It’s a difficult question to answer. I personally barely consider Disco Elysium to be a game, more like an interactive story that uses certain game mechanics as grammar elements and punctuation in its storytelling. It’s a novel masquerading as a game. It’s three novels in a trenchcoat. But if we do count it then it is my pick, by a landslide.
Otherwise it’s probably Baldur’s Gate 2. It’s the story game I’ve replayed the most over the years and it was absolutely fundamental in my journey as a gamer, the definition of a formative experience. Even though parts of it are dated now (some clunk is to be expected from a 25-year-old game) I still prefer it to BG3. It’s got a great story, great companions and an all-time great villain. David Warner put in an incredible performance and even all these years later there aren’t many video game villains who have surpassed Irenicus in sheer aura.
I played BG1 and 2 for the first time shortly before the release of BG3, and I just wanted to hear Irenicus talk more.
Disco Elysium, on the other hand, just did not hit for me. The only things I hear about it are praise, but my friends list is filled with people who played it for a few hours, like I did, and stopped, so maybe the dissenters just aren’t so vocal.
Like I said, the game itself on its store page claims to be a “detective game RPG” while in reality I would argue it’s barely any of those things. So a lot of people probably come into it with the wrong expectations. It’s more like a novel about love and loss, about addiction, depression and the past looming over the present like a grey ghost. It’s a story about finding hope in the midst of overwhelming nihilism. As someone who has struggled with all those things it hit incredibly close to home, and was the most meaningful experience I’ve ever had playing a video game.
I don’t think I came to it with many expectations other than that people praised it for the writing, but I found the characters to nearly universally be abrasive and the story delivered via info dumps.
That’s not an inaccurate description. Though context is important - most of the characters know yours through behavior and actions that neither you or the character remember. A lot of the game is playing with how you handle that.
I can sympathize with that. The whole game is intentionally bleak and rough, which can be pretty off putting (though it does make the few nice parts exceptionally nice). The devs made a pretty overt choice to focus more on being fairly confrontational art rather than being particularly accommodating to the player.
I think that’s another thing as well, a lot of people go in with the idea that you can to some extent “play as yourself” like you do in many RPGs. And they get frustrated when they’re only given stupid or horrible dialogue options like “why would I ever say any of these things?!”. Because the game is actually rather restrictive in terms of roleplay: yes you can choose your flavour and variety of crazy but at the end of the day you’re always Harry, you’re always insane and damaged and you can’t change that.
For me personally, I’m also an utter failure and I hate myself deeply, so maybe that’s why I easily resonated with the protagonist. And in the end, much of the actual story is about dealing with failure, about finding hope amidst despair and about overcoming and letting go of the past.
I’m totally fine with playing a character who is always a shitty person, but when the world was littered with those characters, it was undesirable to spend any more time in it, especially considering my issues with the story’s delivery as well.
I don’t know how far you got, but you might have gotten unlucky with who you spoke to in game. Lena, Anette, Tommy, Mañana and Roy are all immediately accessible for example and are all rather lovely people, providing some soft contrast to other more abrasive characters.
Can’t say anything about the delivery of the content though. It’s certainly extremely info dumpy and text heavy - part of why I was saying to start with that it’s less than a game and more of a novel.
I personally consider Disco Elysium very much a game (a way better role-playing gamer than most), because an “interactive story” is a game. Combat shouldn’t be a necessary condition. Planescape: Torment should have had the guts to scrap its lackluster combat and focus on its strengths.
For me Disco Elysium is definitely my favorite of all time if we count it.
If we don’t for some reason, then Hi-Fi Rush is an absolute joy of a game and I’ve loved every second of it. Very obviously a labor of love and far more gamified than Disco Elysium.
I’ve always maintained that it’s a library, not a backlog. A backlog is a chore, a task I have to finish.
A library is a catalogue of new, exciting experiences waiting for me to have them!
I also happen to live in a rural area with radio Internet so when I decide I want to play a game it’s many, many hours for it to install and be playable. Heck, sometimes I can order a physical game and it’ll arrive by delivery faster than I can install it.
