ameancow
@ameancow@lemmy.world
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 6 days ago:
You summed up why I never engage in media/gaming conversations online, but I had to step into this one because the game was legitimately art and needs to be recognized and preserved before like, the Turmp administration declares it terrorist propaganda or something. (Don’t scroll down where people are saying it was an artistic game as a derogatory slam.)
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 6 days ago:
Oh yes, the voice narration was what made it go from great to fantastic, but it’s still at that point an “audio book” for all the unwashed masses in here, so it’s semantic and pointless to try to convince people who rather delight in the nuance and depth of JRPG’s where you grind killing slimes for 94 hours that it’s not supposed to be that kind of game.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 6 days ago:
Subjectively Terrible choice #1 Subjectively Terrible choice #2 Subjectively Terrible choice #3 Subjectively Just godawful choice #1 Subjectively What the fuck is even this choice? #1
Fixed that for you. For many people who appreciate nuance and dark humor and a more subtle narrative interaction, these choices are what made the game great. It’s not going to land with everyone and that’s okay, it just needs to be understood that these are personal tastes.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 6 days ago:
I think anime ruined a whole generation.
Something about the really overly exaggerated and 2-dimensional character traits that require absolutely no nuance to understand because it makes for better translation through international markets for children, it just wrecked how a lot of people interact with media.
The sad part is someone is reading this comment right now and furiously typing up a reply why their favorite story about a high-school kid with absolutely no personality being fought over by two jealous sci-fi/fantasy princesses for no reason is in fact, peek nuance and the highest form of thoughtful expression.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 6 days ago:
without actually explaining what makes it art.
Is that happening? Everyone endorsing the game even in this post are going on at length what makes it great. I could drop a 20-page thesis about the themes, plots and interwoven interactive narratives, but I am guessing you don’t actually want to read that any more than you want to play a reading game to begin with.
Maybe… and hear me out here, maybe some of you just don’t like arty games and rather do mindless clicking and grinding. That’s fine, just understand what’s what.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 6 days ago:
It’s not at all surprising to me that the people with outspoken dislike for Disco Elysium and getting pissy at people who did like it, are also the same people trying to say action JRPG’s that share absolutely nothing in common are better games and getting mad at people trying to describe how reading is actually good.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 6 days ago:
neckbeards downvoting you for having a civil conversation
That’s not at all what’s happening here, it’s the other way around. Most posts in here are from people saying they hated the game and comparing it games absolutely nothing like it, and then they are getting pissed at the people responding and explaining why they liked it and why it was good, and said neckbeards doubling down and saying Witcher was a better game or something when one is an interactive novel, and the other is a click-splat game.
People are just being irritated with other people for not liking the same thing they like, and no surprise, the bulk of contention is coming from people who rather mindlessly cut down orcs with a sword so they don’t have to feel or think things.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 6 days ago:
ITT: lots of people who don’t like this kind of game saying they didn’t like it and getting pissed at people explaining why it was great.
I weep for our species’ lost potential, which ironically was a theme of Disco Elysium.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 6 days ago:
It LOOKS great, the writing is dogshit.
The writing is the key point, it has the best writing of most novels so that shows how badly the game is being misrepresented even here by people who didn’t give it a chance because they expected something else or have millisecond-long attention spans. I don’t know why anyone would compare it to any of the other games you listed, the title of the post and article is clickbait, the game is an interactive narrative, not anything like fucking Phantasy Star or others. They’re all great games but it’s weird trying to box them together.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 6 days ago:
Half of these games are absolutely nothing like each other, maybe we would all be better off if we just stopped trying to place boxes around things and appreciated them for what they are.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 6 days ago:
lol ok bud
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 1 week ago:
That’s absolutely crazy, I have done deliberate fuck-up playthroughs and had as much enjoyment from how the story progresses as when I try to min-max various traits and win every roll. I can only think of a couple places where dying was a real risk and they take place much later in the game.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 1 week ago:
Look, I played SEVEN and not another one, if that’s a real number for where we’re at, that’s even worse.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 1 week ago:
Sounds like you had some really bad luck? The game doesn’t ever punish you for failure, it rewards it in most cases, it develops the story and there are relatively few ways to actually “lose” there are just different story and character arc outcomes, that’s why so many of us replay it so many times.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 1 week ago:
You haven’t read a lot of good novels if you need all this audiovisual support to paint a world with such depth in your head.
