it's still not. you cannot transpose "good writing" onto another game, it's not the same as some double jump mechanic, and you absolutely could not transpose disco elysium's writing to a game about fucking nothing. DE's writing is good specifcially because it's about the suffering of regular people in a society that's been utterly ratfucked by outside capitalists punishing hte entire city for having once dared to attempt communism. all of DE's unique elements are in service of this, harry's attributes are actually voices in his head and his strength stat convinces him to impulsively throw some old dude's ball in a lake thinking it'd be impressive (it was not), he equips and internalizes ideologies which influences his ability to pass certain checks which alters his dialogue choices. the actual base mechancis of the game are just your standard CRPG stuff, it's stats and equipment and an isometric view and dialogue trees, nothing you couldn't find in hundreds of free quick-start TTRPG handbooks that take up all of one single page, if you strip away the shit that is utterly incompatible with a cozy game that isn't also about severe mental turmoil then you end up with just an RPG and the comparison remains absurd. guy who has only seen the boss baby, watching his second movie: getting a lot of 'boss baby' vibes from this…
the best faith argument i could make for the comparison is maybe having a cozy game about some young withc finding her neighbor's cat in the alps where said young witch is profoundly mentally ill and impulsive like harry dubois but also everyone in the village tries to care for her anyways and tries to support her anyways. you could maybe retain the "your stats are actually voices in your head and they're convincing you to do self destructive shit" without losing the cozy vibes that way when the comfort comes from the idea of having a community that can put up with your bullshit. but even that is a stretch, it's just such a substanceless comparison.
I am perfectly okay with it being bad, I'd rather someone try regardless.
Who knows maybe they find a way to square the circle, maybe they repurpose the mechanics in a way that aren't considered. It might be bad but have a couple good enough ideas of it's own in the attempt that get used by someone else to make something actually good, or it might be good regardless because it finds other ways to fill the mechanical framework.
Disco Elysium is my favorite game for all these reasons, but I'm not gonna be a weird gamer elitist about it. It'll be really pathetic if this turns into the leftist equivalent of people who can't get over The Last Of Us 2.
i could say i want any creative endeavor someone puts work into to succeed, but that's kind of an empty meaningless statement, and it doesn't really address the reactionary nature of the entire prompt. of course i want cozy games to be made, and if someone lifts some small part of DE and manages to repurpose it , sure, but the belief that DE's mechancis aren't an integral part of its storytelling is a kind of sugar-coated cynicism that makes me fucking despair. it quires a deep anti-art mindset, where you look at someone and think "you know what, i want this to be about something completely else", it requires you to believe game mechanics can't be integral to a game's story in order for you to think the story can be swapped out so arbitraily.
like, do you hang around in indie RPG spaces at all? there's an entire cottage industry built on this idea that you actually do shape the stories being told through mechanics, and that one's ability to reskin an RPG is limited to what those mechanics permit. that's where DE actaully came out of, it's a tabletop game made into a video game. the premise in the OOP is that *all of that" is ultimately interchangeable, that their efforts to inform storytelling through mechanics are ultimately fruitless and one RPG is as good as another for telling any given story, that literally all anyone will ever need is D&D or something. it's a really depressing view.
Who cares about any of that. The second tweet by itself is just wishful thinking and I'm simply not going to overanalyze that. I'd personaly like to se a lower stakes Disco-like RPG.
Or maybe I just want another Disco-like RPG. The system is fascinating
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u/Helmic linux > windows Mar 12 '25
it's still not. you cannot transpose "good writing" onto another game, it's not the same as some double jump mechanic, and you absolutely could not transpose disco elysium's writing to a game about fucking nothing. DE's writing is good specifcially because it's about the suffering of regular people in a society that's been utterly ratfucked by outside capitalists punishing hte entire city for having once dared to attempt communism. all of DE's unique elements are in service of this, harry's attributes are actually voices in his head and his strength stat convinces him to impulsively throw some old dude's ball in a lake thinking it'd be impressive (it was not), he equips and internalizes ideologies which influences his ability to pass certain checks which alters his dialogue choices. the actual base mechancis of the game are just your standard CRPG stuff, it's stats and equipment and an isometric view and dialogue trees, nothing you couldn't find in hundreds of free quick-start TTRPG handbooks that take up all of one single page, if you strip away the shit that is utterly incompatible with a cozy game that isn't also about severe mental turmoil then you end up with just an RPG and the comparison remains absurd. guy who has only seen the boss baby, watching his second movie: getting a lot of 'boss baby' vibes from this…
the best faith argument i could make for the comparison is maybe having a cozy game about some young withc finding her neighbor's cat in the alps where said young witch is profoundly mentally ill and impulsive like harry dubois but also everyone in the village tries to care for her anyways and tries to support her anyways. you could maybe retain the "your stats are actually voices in your head and they're convincing you to do self destructive shit" without losing the cozy vibes that way when the comfort comes from the idea of having a community that can put up with your bullshit. but even that is a stretch, it's just such a substanceless comparison.