I wouldn't say I didn't like Disco Elysium, in fact I really enjoyed it in the beginning, when it was more about the case and less about politics. In theory it was really my thing: focus on story, mature, a sense of humour... Planescape: Torment is probably still my favorite game of all time and this looked up that alley.
Alas, once the game gets going I found Disco Elysium way too preachy and it completely lost me. Then I saw that it was scripted in part by the guys in el chapo trap house, which I find insufferable and it all made sense. I really really wish they had done away with all the political stuff, it could have been so good.
Agreed: Planescape's faction represents ideologies, philosophies and world (... multiverse?)view and societal view that's political by nature. Their label are just not a 1:1 match with our world.
And in Disco Elysium (in least in my playthrough and my impression) everyone gets criticized equally at some point, even though the writers are nostalgic communist. But it doesn't feel to me like blatant propaganda.
It's "political" in quotes. In the sense that there are factions, and they represent mostly evergreen moral and civic ideas either real or fantasy (the religious fanatics, the militaristic autocrats, the death obsessed). Disconnecting them from reality, from the early 21st century political obsessions and framing allows for a much more long lasting approach and, frankly, a lot less preachy.
Since DE takes place in a world that’s meant to very much mirror ours, how would you deemphasis the political content? Would you just replace it with fictional ideologies? The difference with Planescape: Torment is that the latter takes place in Dungeons and Dragons where everything from history to economics to the rules of physics are completely different. Disco Elysium takes place in a much less fantastical world that’s reminiscent of our own; you’re going to end up with familiar conflicts unless you were to inject a lot more fantasy-sci-fi gimmicks to change how life operates there.
I would have not given the scriptwriting to terminally online, politics obsessed people. For DE it looks easy to fix, just don't have so many characters pontificating about communism or whatever, and not so much internal dialog about it. Cut it by 50-70%, be it a minor theme, focus more on the case, done.
>Alas, once the game gets going I found Disco Elysium way too preachy and it completely lost me. Then I saw that it was scripted in part by the guys in el chapo trap house, which I find insufferable and it all made sense. I really really wish they had done away with all the political stuff, it could have been so good.
The union workers are depicted as useful idiots for corrupt scumbags at best and parasites at worst, communists as delusional losers, the moralintern as ultimately functional, yet brutally oppressive. The script does very clearly come from a left-wing side of things, but I feel it shows the most when it comes to leftist ideologies which are brutally criticized.
Funny enough, one of the most liked characters is the unfettered capitalist,which is depicted as far more humane than the general ideologue in the game.
I must assume that you disagree with some or all of this?
It feels to me that people who don't like it are allergic to political opinions. They want to exist in world where people have no opinions and disagreements,
Disco's world is an amazing melting pot of ideologies, history and clashes of those.
It's not about agreeing or disagreeing, it's about the shoving it in your face. It's also done in fairly "modern" ways (modern = juvenile, twitter brain-rot, millennial, culture war-coded, whatever you want to call it).
Honestly there aren't that many games about politics, at least the way I understand "being about politics" so I can't say, and I don't miss that there are more to be honest. Also, I don't think Disco Elysium needed to be about politics, it's technically a murder mystery and in fact for quite a while I was quite happy with the mystery and general world building but at some point the amount of politics increased to an amount it made it not fun anymore.
What ideology do you think it explicitly supports? I really liked the game, but I thought that it showed character stories, and not particularly an overarching ideology, and now I wonder if I also support something that I don't even know of.
I'd say it's fairly explicit that it was written by people with leftist sympathies and I assume that's what they meant. I don't get how anyone could find their portrayal of leftists very flattering; unless your notion of "leftist" is Biden/Macron/Starmer, I guess.
Not sure how someone could create a world like the one in Disco Elysium without having some kind of political ideology or why anyone would want them to be fixated on moderating themselves to the point of killing any sense of individuality in the work.
It'd be like checking out the new Mel Gibson film and being annoyed that it comes across as having a conservative Catholic ideology.
It might have an appropriate pessimism but it absolutely endorses fully fledged communism in an uninformed college-bro way (as the other commenter noted, akin to chapo trap house).
>It'd be like checking out the new Mel Gibson film and being annoyed that it comes across as having a conservative Catholic ideology
Yes, but I know Mel is a catholic, I knew nothing of ZA/UM beforehand, I wonder if all of its spiritual successors will be tainted in the same way, if so I'll know for the future that their games aren't for me.
I might miss something, but my recollection is that the setting itself is a post-communist revolutionary ruin. Ruin in many ways, we see literal ruins as a visual setting, I don't think there is any piece of building that's intact, and the people are chewed out as well, and often full of some kind of negativity. Many of the game's political discussions flew over my head, but never once have I felt that whatever I'm shown is endorsed in any way, or that any system, like communism, is a good idea. My gathering was that systems usually just grind down the individual, and so, participation is questionable, and value is coming from caring for one another, in a personal way.
I'm replying to this, and risking becoming part of the "HN is turning into Reddit" problem but you raise a fair point, I enjoy the works of China Mieville despite not sharing his beliefs.
I wonder if it's perhaps the requirement that I actively engage in activities that I would ideologically object to in reality, for the sake of someone else's narrative, but that also seems spurious as I have no real issue with participating in the mass-murders of titles like Grand Theft Auto...DE just rubbed me the wrong way, even if some of the mechanisms were intriguing, maybe it's the smugness oozing from it which again brings us back to Mieville.
I guess I just didn't like DE and I have trouble reconciling that with the expectation that I would like it...because it very much seems like something I would like.
Yeah that makes sense, I thought after posting that it isn't a fair comparison when going in blind.
Not sure what it says about me or media in general these days, but I seem to never encounter anything now without knowing something about the politics of its creators so I didn't encounter it at all blind.
Wouldn't say it endorses it so much as dreams of it (or maybe longs for something like the hope it provided in the past when the ideas were new), I get that that's a very muddy perspective though.
Alas, once the game gets going I found Disco Elysium way too preachy and it completely lost me. Then I saw that it was scripted in part by the guys in el chapo trap house, which I find insufferable and it all made sense. I really really wish they had done away with all the political stuff, it could have been so good.