The lead designer for Disco Elysium revealed in a YouTube video that the game's dialog boxes were based on Twitter feeds. The title released last October and almost immediately garnered universal acclaim. The conversation systems and narrative structure received most of the praise for being particularly innovative. Disco Elysium has won several awards at this point, particularly Best Independent Game and Best Role-Playing Game from The Game Awards, as well as many other nominations.
Disco Elysium takes place in the fictional city of Revachol that has been crippled by a failed communist revolution. The city is infested with crime and corruption and a militia group called the RCM is tasked with keeping the peace. Players take control of a detective with the RCM who has been hired to investigate a murder. The protagonist begins the game having had an emotional breakdown with little memory of who he is or what he is supposed to do. Players must solve the murder and help the detective regain his memory.
GameSpot posted a video on YouTube yesterday featuring the lead designer of Disco Elysium, Robert Kurvitz. Kurvitz states that the dialog chat boxes were based on Twitter feeds to encourage players to actually read them. He was concerned that many gamers believe text to be boring, so he tasked his team with finding a new way to make the mechanic interesting. He notes, while laughing, that it's ironic that people say reading is boring, yet people spend almost their whole days reading Twitter or other social media posts. Since social media can be angry and violent Kurvitz felt that Twitter was the perfect pairing for this game.
The mechanics of Disco Elysium are incredibly unique. The game features no traditional combat, but rather combat is handled through dialogue trees and different skill checks. Players have access to four different skill sets that they are able to use: Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics. In traditional RPG style players earn skill points by leveling up and then are able to add those points into each of the four sets. The gameplay mechanics and storyline are almost exclusively tailored to the dialogue system.
After the several decades that video games have been around it has become incredibly difficult to create games that are truly unique. So many ideas have already been done before and a lot of developers decide to just stick with what works instead of innovating. Disco Elysium on the other hand seems to have truly become something new. This year has shown how incredible indie games can be, but Disco Elysium may have found a way to stand out from the pack. While the systems and ideas are obviously inspired by table-top RPGs and Twitter feeds Disco Elysium is truly something that the video game community has never seen before.
Disco Elysium can be played on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.
Source: GameSpot