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"No Truce With The Furies" now called "Disco Elysium" - Isometric "modern-retro sci-fi" RPG, 2017, PC

M

More_Badass

Member
New screenshot

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A

Arulan

Member
I'll post this here too.

I thought this post from one of the developers on the Codex shared some interesting details:

Source

Marat Sar said:
Hey. Finally a question I can answer. The way we currently track "reputation" and "alignment" to use some broad, known terms, is twofold.

On the "reputation" side, there are tons of individual flags to check: did a stupid thing here, said this strange thing to this guy and now his friend knows, said liberal platitudes to this woman etc. That's the outside world. There are almost no integers here, each cause has a discrete effect. We're not counting how good / bad you are, just individual story tickets you take by making small (or large), outwardly visible decisions.

This guarantees that the world acts in a logical and interesting manner toward you.

The "original" stuff happens on the "alignment" side. We have hidden counters called "copotypes." Fascist_cop, art_cop, radical_feminist_cop, apocalypse_cop, communist_cop. Etc. There are four political, four aesthetic, and a ton of special ones. When you've hit the counter (usually 2 or 3 is enough) in a dialogue, and are walking away, you get an afterthought. (http://zaumstudio.com/2016/08/08/afterthoughts/). Afterthought are small dialogues that pop into your head after talking to someone. Think of them as footer notes for the main talk. One of your skills comment on what you just said. Eg Rhetoric: "man, this racism thing is really taking root" or Physical Instrument: "punching inanimate objects feels satisfying!". This dialogue, should you decide to accept it (sometimes there is no choice), gives you a thought.

Advanced Race Theory (for racism) or Enemy of Matter (for punching inanimate things). These thoughts are now in your Thought Cabinet. The game knows you're into some pretty *racy* stuff -- or that you don't like doors and mail collection boxes.

Special dialogue options start popping up when you talk to people, or punch them. You *might* not stumble upon these options if you're unlucky, but if you do -- you unlock little nuggets of info by getting nice on comfy talking to the racist lorryman. Or communicate with walls and mailboxes by beating them up. I stress this -- repeat playthroughs will yield these secrets. Do not expect to see every thought giving you interesting personalized content. We're aiming for "most of them". Most of them should become role playing tools, giving you satisfying solutions, letting you act out your character in some pretty minute ways. (The reason we're not cramming in 20 dialogue options for each Thought is quality of writing.)

In addition to this -- let's say -- "internal reputation tracking" or "reputation of the soul", the thoughts are also items. They give you bonuses if you drag and drop them into slots in your Thought Cabinet. They will even start evolving. Most turn out to be traits, rather than perks. I don't want to get too deep into the Thought Cabinet now. Lets just say you don't have to even equip the thought, just having it checks you for dialogue options. And you can't destroy or drop thoughts -- you're stuck with them. (We're looking into a possible thought destroyer character, but no promises)

The political thoughts are just four major ones we're working on, good for demonstrating the system. In total we want there to be around 40 thoughts. It's in the mixing and matching that interesting things happen. Apocalyptic disco cop! Boring Cop / Hobocop. (never says anything interesting, only looks for tare). Even the unholy union of liberal and communist is possible.
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P

Purkake4

Banned
Arulan said:
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Haha, I actually tweeted him about the game when they showed off the dialogue-combat system. It does seem right up his alley.

The copotypes thing seems pretty crazy if there's 40+ of them. Kind of makes me wonder how long/big the game will be.
 
A

Arulan

Member
Purkake4 said:
Haha, I actually tweeted him about the game when they showed off the dialogue-combat system. It does seem right up his alley.

The copotypes thing seems pretty crazy if there's 40+ of them. Kind of makes me wonder how long/big the game will be.
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Source

AwesomeButton said:
So, I'm curious - which one of these options is it:
- The world is really small, smaller than AoD?
- The reactivity will turn out to be less than what you advertise?
- The team have been working non stop for two years? In which case how on earth did you manage your expenses? :D
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Marat Sar said:
Pretty much all of the above.

1. The world is small. It doesn't feel like that, though -- not to me at least. We have the 4th dimension in there too, characters appear and things happen depending on what day it is. (We have a time of day system that didn't factor into Prime Junta's short play-through). So very concentrated. But also small, yes.
2. The reactivity will be less than people wish it would be. Always the case, I'm afraid. At least for me it is.
3. Almost none of us have families and about half (the leads especially) have also become teetotalers. I for one am barely a corporeal entity any more.
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P

Purkake4

Banned
Arulan said:
Source
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Interesting, thanks. This is looking more and more like a focused, concentrated version of Torment. Funny that they're coming out in the same year (hopefully).

