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HDB: Kim, why are you so cool? Kim: I remind you of your ex-wife.
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Sep 4, 2020 10:17
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I've played this game for a couple of hours and it's a real trip but I seriously have no idea what's going on with the dice roll checks or abilities represented by abstract drawings tbh. Game is cool though. The writing is great and it looks fantastic.
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Sep 4, 2020 10:35
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veni veni veni posted:I've played this game for a couple of hours and it's a real trip but I seriously have no idea what's going on with the dice roll checks or abilities represented by abstract drawings tbh. Game is cool though. The writing is great and it looks fantastic. Pretty sure it's meant to show that your skill rolls are a simulated 2d6, though I might be fooled.
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Sep 4, 2020 10:38
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Pretty sure it's meant to show that your skill rolls are a simulated 2d6, though I might be fooled. Nah, you're completely right.
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Sep 4, 2020 10:57
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sebmojo posted:I don't think it's deliberately inflammatory, i think it's just a little undercooked. Came here to agree with this. I think there's a big cultural disconnect between the american critic and the estonian writers. America is a place where real-existing-socialism was, I guess, best captured by the New Deal, which mostly didn't have a tremendous amount of gulags. Unskeptical, unironic, and full-hearted embrace of socialism in east europe (where I currently live) is, uh, not really something people with a brain in their heads get into, even serious leftists. I know it's vogue in parts of the US right now (and good on them) but in a place left scarred and traumatized by a legacy of secret police, gulags, and rooms with drains in the floors, socialism isn't considered the unalloyed good that a lot of american twitterati want. And, of course, there's a lot more going on in DE than just the big picture political questions. It's also a very sincere look at the void, which is both personal and intimate, but also collective and universal. In short, critic has a point, his opinion is valid and worth hearing, but his reading is, in my opinion, incomplete.
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Sep 4, 2020 11:30
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Pretty sure it's meant to show that your skill rolls are a simulated 2d6, though I might be fooled. Yes, that's correct. The odds it shows you are a (rounded) version of trying to meet or exceed the displayed difficulty on 2d6 + bonuses, where snake-eyes always fails and boxcars always succeeds. In addition, something is constantly happening in the background - the game is comparing 6 + bonuses to various hidden difficulties. This affects whether you get various little int/psy/fys/mot colored bubbles around your head, whether you can see and interact with various yellow-outlined dots and objects, and whether the game reports certain passive checks in dialogue as succeeded or failed. (Most of the time, the game doesn't report that you failed passive checks. That only comes out for effect at certain times.) A tremendous amount of difference in the playthroughs from one run to another comes out in these passive checks and the options they give you. More difference comes out in the order you do things and what you see first. But don't worry about it, and don't be afraid to fail. Glazius fucked around with this message at 13:48 on Sep 4, 2020 |
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Sep 4, 2020 13:41
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If there’s one thing I could complain about in DE, it’s that the check difficulty is visible in dialog and the map, but your chance of succeeding is not visible. I avoided so many checks near the start of the game because they said “legendary” or “impossible” and I assumed that meant it was unlikely/impossible for ME to succeed
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Sep 4, 2020 14:15
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Yeah, that figures. The game is deceptively simple mechanically, but the devs use that as a springboard for endless complexity. Your skills are basically characters in themselves. The protagonist is basically a noir version of The Nameless One, and while some aspects of his character are retroactively determined by your choices (and I'm not even sure about that) the game is heavily about exploring his character and discovering aspects of a long and interesting life he's had intertwined with the setting.
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Sep 4, 2020 14:15
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I just got this game like 2 days ago. Dumped all my skill points into empathy and still couldn’t convince cuno to cut him down.  Then me and Kim took pot shots at his body. So now I have no choice but to enlist the dock workers help. Also I internalized racism cuz I didn’t think I could touch the big guy at the gate. Should I just reset? What happens when the workers help take him down? I’ve done so much else in the game already that I really don’t want to start over but it’s really disappointing to have maxed out empathy for one single white check thing and still fail it. And since it’s maxed out I don’t think I can get it to show up again, since it says I need to put more skill points into it to make it show up. Even equipping the fixed ledger, which gives another +1, doesn’t enable the conversation option again.
