Comment on Is Disco Elysium playable in short bursts?
TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
I think you should try it. I think an hour is appropriate for a lot of the story beats if you have a decent memory, though maybe an hour and a half would be better suited to some of the more involved parts. A lot of this is affected by your reading speed. There’s a lot of reading.
For what it’s worth, I also played it in bursts, but probably something like 2 hr sessions. There’s a lot of rough, serious material in that game and I found it a lot to process at once, so I took breaks between sessions fairly often.
Glad to hear that. Although I’m not fast reader (not even in my mother tongue) I like reading when it is meaningful. I chewed through Planescape: Torment after all…
As for time, I’m not strictly limited to exactly 1 hour. It’s just I simply can’t play 5 hours straight like a teenager can… so one hour was an estimate. Sometimes it’s an hour, sometimes it’s two.
After all it looks DE should be ok and this short burst shouldn’t spoil it. Thank you.
I’m not sure if the above comment played on launch or after the Final Cut update, but there isn’t all that much reading in the game anymore. Almost all text is fully voice acted now. You still have to mentally absorb it of course, but I find it less taxing than reading, personally.
The book-like nature of it is spot on though; it’s better to treat it like an interactive novel where you choose the order in which you read its pages than as a traditional RPG.
Don’t be afraid to pick wild and weird dialogue options, and especially don’t be afraid to fail at things. The game pioneered a “fail-forward” design philosophy
Well, since I’m not native speaker I sometimes tend to miss some words/context without reading “subtitles” during voiceovers. On the other hand I’m glad there’s voiceover because it usually helps with immersion.
Fail to progress reminds me of my playthrough of Fallout 1 with very low INT character. Some conversation were priceless. It was usually things like “Mmmhm, unga bunga, huh” from my character and then sigh from the NPC like “Oh no, another village idiot…” I highly recommend to at least check some of these low int conversations on youtube - hillarious.
I think my favourite low-int detail was in Fallout 2. You come across the tribal Torr early on in Klamath and he speaks in grunts and broken sentences just like that if you talk to him with normal INT or above. However, if you talk to him with low INT the conversation completely changes into long eloquent sentences with advanced vocabulary for both him and you, matching the dialogue options unlocked at 10 INT. Amazing.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
I mean, there’s a lot of reading, but almost all of it is voice acted. Wonderfully.
Disco Elysium is worth it for the voice acting alone. And that’s not even a tenth of the game.