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I love the game’s potential, I will regularly log in just to walk around stations or planets or hang out in my ship and enjoy the aesthetic. I like to fiddle with things and see what’s new. I love the sense of scale and freedom, just knowing at any time you can get up out of your pilot’s seat and open your cargo hatch and yeet yourself out the back just makes me giddy.
All that said, I grow weary of the endless fuckery and delays and just uninstalled for the dozenth time to let the thing cook longer. The graphics, for all their beauty, require more power than my PC can put out so the frame-rates are almost unplayable in many areas. Quests and missions are still a complete dice-roll if they’re going to work or break at any moment. NPC’s in the ground missions are either dumber than rocks or clip through walls and you can never find them.
Server meshing is an amazing technology, but you have to have all your servers working, so there is always at least one area of the solar system that just plain doesn’t work. Stations that don’t answer your landing hail, quest locations that don’t work, lagged out doors and ship systems.
The universe truly feels more vast than any other game, ever, because you feel like a tiny human in a huge expanse. Too bad that’s about it most of the time, there’s no sense of permanence, no bases you can build, no personalization you can do to your own apartment, no storage locker in your own room like every other game ever made, everything including accessing your personal gear has to be done through kiosks in lobbies. The lack of personal items and survival components other than eating and drinking once in a while leave a good 80% of every station or base useless.
Sure you can buy a few cheap ass toys to put in your cockpit, but since most likely your game will crash and you will have to file a claim on your ship, you will hardly want to do this more than once.
Ship interiors feel real, it’s highly convincing. It’s just too bad that they’re mostly useless. Other than moving cargo around a cargo hold, there’s very little else you can do on a ship.
And you know what… I would be okay with all of these shortcomings IF THE GAME HAD GOOD CONTROLS. Seriously, look at a game like SCUM, it’s a survival PvP MMO where the gameplay is so detailed you need to manage your protein levels to build muscle and you have to poop regularly, you can even die of a heart-attack. You can load your magazines with several types of bullets and it will fire them in order. You can adjust how deep of a crouch you’re in and you can craft a vast array of useful items to survive and fight.
And it does it all smoothly. Sure it takes getting used to, but it’s never tedious. You never fall through the floor. You never have to fiddle with a door panel, you don’t have to make sure you point your cursor to just the exact position to open a hatch, you can actually trust the line-of-sight from a hostile mech so you can avoid it.
And that’s a game that’s far, far from perfect but they make a better gameplay experience than Star Citizen which has made exponentially more money from its players.
I will still keep trying it out from time to time, but I really, really hope some new game comes along and takes all the best lessons from SC and makes a more polished game experience that keeps the scale and detail and freedom but gives you things to do.
(No, I know about No Man’s Sky, it’s like a muppet/minecraft version of a space sim and too silly and unrealistic, totally different experience.)
Wouldn’t it be awesome if people cared about research and facts.
Conservatives want to take all our games away, they have hated video games for decades, they made it clear for years that they want to see games censored the same way as movies and television. They have pushed many major media platforms into censorship already, and are just getting started.
But what if I just pirate and use VPN’s? You tech-savvy kiddos might ask, getting a small thrill from feeling like anti-establishment pirates.
Well never fear, they have plans for that too! Do you all really think Palantir and associated social monitoring programs are just going to make drones to try to spy on what American citizens are masturbating to? Nope! Palantir is a broad-spectrum monitoring company, and they will have various manner of AI bots scanning the contents of your hard-drive and reporting your browsing and downloading habits to all kinds of agencies and institutions who would loooooove to have more “product” to sell to our for-profit prison industry!
I’m older also and am enjoying Hollow Knight a lot, it’s hard but I wouldn’t say frustrating, the game lets you say “Hmn this is not working out, I’m coming back here later after I get more skills or abilities” and it’s relatively non-linear for a metroidvania type game.