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Sep 4, 2020 14:30
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Keep going, you're doing fine (well not fine because you're racist, but whatever). Try not to worry about doing things "optimally". The game is all about learning to accept failure.
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Sep 4, 2020 14:32
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internalizing measure head's ideology doesn't make you racist, just make you realize just how dumb it is
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Sep 4, 2020 14:37
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Early game white skill checks are the ones you have every possible opportunity to retry. Honestly it might be good to start with a fuckup run before you know what you're doing, since it can be hard to let yourself fail stuff on another go when you actually do know. The game is actively designed to let you finish it with all but the worst mistakes.Nosfereefer posted:internalizing measure head's ideology doesn't make you racist, just make you realize just how dumb it is IIRC, first internalising the thought does make you racist, but completing it does make you realise how stupid it is specifically because you've been exposed to Measurehead's interpretation of it and realised the contradictions make no sense from any perspective.
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Sep 4, 2020 14:39
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Jedi Knight Luigi posted:I just got this game like 2 days ago. Dumped all my skill points into empathy and still couldn’t convince cuno to cut him down. Just keep going. This is very on-brand for Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau.
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Sep 4, 2020 14:49
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Jedi Knight Luigi posted:I just got this game like 2 days ago. Dumped all my skill points into empathy and still couldn’t convince cuno to cut him down. If it comes to it there are other options. Gear won't let you reroll checks, but learning other things that boost the skill roll can. I don't think you can get that with Cuno at this point, but you have a chance at doing something to impress him a bit later, after the body's down. Increasing a stat will also increase the skill cap, and drugs exist to increase every stat temporarily. Also there are thoughts that increase the caps for certain skills. If you've looked in the mirror and realized where The Expression came from, you have a relevant one of those. Also also, nearer the endgame you get access to one-shot global unlocker thoughts for each stat, but that's kind of far off.
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Sep 4, 2020 15:04
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Nosfereefer posted:internalizing measure head's ideology doesn't make you racist, just make you realize just how dumb it is yeah, the nationalist thought is something else
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Sep 4, 2020 16:36
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Glazius posted:If it comes to it there are other options. I believe the dicemaker also gives you the ability to reset white checks by buying from her, although you can only buy each thing once.
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Sep 4, 2020 16:47
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But the thoughts don't tell you that they do it until it's already internalized and done, not exactly useful for anything but repeat playthroughs except as a nice surprise.
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Sep 4, 2020 16:53
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Both literally and figuratively roll with it, unless you really don't want to. This game lets you fail forward.
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Sep 4, 2020 17:01
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Glazius posted:And DE never comes out and says, in the game in big bold ink, that you shouldn't just listen to certain skills or say certain things but always consider what you're picking from the options, because Harry is really saying that and it can really affect people. It never comes out and says that failing white checks may hurt you a little, but won't redirect the game, and you may need to try and fail to find out what you need to do them better. Another thing I realized from watching a streamer (Day9) play the game is that there are subtle, but crucial, aspects of the mechanics that really require some Gamer Thinking to understand, and there's a lot you can miss if you don't notice them. One of the things I immediately loved about Disco was the way these mechanics help the game reveal itself to you, in the same way that an exceptionally well-designed puzzle game will set up some mechanics, and then let the player feel like a genius for figuring out how to apply them. But here, those mechanics aren't really "set up" the way that most games onboard new players these days; they expect you to figure them out from context. As an example, dialogue trees have a few different "archetypes," and most conversations include several/all of them at various points. They vaguely look like this: code:
Those of us who've played through the game may implicitly see the above as:
But the interpretation of what this choice means can change very subtly. Consider: code:
Now, it reads more like:
Or: code:
Seeing that there's a roll here might make the options look like:
It was driving me a little insane to watch someone play when they hadn't yet picked up on these kinds of distinctions. They were treating loopable sections (i.e. those with Proceed options) as though they needed to commit to one response, for example, and as a result they were missing content or not catching important details. People often say that every choice matters in this game, but that's not exactly true: there are lots of spots where you should pick every option, and some spots where the game is subtly telegraphing to you that your dialogue choice will more specifically reflect a political ideology or personal character trait that you're committing to. There are some important story details that can significantly recontextualize the game's world and its characters, and it's totally possible to miss them if you don't pick up one where it's appropriate to be thorough vs. picking a response and sticking to it.