Also some console games are still physically on the cartridge/disc and it’s becoming more and more of a rarity. As long as the media and systems hold up you can still actually own these games. It’s sometimes worth not sleeping on these because, as I’m sure we can all see, they’re a drying breed. Same thing with (most) GOG games: if you download and save the backup installers you can have actual ownership over titles purchased there.
www.doesitplay.org is a wonderful resource to find out if a physical game you buy is actually on the media it comes on.
And, unfortunately, some digital games are going somewhere. Delisted games have become a real problem for preservationists. You can find a whole list of them here: delistedgames.com
All that said I support the notion of less consumption and more meaningful consumption when it occurs. Don’t let FOMO get the better of you, be aware that these corpos are not your friend, and take measures to secure the things you wish to have available to you! Host servers, seed torrents, and have backups.
Halo is my top pick, the first three have great stories and couch co-op if you need that, and if you get the master chief collection (halo mcc), the multiplayer is great and you can find tons of forge mode maps created by people, from race modes to mini golf haha
Gears of war is also fantastic, epic story, fun gameplay, and who doesn’t love a chainsaw bayonet lol
Deep rock galactic is another really fun one, I can’t say there’s too deep of a story too it, but it’s endlessly repayable with all the combinations of weapons and procedurally generated missions.
What if I from time to time really love some basic gameplay done well? I’ll think avowed is straight up my alley. Not every game I play needs to innovate. There is also a lot of comfort in the preexisting.
I’ve learned a long time ago that if you just wait a few years these games will go on sale for $20 and will have enough informed reviews to help make a solid purchasing decision. Gamers need to get off this new release hype train and be patient. I personally won’t play KCD 2, I disliked the first one. I will probably try Avowed in a few years after I get through my existing backlog of ~100 unplayed games in Steam. We are spoiled for choice and the market is filled with good indie games.
Sure but the cheap market would not exist if a majority of people would not buy the game at full price. Sure there are a lot of smart people who don’t fall for the FOMO and hype but if a AAA game would only sell for 30€ it would not offset its development cost and no new game would be made.
If they cut the system, we’ll get the money in our pay. So at least we can control it. Just don’t spend it on games that will hit your backlog and sit for years. I’m personally guilty btw.
I don’t know, I was unemployed for a while and literally spent every waking hour gaming for many months straight. It was the happiest time of my life. I’d give up a lot to be so financially stable I could do that again.
I substitute socialising with small streaming channels. Like the ones that have less than 5-10 people watching ever. You can come and go as you please and no one cares, and you can make real connections and have actual conversions with both the streamer and other viewers. People with channels that small aren’t doing it for the money, they’re doing it to have people to chill with while they play.
Some would say they aren’t real friends but I think there’s a point you can get to where I would disagree.
Having one thing be your only hobby will get boring for the majority of people, so just have some extra hobbies. I could definitely spend 75% of my time gaming and the rest on other hobbies and feel great.
I’m so sorry, text of the original Reddit post below.
My family poops big. Maybe it’s genetic, maybe it’s our diet, but everyone births giant logs of crap. If anyone has laid a mega-poop, you know that sometimes it won’t flush. It lays across the hole in the bottom of the bowl and the vortex of draining water merely gives it a spin as it mocks you. Growing up, this was a common enough occurrence that our family had a poop knife. It was an old rusty kitchen knife that hung on a nail in the laundry room, only to be used for that purpose. It was normal to walk through the hallway and have someone call out “hey, can you get me the poop knife”? I thought it was standard kit. You have your plunger, your toilet brush, and your poop knife. Fast forward to 22. It’s been a day or two between poops and I’m over at my friend’s house. My friend was the local dealer and always had ‘guests’ over, because you can’t buy weed without sitting on your ass and sampling it for an hour. I excuse myself and lay a gigantic turd. I look down and see that it’s a sideways one, so I crack the door and call out for my friend. He arrives and I ask him for his poop knife. “My what?” Your poop knife, I say. I need to use it. Please. “Wtf is a poop knife?” Obviously he has one, but maybe he calls it by a more delicate name. A fecal cleaver? A Dung divider? A guano glaive? I explain what it is I want and why I want it. He starts giggling. Then laughing. Then lots of people start laughing. It turns out, the music stopped and everyone heard my pleas through the door. It also turns out that none of them had poop knives, it was just my fucked up family with their fucked up bowels. FML. I told this to my wife last night, who was amused and horrified at the same time. It turns out that she did not know what a poop knife was and had been using the old rusty knife hanging in the utility closet as a basic utility knife. Thankfully she didn’t cook with it, but used it to open Amazon boxes. She will be getting her own utility knife now.