Part of why it was very popular is the difficulty straddled a good line between challenging and manageable enough to keep making progress. But every player has different experience levels, distractions or time-limits on how much we can dedicate to gaming so it should be standard to allow players to choose difficulty. However, in a game like Hollow Knight you might be able to adjust the difficulty of boss fights but that’s only part of the challenge, the rest of the challenge in inherent in the game’s layout and mechanics.
I don’t know which of us you’re replying to, you seem to be replying to both me and the person I replied to?
I’m saying it’s actually fine if a privately owned company wants to change whatever content they provide, it happens all the time and nobody bats an eye, but this isn’t that, this is an action by a government to broadly crack down on even what private companies can and cannot do. This is a massive problem that isn’t about porn, it’s about government overreach and government censorship, we have constitutional laws about such things… or had, I am not sure if that’s even a thing anymore.
I mean, they are in the moment that they’re mad that someone made a black female with realistic proportions as a selectable character… but they largely don’t have principles or values at all, they’re a slime-mold that fits into whatever social trend is easy to latch onto right now so they can share emotional connection with their peers.
What happened is we ignored them and people like Steve Bannon and Russians and other agents of regression saw them as a ripe target for exploitation and manipulation. We have a massive rise in things like incels and anti-woke young men, but it’s largely manufactured. These are mostly young people who are unhappy, alone and they’ve been nudged towards easy-to-digest memes and talking points that this is the fault of unattractive feminists who want to take their games away.
This isn’t “conservatism” as much as reactionary attitudes and social isolation. If we were able to get a foot in the door faster and have a concerted effort to show them that their issues are largely socio-economic and mental-health related, we would have made a lot more progress a lot sooner. Source: I used to do just that and mentored/coached lonely young guys for years, they’re staggeringly easy to turn if you make the effort and are social and can listen to people.
No no, I’m sure it’s the fault of the trans kids. And the immigrants. I’m sure prices will go down if the US just cracks down harder on these threats to gaming.
edit: do some of you dipshits have literal brain damage? If I have to add /s tags to something like this, it’s proving that we have NO hope for the future ffs, take your medication and talk to someone.
A conspiracy implies they made an attempt to hide it.
I’ve been showing people this shit on social media and reddit for years now and nobody cared. I was called a fearmonger and hyped up “shrill” leftist, stirring up controversy over unrealistic possibilities, etc. etc.
Fuck all ya’ll, I know some of you are out there reading all this, some of the same head-buried-in-the-sand lazy fuckers who tried to dismiss real warnings about real things because you didn’t want to be bothered to get involved or change your vote.
I’m all in for banning pornographic content
The issue isn’t so much that they’re banning pornographic content, it’s the fact that there is no possible definition of “pornographic” that people can agree on, and every attempt at trying to do this in the past has always been simply an attempt by lawmakers to legislate what you can and can’t enjoy - IE: state approved media that doesn’t go against power. We had many court cases about this in the US, they always have ended siding against those trying to censor what people can and can’t look at.
“Porn” is like physics. You can call almost anything porn from certain vantage points, so an open-ended policy that allows those in control to decide what’s porn or not allows them to control what you think in a very real way.
There’s no way that US politics wouldn’t have a huge effect on this type of censorship.
I’ve been called a fearmonger also for trying to tell apathetic gamers who “hate politics” that if they don’t get involved they’re going to start losing their own goddamn games.
I have linked the “Conservapedia” articles on video games all over reddit until they banned me. I have tried to tell people that voting for Trump or supporting his ideals even distantly isn’t going to “take the woke out of your games” that it will actually crush your gaming entirely, because… and I can’t stress this enough, Conservatives HATE GAMING. Not the online chuds and 4channers who hate women, they’re barely even conservatives… they’re fodder for the online fights. But the old-guard and middle-class conservatives who get marching orders from churches and grifters, the ones who have all the actual money on the right. They want to see an end to “distractions” and fiction and fantasy and everything that isn’t some kind of sanitized, un-nuanced devotion to Dear Leader and his United States of White Jesus.