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Sep 4, 2020 17:01
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Comte de Saint-Germain posted:I know it's vogue in parts of the US right now (and good on them) but in a place left scarred and traumatized by a legacy of secret police, gulags, and rooms with drains in the floors, socialism isn't considered the unalloyed good that a lot of american twitterati want In all honesty, they had Chapo Trap House and Red Scare doing vocals for the game. It would be one hell of a contradiction praising ZA/UM's general cleverness and not consider this quite appropriate for the humor and approach of the game w/r/t communism. This feeling has some kindred roots here in Latin America, which is something that is rather beautiful in a way - holy poo poo guys from Estonia and I am getting what they mean - is that we had our reactionaries and the USA wiping out the floor beating the poo poo out of us so that we didn't even get to try implementing anything remotely close to a shade of pink, and they over there had their poo poo beaten out of for the sake of the All Workers' State which degenerated from its revolutionary premise. Yet, here and there, socialists (and communists and anarchists and the entire gang) remain, and the humor is incredibly similar across this distance. "Child-eating communists with a grin" is something that was no loving joke used by Bolsonaro's crew, and Rhetoric does it in DE. I loving lol'ed. Zizek has a poster of Stalin at his home to explicitly take the piss out of anyone going "ehhhhrrrmmmmmm" at him. A common joke among the Latin American left is "should've killed more" when liberals and conservatives say "WHAT ABOUT STALIN". And that particular context is something that is quite difficult for American culture to handle, because the humor only seems to be ironic, but is there to handle the authentic and sincere ideological beliefs, which ends up subverting irony: we are laughing at the monster, not at the audience. We are laughing at the failure of it all, either for not being making it and reaction loving us up or by failing the revolutionary ideal. And good humor in such cases is a very important sign of emotional well-being, as far as psychology is concerned. It means to be able to walk away from the ruin of the tragedy and try something new.
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Sep 4, 2020 17:08
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To the guy who posted about the only thing that fights back the Pale was Art, was this mentioned in the game? My art stat wasn't that high but didn't read about anything fighting it off, more like other people posted - that it's constantly entropying away the planet/universe.
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Sep 4, 2020 17:34
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dead gay comedy forums posted:walk away from the ruin of the tragedy and try something new. I feel like this is the absolute core of the game, the stressing of the importance to face the failures of the past but move beyond them, or at least try genuinely to move beyond them.
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Sep 4, 2020 17:35
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Yeah there is a weird thing in former Eastern Bloc countries, who were very much getting the poo poo end of the stick in the USSR, where many of them respond to opinion polls saying they actually feel worse off now under capitalism than they did under communism, even being fully aware of the history involved. The key theme of the game is that better things can be possible, humanity might be lovely but humans can be good, and the main thing that neoliberal capitalism espouses is "this is the best things can be", end of history kind of thinking. It's something a lot of young socialists find extremely depressing because it's a sort of tyranny of the mediocre - it's a belief that not only are better things not possible, but it is in fact foolish to even imagine they can be. It's "very smart people" paternalistically talking down to fully grown adults as if they are children because they dare to believe that actually, things could be better. I think this is the feeling the writers have living in a former Soviet nation - communism as it was practiced was deeply flawed, but it carried with it the promise of a better future. The world order that has replaced it is one that has no place for hope, and they see this as much more grim than anything the Soviets ever did. It's like that old Mark Twain quote about the French Revolution, but in reverse: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court posted:THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves. The world of DE is one where the "hot" revolution was replaced by "cold" Moralism. Where the big smart men with their big smart ideas came in to "fix" the violence of the revolution with their superior economic ideas that are so superior they have to be imposed at gunpoint.
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Sep 4, 2020 17:35
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dead gay comedy forums posted:In all honesty, they had Chapo Trap House and Red Scare doing vocals for the game. It would be one hell of a contradiction praising ZA/UM's general cleverness and not consider this quite appropriate for the humor and approach of the game w/r/t communism. A lot of the twitterati also hate chapo for the same reasons they don't like DE. Though a lot of them are the kind of socialists who think that putting rose emojis in their handle and talking about fatphobia is revolutionary praxis. (I'm not including the author of the piece, btw, I don't really know them well) I feel like I've got a unique perspective here, since I'm an american leftist, relatively new to the whole thing (Eh, about 12 years or so) living in Poland, a county burned to the ground by fascism and then rule over for decades by a brutal socialist police state. So I can read the Vice article and know exactly what the guy is talking about, while at the same time see that he's completely misunderstanding the game's voice.