<span style="color:#323232;">[Edit: Common question - Why was this not in the bathroom instead of the laundry room? Answer. We only had one poop knife, and the laundry room was central to all three bathrooms. I have no idea why we didn't have three poop knives. All I know is that we didn't. We had the one. Possibly because my father was notoriously cheap about the weirdest things. So yes, we shared our poop knife.]
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In my experience, there are actually a lot more dialogue choices based on your skills, which I really liked—it makes me feel more connected to my character. So I’d say there’s more role-playing depth than Skyrim, but at the same time, the action feels better too.
I really enjoy the combat; it’s not easy, even on medium difficulty. If I’m not careful, I can die pretty quickly, which makes it more fun and engaging for me.
The only downside is that the world feels smaller than Skyrim. In Skyrim, I had this feeling that the world was endless, but in Avowed, it feels more limited. However, that’s fine—not every game can be a legend like Skyrim for me! :)
This is a genuine question and not me trying to be snarky or anything: how’s that possible? Was there any meaningful role playing in Skyrim at all?
To me the system simplification of Skyrim went so far that the only real role you could play was the dragonborn - not your specific one but a generic dragonborn who could be anyone and everything at the same time. Maybe my definition of role playing is outdated as I feel it should include choices and consequences (like blocking or limiting access to some content) so I’d be grateful if you could expand on that.
Again, I’m not trying to suggest you’re wrong or anything, I’m just curious about your perspective (or something more about what you’ve read).
I think what I read was actually about oblivion rather than Skyrim, but I’m not sure if that changes your questions or not. I agree that the Skyrim character did feel like a genetic dragonborn. The guild quests especially made it feel that way. (I’m the head wizard, but also chief fighter dude and captain of the thieves guild… What?)
I guess for the role play aspect I prefer games to more narrowly define the main character and tell the story from there rather than leave it up to me to decide who the character becomes. A Plague Tale is a great example of this type of story telling, but of course it isn’t at all comparable to an open world game.
Change from Oblivion to Skyrim would definitely affect my question. I do think the former had more “my kind” of role playing so the initial thought would be more understandable for me.
Thanks for the answer. I get what you mean about playing as more defined main characters, it definitely has it’s benefits over more open-ended approach.
There’s never been much content blocking in elder scrolls. You could always master every skill even in Morrowind. Morrowind had a few exclusive guilds, but even Skyrim had a couple. Role playing in Skyrim is self imposed.
Guild exclusivity is actually what I had in mind. Sure, there’s nothing that significantly changes the main quest in TES games (and I think I misremembered how much blocking is there in previous titles) but that still counts for me personally. Self-imposed role play is fine in general (I do it all the time in games in fact) but I still think that lack of reasonable requirements for some (optional?) content makes the world feel more generic and player-focused than I’d like.
No, there wasn’t - Skyrim is the video game equivalent of makeup on an otherwise uninteresting individual. Might seem pretty at first, but the lack of depth or meaning dulls any beauty.
A good contrast is something like Outer Worlds, where there is usually multiple possible outcomes. I think it comes from their Fallout lessons learned and GURPS background. Love the game design. (Dislike the combat, but that is a separate thing.)
Same, I really enjoyed Veilgaurd and actually finished the damn thing, which is rare for me these days. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a good, breezy arpg.
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