This is such a needlessly obtuse and petty take that I stopped here. I will not have any interesting conversation with someone so bent out of shape that other people had a better experience than they did. If you just don’t like a “reading game” just end it there and go play CoD or something.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 1 week ago:
If it’s not attention span, and you like to read, then the issue is expectation. It is a visual/interactive novel. Player choices and interaction and evolution are what drives the shape of the experience you have, the game wouldn’t work as a novel, and a novel alone couldn’t explore the depth of the world-building and characterization, so it’s an almost perfect harmony between the two genres, and if you don’t like the tone, setting or concept, that’s fine. I just encourage people to understand that it’s not trying to be a traditional game or novel, it’s something in between and if you don’t care for that experience, also fine.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 1 week ago:
Because the player choices and interaction and evolution are what drives the shape of the experience you have, the game wouldn’t work as a novel, and a novel alone couldn’t explore the depth of the world-building and characterization, so it’s an almost perfect harmony between the two genres, and if you don’t like the tone, setting or concept, that’s fine, but understand what it is so you know why you don’t like it.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 1 week ago:
Part of the idea behind the “world” is the idea that we normalize our reality and it’s almost equally absurd and distressing, we have just as much craziness in our existence that we’re just used to the same way. “Oh, we’re floating on a spherical rock in an endless dark void? And the climate is changing and we may all go extinct? Cool, what’s for breakfast.”
It’s used as a metaphor for how we just plow through our own narratives in life without stopping to think about how weird and fascinating and disturbing our own reality is, and it could be radically different and we would get used to that as well.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 1 week ago:
The game gives the player so many options for what you want to dive deeply into. Some players might get lost in the backstory and politics, some might dive into the characters, some like myself might get lost down the surreal/sci-fi elements. It’s very easy to play an entire playthrough and miss entire bodies of work within the work.
And if you’re like half the people commenting here, you might boot the game up and immediately say “I ain’t reading all that” and go fire up Call of Duty.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 1 week ago:
If it were me, and I had that reaction to a interactive story that so many other people got so many other different experiences from, I would explore that dissonance because it reveals something.
Not saying “go play the game again” if you don’t like it you don’t like it, but I would consider thinking about how and why a dark, bleak-toned reading experience left so many other people feeling one way, and you another. I found it hilarious but also you have the choice in the story to view the bleak world as either a tragedy or a comedy and everything in between… do you feel that kind of agency in life or are you stuck in some way?
Not asking for an answer, just queuing rhetorical questions I would ask myself in that position.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 1 week ago:
I think it triggers some people because it’s immediately apparent that it is:
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Not a “click-splat the baddies” game and you’re not going to be running around grinding levels and powering up your weapons. People barely read more than a paragraph even on social media sites, we cannot expect most people to connect with an interactive novel.
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Realistically dark. If you are like a lot of people right now, you are trying to escape thinking and feeling (never mind the damage that does long term) and seeing a setting like Disco Elysium immediately throws you into, of a world torn apart by fascism, greed and human failings, of self-destructive binging to escape pain, of the quiet acceptance of a winding-down world that people still try to exploit and get ahead of others in, you might quickly run away.
This is sad because the story also teaches about finding yourself, of creating identity out of the darkness, of listening to your inner voices and deciding how to treat others and dealing with the consequences of those choices. It feels like a lifeline in places, a nod of hope in the darkness that you still have agency, and it’s wildly quirky and funny, also like life in many ways.
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- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 1 week ago:
Sad because I played it a dozen times and found avenues of hope, metaphors for our current lives and generation, bleak and dark views and sublime explorations of acceptance and living in the present. Choices and consequences that can’t be reversed and how we deal with them.
But as I say over and over, it’s a reading experience, it’s a mental/emotional exploration of ideas and settings that reflect the real world. If you just wanna feel good… well there’s a voice in your head for that too, and you can follow that voice and shut out all the others in life, and in game.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 1 week ago:
But the gameplay itself is SO boring.