I'm personally very interested in a huge amount of interactivity in a limited space as opposed to vast spaces with little to do in. This model would also work really well in a game focused on a Groundhog Day timeloop...
 
P

Purkake4

Banned
An interesting devblog about possible wheelchair-bound characters.
notruce-pier-2560-2jpeg.jpg
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Since we have a modern setting, we can have people in wheelchairs. Ypa! This one is a fancy, gas powered, electric motor driven wheelchair. (The wheelchair pushing animation would be too much of a hassle, plus the gas powered engine has a nice sound to it.) So we're thinking – what if we had a wheelchair companion? We like Lena, she's turning out nice. She's presented us with an interesting thought experiment. How would Lena as a squadmate work?

Currently – not so well. A gossamer state does not lay wheelchair ramps over the ruins of its monarchist past. Traversing the map becomes an instant problem. We had a look at Martinaise proper and most of it is already barricaded with those stairs that isometric level design loves so much. The rest has ... navmesh problems. So we're currently thinking of making Lena into a temporary companion for an atmospheric stroll kind of side-quest. Prototype it. Then maybe expand it into a more fleshed out thing in the future? Those navigational restrictions have some interesting gameplay and exploration possibilities ...

Anyway, these are just thoughts. It's not guaranteed we'll get her in there at all. It would need to be a smooth experience. There are a lot of crazy what-if's that keep it on ”Maybe?" list as of now. Just wanted to clear that up so y'all don't expect her as a squadmate and then get angry when the gossamer state's ”who-gives-a-fuck" social policy cuts her navmesh.
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M

More_Badass

Member
Purkake4 said:
A huge interview with a Hungarian site with some new info and pictures.
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These are exciting. Also they say they're considering iOS/Android versions, and maybe even console
You can like totally kill other characters. But it all comes in a lush, written-out naturalistic detail. Really see the light go out in their eyes. Feel sick afterwards. And get interrupted by a horrible and tactless skill-check that lets you inflict even more harm to the frail human form before you. We call it story-combat. It's a highly literary turn-based combat, where your inventory determines the actions you can take in a branching violent dialogue. We handle everything in the dialogue engine, but that doesn't mean the narrative is a bloodless exercise. We want to give the player great freedom at a considerable expense. But just to be clear, there are only two or three of these action-showdowns in the game, just as there are only two or three in a good Dungeons and Dragons campaign or in a nice thriller.
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The world itself is not a ”massive open-world". Ours is a palm-sized, intricate toy-box of a world. Some bombed-out seaside ruins and a strip of urban coast. An unimportant part of the very important city of Revachol – the district of Martinaise. While Martinaise is an open world and there is plenty to explore (the level of detail really *is* incredible), a lot of this exploration will take place in the fourth dimension – the player will be rummaging through its history. This is where the non-static world idea comes into play. Martinaise is where some would say the turn-of-the-century revolution was ultimately lost. There's a lot of history to explore. And not in a sense of a massive lore-dump manner. I think we've really discovered a new way to use writing to add subtle layers of history to the world.
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L

LordGorchnik

Member
Been following this from the beginning and yeah we just had a sneak preview back in March. 2017 would be nice but it wouldn't surprise me if this took longer.
 
M

More_Badass

Member
Those who were a bit disappointed by Tides' overly wordy text, this mentality sounds promising
Word count is not something we take pride in by itself. If anything we're trying to see how low we can keep it. A lot of the writing process is about editing fluff down for pacing. In dialogue we try to generally present the player with no more than 3-4 new sentences to read before waiting for player action, to either make a choice or hit continue to get the next paragraph of text. If ever there's more text given it's always for considered reasons, either stylistic or for pacing.

Editing text down to its juiciest concentrate is also one of the main reasons why writing takes so god damn long
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P

Purkake4

Banned
More_Badass said:
Those who were a bit disappointed by Tides' overly wordy text, this mentality sounds promising
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After Tides this is indeed a welcome approach. I hope they focus on many different outcomes and options with different skills/approaches and not just fail states for messing up a check.
 
