Oct 26, 2019

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut - ZAUM_Dani

DISCO ELYSIUM Patch notes for version C50F6815 (viewable in the F1 menu, bottom right)

Fixed duplicate thoughts bug
Fixed Win7 game boot bug
Item and description changes
Adjusted text for Ultraliberal
Fixed Thought Cabinet “Problem” persisting upon finding a Solution
Fixed character creation stats not showing correctly bug
Fixed Kim badmouthing issue
Fixed misplaced area names
Fixed Dicemaker VO
Fixed Pigs spacebar bug
Fixed map white checks showing incorrectly
Fixed red tint after red check bug
Fixed gun not disappearing correctly after looting bug
Fixed boombox not playing
Fixed issue causing Kim dialog to lock
Improved character pathing and navmesh
Fixed Cleaning Lady visual glitches
Fixed Tequila getting stuck after sleeping on island
Fixed orbs in various places
Fixed cutscenes hovering over checks
Fixed quick-save/load breaking menus
Reduced max text size
Fixed player getting stuck in Dicemaker dialogue
Adjusted text for Overproductive Honour Glands
Fixed jackets sometimes hiding shirt items
Fixed HUD icons open state override
Fixed major nerd glasses bonus
Fixed Thought Cabinet white texture bug
Fixed inventory grid alignment bug
Fixed Egg Head animation glitch
Fixed Karaoke UI bug
Adjusted Church rumble VFX
Fixed the other shoe bug
Fixed issue with save file after player discovered the insulidian miracle
Fixed skill points negative accumulation
Fixed Frittte typo in area name
Fixed Tequila stops for inventory fix
Fixed whirling doors no longer bleeding light
Improved saving games.
Fixed issue caused by the thought “Insulindian Miracle.”
Fixed resolution switcher
Fixed internalized thoughts remaining highlighted in selection menu
Fixed camera weirdness in certain conditions pertaining to journal and character sheet
Adjusted ESC key for specific in-game segments
Solved the mystery of the disappearing shoe.
Fixed Kim remaining in a holster position under certain conditions
Fixed visual part of stat resets upon new character creation.
Fixed waking up bug
Fixed certain keyboard combinations breaking the HUD
Fixed Cindy camera lock issue
Fixed Gary's apartment door lock
Improved GOG achievements
Fixed karaoke crowd and loot
Fixed Doomspiral outline issues
Fixed Unity light artifacting issues
Improved weather changes during dialogues
Improved FPS all around
Fixed electrochemistry smokes bug
Fixed health bar displaying incorrect amounts
Fixed getting stuck at phasmid after electrochem check

Remember to report any bugs you may find! - Bug Report -

Thanks!

Oct 22, 2019

DISCO ELYSIUM - Substances and You

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut - ZAUM_Dani

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.

SMOKES

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.

PYRHOLIDON

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.)

ALCOHOL

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.

SPEED

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.

Oct 8, 2019

Welcome to Revachol!

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut - ZAUM_Dani

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.

Sep 30, 2019

Introducing The Thought Cabinet

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut - ZAUM_Dani

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.

THC is the game's reputation system.

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.

THC is also the game's perk system.

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.

Thoughts evolve over time.

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.)

Some (very special) thoughts open up big things in the story.

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.

Finally, Thoughts are also how Disco Elysium handles classes and alignments.

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

Sep 24, 2019

DISCO ELYSIUM IS A COLOSSAL GAME

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut - ZAUM_Dani

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.

So — a colossal game.

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.

What is there to do with one massive day?

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.

Let's talk stuff too.

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.

It is one million words long.

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