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Sep 4, 2020 17:39
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Desdinova posted:To the guy who posted about the only thing that fights back the Pale was Art, was this mentioned in the game? I don't remember the exact wording, but i'm pretty certain that its supposed that the church nightclub has some chance of preventing the spread of the Pale from the hole inside the church. Fighting back was probably too optimistic wording, its not like its a solved problem, but a thin glimmer of hope is a lot more than anything else given in regards to the Pale.
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Sep 4, 2020 17:55
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Desdinova posted:To the guy who posted about the only thing that fights back the Pale was Art, was this mentioned in the game? it is mentioned, yeah: after completing the reality lowdown, get Evrart to admit he wants open war with Wild Pines and tell Joyce about it. she'll share the story of the discovery of the Insulindian isola and you'll get the Insulindian Miracle thought. the one expedition of Queen Irene's that survived developed the Volta do Mar: basically, writing poetry helps keep people sane in the pale.
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Sep 4, 2020 17:55
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World War Mammories posted:it is mentioned, yeah: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV9opcVjJFM
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Sep 4, 2020 18:01
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apparently the volta do mar is a reference to a real thing as well and of course The Smallest Church in Saint-Saens is a preexisting song called The Smallest Church in Sussex https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei1RKGdlBUw
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Sep 4, 2020 18:21
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blixa <3 <3 <3
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Sep 4, 2020 18:26
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World War Mammories posted:apparently the volta do mar is a reference to a real thing as well British Sea Power did the score for the game
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Sep 4, 2020 18:37
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yeah, I know, it's just a preexisting song of theirs adapted for the game as opposed to something written specifically for the game. i must post trivia or else i'll die, i am encyclopedia incarnate
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Sep 4, 2020 18:47
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i wonder if the title is a reference to Camille Saint-Saens
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Sep 4, 2020 18:54
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Is there any reason why they decided to make Revachol very French?
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Sep 4, 2020 19:20
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Probably to allude to the Paris Commune.
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Sep 4, 2020 19:27
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Health Services posted:Probably to allude to the Paris Commune. also why the communists are frequently referred to as "communards"
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Sep 4, 2020 19:49
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It just occurred to me that Rene is literally a grognard.
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Sep 4, 2020 19:56
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RudeCat posted:I feel like this is the absolute core of the game, the stressing of the importance to face the failures of the past but move beyond them, or at least try genuinely to move beyond them. Completely agreed. I think one of the most important thematic moments here is the date with Lilienne. You can't romance her, you can't kiss her, you can't get laid, you can't fall in love. All you can do is... not gently caress it up. You can go on a nice walk with a lady and not gently caress it up. And that's hugely important, because just not loving up is the first step in a long, long journey towards eventually being able to be in love again.
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Sep 4, 2020 21:12
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DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:Completely agreed. I think one of the most important thematic moments here is the date with Lilienne. You can't romance her, you can't kiss her, you can't get laid, you can't fall in love. All you can do is... not gently caress it up. You can go on a nice walk with a lady and not gently caress it up. And that's hugely important, because just not loving up is the first step in a long, long journey towards eventually being able to be in love again. Yeah, that was one of my favorite scenes, it would be hyperbolic to say that I was sweating bullets trying to make sure I wasn't loving it up, because I could *feel* how important it was, but not by much.
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Sep 4, 2020 22:28
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RudeCat posted:Yeah, that was one of my favorite scenes, it would be hyperbolic to say that I was sweating bullets trying to make sure I wasn't loving it up, because I could *feel* how important it was, but not by much. also my favorite scene. I particularly like the conversation where she tells you that you dont have to get drunk to have a good time on a date.
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Sep 5, 2020 01:00
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TommyGun85 posted:also my favorite scene. I particularly like the conversation where she tells you that you dont have to get drunk to have a good time on a date. And you realize how much Harry needs someone to lay that out for him because that's the well he's been going to for so long.
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Sep 5, 2020 01:25
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