N

nynt9

Member
Mikee Goodman of the legendary UK tech metal band Sikth is doing voices for this game, and he's also the voice director for it. You can hear his narration on the trailer. I interviewed him about Sikth on our metal podcast a couple weeks ago, but we also had a discussion about the game as well. He talks a bit about the themes and design for the game. You can listen here. The discussion starts at 19:52
 
S

Shake Appeal

Member
Just noticed:
There were snatches of the soundtrack composed and performed for the game by the UK group British Sea Power, ready to out-rock, out-karaoke, and out-disco anyone out there.
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That's a weird fit for a videogame, but I'm cool with it.
 
T

TheVoidDragon

Member
This looks very interesting, the screenshots of it look great.

I don't quite understand the artistic theme of it though, and looking at the screenshots i can't see anything that clearly indicates the style it's going for. Can someone explain it? There's the car in the first picture which seems a a bit retro and old-fashioned in design, but then the rest just seem to show fairly typical things/locations to me.
 
P

Purkake4

Banned
TheVoidDragon said:
This looks very interesting, the screenshots of it look great.

I don't quite understand the artistic theme of it though, and looking at the screenshots i can't see anything that clearly indicates the style it's going for. Can someone explain it? There's the car in the first picture which seems a a bit retro and old-fashioned in design, but then the rest just seem to show fairly typical things/locations to me.
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Copying from the Hungarian interview:

A brief summary for those who are not (yet) familiar with No Truce With The Furies. This is an Estonian narrative based isometric rpg with oilpaint-like visuals. The game shares the world of a novel’s titled: Sacred and Terrible Air (Püha ja õudne lõhn) written by Robert Kurvitz who is also a designer of the game. The novel’s genre is fantastic realism. Fantastic realism, according to your devblog means a non-static world. Would you talk a little about this?

KURVITZ: Both the game and the novel take place in a fictional world that we ourselves endearingly call Elysium. This, we dare to say, new type of setting has been dubbed fantastic realism by literary critics. If pressed, I would name three main features that distinguish this world from other sci-fi fantasy settings. These are:

1. It’s non-static as you said. Fantasy settings usually occupy a single period of history, thus forever remaining in a kind of eternal stasis (middle-ages, near-future, cyberpunk, China, you-name-it). Ours has actual six thousand years of history: it spans from its own version of the early Bronze Age (Perikarnassian period) to the early Middle Ages (Franconigerian period), to the Renaissance (Dolorian period), right up to a decade we call “The Seventies”. It’s a world like ours, one that has evolved culturally and technologically over widely varied periods of time. No Truce With the Furies takes place in the modernity of this world.

2. It has geopolitical credibility. In this world there are states, nations, boring political parties, NGOs, and defunct monarchies hanging on to tabloid media to maintain the final threads of relevance. These states, nations, continents all have credible names like Meteo, Vesper-Messina, Revachol, Graad or Vaasa.

3. This world aspires to outmanoeuvre history itself. We don’t only copy the structures and the history of our world, we try to improve upon it. As people who are obsessed with history and who have thus constructed a complete alternative history, we are always looking for ways to out-do the reality. For example, the French and the Russian revolutions are something we are endlessly fascinated with. The Antecentennial (or turn-of-the-century) Revolution is our answer to those historical events. It is an equally grand and even more failed expression of extreme humanism that lays the foundation for the political scene in No Truce With the Furies. Similarly we like to invent new names for familiar things. Motorcarriages instead of cars, anodic music instead of electronic music, pistolettes instead of guns. This should, in effect, bring out the inherent qualities of these daily objects and put them in a fresh light. Elysium, our worldbuilding project, is all about relishing the world, appreciating the world, finding out new and interesting things about the world. It’s for people who have read all of Wikipedia and want more. Another world as believable and terrifying as our own, a tool for analysing ours.
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M

Mr. Nice_Guy

Member
I also read furries, and after looking at the first few screenshots was trying real hard to see where they were gonna fit in.

That being said I love the art in the game, so much it alone is gonna make me look into this more.
 
S

Sotha Sil

Member
Everything I read about this game is great ; I think I'll stop reading the updates and go "blind" once it comes out. Hope the result will match their ambition. Can't wait.
 
P

Purkake4

Banned
Sotha Sil said:
Everything I read about this game is great ; I think I'll stop reading the updates and go "blind" once it comes out. Hope the result will match their ambition. Can't wait.
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They've done a pretty good job focusing on themes and mechanics while keeping the story under wraps. I would hate to get spoiled either.
 
M

meerak

Member
Looks pretty neat I think, will keep an eye on this.

Bad name though.

Kinda amateur hour "I wrote a serious book and it's serious grrr" etc but whatchagonnado I guess.
 
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