I don’t know why anyone is trying to pass it off as a “gameplay” experience, it’s literally an interactive novel that uses visual settings and reader choices to advance the plot in a thousand different ways.
If you don’t like reading, if you don’t have a brain adapted to creating worlds from text, you won’t like it. If you sit down to “play a game” and wanna click-splat baddies or strategically manage your health potions as you horde massive piles of wealth and gain levels… you won’t like it. It has some of those elements but its to serve the purpose of advancing story, not engaging in gameplay.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 1 week ago:
Nobody reads anymore, anything more than a paragraph of text gets skipped by most people under 25 I think. I mean it broadly too, online, in games, in classrooms, in work meetings… it’s massively infuriating to someone who grew up reading books and has a brain adapted to creating worlds from abstractions.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 1 week ago:
If you read a lot of books, it’s absolutely one of the best interactive reading experiences ever made. If you’re not into reading and you don’t have a brain adapted to creating worlds from text you’re going to feel like only some kind snob likes it or it’s pretentious and people only like it for the politics or something.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 1 week ago:
Because people trying to sell it as a traditional video game are doing it a disservice, you don’t play Disco Elysium for the same gaming experience as something where you click buttons to splat baddies, it is literally an interactive novel and if you love reading you will love it, if not, you won’t. It’s ridiculous to compare it to other games because it’s a niche genre.
I get really sick of the anti-intellectualism around non-traditional experiences though, part of the seven-second attention-span generation leaking everywhere. The “I ain’t reading all that” banner that everyone under 20 seems to carry nowadays.
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 1 week ago:
Best to who? In terms of what?
I tuned out of these absolutist statements years and years ago and now just see it for what it is, attempts at farming engagement.
I loved DE and absolutely rank it up there as one of the best gaming experiences, but it’s more like an interactive novel set in a highly polished world, a dive into an author’s mind. It’s not a “gaming experience” you can put on the same list with things like Final Fantasy XXVII or whatever RPG’s people play now.
- Comment on When one earbud decides to not charge and I need to remove it from the case and put it back. And I even sometimes don't realize that... 1 week ago:
Not the whole shaft?
- Comment on What is the magic diet for no-wipe poops? 1 week ago:
Glad you appreciate it. I figured it might be just a polling question for engagement, which is why I dropped a thorough back-to-basics summary.
But I stand by the last part, I have read far, far too many posts across different sites from grown-ass men and women who struggle keeping the area between their legs from crusting over. There are men scared to touch their own asses and never wash, and women who think getting water in their vagina will make them go to hell or pregnant or shit, and posts by the partners of these people who have no idea how to address it.
We have a checked out generation relying on Grok and ChatGTP to tell them how to do basic human functions. I feel like this is a recipe for even worst outcomes somewhere down the road.
- Comment on What is the magic diet for no-wipe poops? 1 week ago:
No such thing, your own body is your own body and how it functions is entirely for you to manage, figure out and maintain.
You have to follow the basics of self-care and have a healthy diet including a lot of vegetables, low-fat proteins, healthy oils like olive oil in moderate amounts. Stay away from processed foods, and if you don’t know what constitutes processed food, you need to learn to walk before you run. Do some searches. You have the wealth of Humanity’s knowledge at your fingers.
Just don’t eat fast-food, learn to make beans and rice and chicken/tofu dishes and eat some fresh greens daily if you can. Get exercise every day. DRINK LOTS OF WATER EVEN IF YOU DON’T THINK YOU’RE THIRSTY.
Will all this give you solid, clean bowel movements? No idea, in fact if you’re not used to eating like this, you will probably need months to adjust to it and may have periods of loose stools or even constipation before you start having healthier, easier bathroom times. You will also save a lot of money and you will feel healthier and have more energy and may live longer. I would take all that over “no wipe poops.”
If you’re really struggling wiping, stop. Buy a bidet or a hand-held shower-head with a long hose and just use toilet paper to wipe dry. It’s absolutely criminal that parents don’t teach their kids proper bathroom hygiene and now we have a whole generation of people who struggle in the bathroom.