when you combine it with a highly original universe and impeccable writing, this polyphonic, dynamic system of dialogue will most likely produce a game light years ahead of the RPGs we know. And if Disco Elysium does well after its release at the end of the year, it’s going to be mighty hard for studios to carry on releasing old-style RPGs as if nothing had happened. What is clear is that there’s a real storm brewing in that whispering wind from Estonia.

See you next week for PART 2 – the interview with Robert Kurvitz!