Fiction has been an enemy of power since writing began, and games are just another kind of fiction that lets people stretch their imagination. This is why it’s dangerous, this is why they want to see it ended.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 but quirky and sometimes 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: the idea that so many of you are actually mad that other people had a great experience that you can’t share for whatever reason should be your tell that you are experiencing a form of cognitive dissonance that should be embraced and explored.
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. It’s damn near impossible to find slower-paced, more thoughtful entertainment experiences without really digging into niches and even then you’re going to see people complaining constantly.
edit: if it makes you irritated that other people enjoyed a thing you didn’t, that should be a cue to explore deeper why you aren’t able to enjoy something so different from the norm and what it makes you feel. It’s far more productive to explore your own reactions and conscious thought-stream than try to convince other people who DID like a thing that they’re wrong.
Greatest 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.
edit: there is a lot of rage-bait from people who don’t like to read or follow nuanced stories in this post, I highly recommend just not engaging, you won’t feel better after trying to argue with teenage gamers who prefer JRPG’s where you farm cave slimes and grind levels for 90+ hours.
I love the game’s potential, I will regularly log in just to walk around stations or planets or hang out in my ship and enjoy the aesthetic. I like to fiddle with things and see what’s new. I love the sense of scale and freedom, just knowing at any time you can get up out of your pilot’s seat and open your cargo hatch and yeet yourself out the back just makes me giddy.
All that said, I grow weary of the endless fuckery and delays and just uninstalled for the dozenth time to let the thing cook longer. The graphics, for all their beauty, require more power than my PC can put out so the frame-rates are almost unplayable in many areas. Quests and missions are still a complete dice-roll if they’re going to work or break at any moment. NPC’s in the ground missions are either dumber than rocks or clip through walls and you can never find them. The map/navigation system on your wrist computer is so janky that I dread having to use it, and that’s after several major overhauls.
Server meshing is an amazing technology, but you have to have all your servers working, so there is always at least one area of the solar system that just plain doesn’t work. Stations that don’t answer your landing hail, quest locations that don’t work, lagged out doors and ship systems.
The universe truly feels more vast than any other game, ever, because you feel like a tiny human in a huge expanse. Too bad that’s about it most of the time, there’s no sense of permanence, no bases you can build, no personalization you can do to your own apartment, no storage locker in your own room like every other game ever made, everything including accessing your personal gear has to be done through kiosks in lobbies. The lack of personal items and survival components other than eating and drinking once in a while leave a good 80% of every station or base useless.
Sure you can buy a few cheap ass toys to put in your cockpit, but since most likely your game will crash and you will have to file a claim on your ship, you will hardly want to do this more than once.
Ship interiors feel real, it’s highly convincing. It’s just too bad that they’re mostly useless. Other than moving cargo around a cargo hold, there’s very little else you can do on a ship.
And you know what… I would be okay with all of these shortcomings IF THE GAME HAD GOOD CONTROLS. Seriously, look at a game like SCUM, it’s a survival PvP MMO where the gameplay is so detailed you need to manage your protein levels to build muscle and you have to poop regularly, you can even die of a heart-attack. You can load your magazines with several types of bullets and it will fire them in order. You can adjust how deep of a crouch you’re in and you can craft a vast array of useful items to survive and fight.
And it does it all smoothly. Sure it takes getting used to, but it’s never tedious. You never fall through the floor. You never have to fiddle with a door panel, you don’t have to make sure you point your cursor to just the exact position to open a hatch, you can actually trust the line-of-sight from a hostile mech so you can avoid it.
And that’s a game that’s far, far from perfect but they make a better gameplay experience than Star Citizen which has made exponentially more money from its players.
I will still keep trying it out from time to time, but I really, really hope some new game comes along and takes all the best lessons from SC and makes a more polished game experience that keeps the scale and detail and freedom but gives you things to do.
(No, I know about No Man’s Sky, it’s like a muppet/minecraft version of a space sim and too silly and unrealistic, totally different experience.)