Disco Elysium Explorer
34 comments
·January 13, 2025ChrisArchitect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disco_Elysium
> Disco Elysium is a 2019 role-playing video game developed and published by ZA/UM.
hiimshort
For those unfamiliar with the game I would highly recommend it if you are interested in CRPG games with excellent writing. There is a lot of text in this game, but with the most recent version of the game most of it is voice acted. Many lines will stick with you later. It's rare to not be taken by something in the game, as expansive as it is.
For a more general description of the game: you are a detective, you must solve the case, and your fractured psyche will not let you do it alone.
geor9e
Is something more supposed to show up? Am I supposed to figure out what to do? https://i.postimg.cc/3NWtz6HF/image.png
camtarn
It's not a great UI, especially on mobile.
Start by expanding the Search Dialogs section and type in a search term, then hit Search. Then click on one of the numeric results. Nothing will happen, but if you now expand the Build Conversation section, this will have filled a Conversation ID onto the appropriate box. Or you can input an arbitrary conversation ID into the Build Conversation / Conversation ID box (kelseyfrog posted some good ones).
Either way, if you now click Build Graph, you will get a conversation graph on the right. Red nodes are you speaking, or the voices in your head speaking to you. Yellow nodes are other people speaking (your non skill based voices, like Ancient Reptilian Brain, are also yellow). Blue and purple nodes are flow control (setting and reading variables, skill checks, jumping to other nodes). You can zoom into the graph and click the nodes - for red and yellow nodes, this displays the conversation text in the left sidebar, and lets you listen to the audio.
The graphs don't show actual skill check difficulties, just the results of them being read, and don't seem to show health/morale damage or items being gained/lost.
Quite a remarkable tool, despite the UI.
gazook89
It doesn't seem to work on Firefox at all. Not sure if that is what you are bumping in to, but I had to switch to Chrome.
DanHulton
Same thing happening here. I think it might not be all-browser friendly.
null
duskwuff
Another, differently formatted explorer for this data: https://fayde.co.uk/
dlevine
I played Disco Elysium when it came out and enjoyed it. In particular, I thought the Inland Empire skill was pretty awesome. I can't imagine what the game would be like without the ability to talk to inanimate objects.
lacker
I took no Inland Empire but I did love Encyclopedia. Guess I'll have to give it another run....
Rodeoclash
I loved the way that you'd pass encyclopedia checks in the game and it would give you totally irrelevant information. I think at one point a character tells you she's using a contact mic and the skill check informs you about a boxer called "Contact Mike".
freeone3000
Or in other cases, completely relevant information, like the complete life history and works of Doloros Dei, which is simply unactionable as she has been dead for decades and the church is long-abandoned too.
braden-lk
This game is right up my alley but it’s so engrossing I always forget to save and lose hours of my progress.
adamnemecek
If you haven’t played Disco Elysium, please do, there’s a reason people are so obsessed with it. It’s a novel really.
ahartmetz
I don't like anything about the game - writing, art style, characters, UX, voice acting, main storyline... so that opinion exists, too.
egeozcan
I could play for 5 hours then gave up because similar reasons. In situations like this I usually think it should be an acquired taste, but in this case, I'm pretty much confident that I'd have never liked it. UX was the biggest pain point for me BTW.
pesus
Some of my all time favorite writing, regardless of medium.
jakevoytko
I believe that this game is an artistic masterpiece.
On the first playthrough when I woke up with amnesia, I simply played a cop with amnesia in all of my responses. It was goofy, I annoyed Kim for fun, I beat the game, etc.
On the second playthrough, I chose all of the dialogue options that honestly explained how the character became an alcoholic. It changed the vibe of the whole game to somber, and I was fascinated that the relationship with Kim felt different. It also felt natural to explore all of the lore and sidequests of the game involving the pale in this mood.
And then I went on a completionist binge and found some great social commentary in the "high-net-worth individual" sections.
jimmygrapes
At risk of saying too much... I am playing it again right now and am choosing a path of sobriety and contrition and it's been making me think, pray, and cry every night. I'm working on it.
pdpi
The writing is an exercise in how closely you can toe the line of turning into purple prose without ever crossing it. It's clearly written by somebody who likes words, for other people who like words.
Toutouxc
One of the reasons I played using the "Psychological" voiceovers (where the characters are voiced, but not the inner monologue). The skills were to me the purplest element, and the voice acting differed too much from my imagination.
ajmurmann
Very much agreed. When Harry met a certain creature I cried a little. The text and music were so moving.
OnionBlender
I don't know why I haven't played this yet. I absolutely loved Planescape: Torment and Fallout 1 & 2. I already own Disco Elysium. I've just never booted it up yet.
tapoxi
It's such an incredible science fantasy universe, probably my favorite piece of fiction from the past decade.
The political history, nature of reality and shape of the world, even things about how computers ("radiocomputers") work are all fascinating to me. It's a shame what happened to the studio. There deserve to be more stories told in that universe.
duskwuff
> It's a shame what happened to the studio.
And there's an extremely funny winking self-reference in the game:
https://fayde.co.uk/dialojue/4600609
For context: ZA/UM was, for a time, called Fortress Occident.
pm3003
I've seen people use it to learn colloquial French. I'll try othetr languages.
ireflect
Love that this is hosted on a bare IP address. Hack on!
kelseyfrog
Conversations 7, 8, 9, and 10 are a great place to start.
lelandfe
495 for one of the rarest ones I've found in the game. Needs 9 Perception on Day 1 to do: https://youtu.be/w9aDmCuyU-4?t=10
A preposterously complex dialogue web for a weird throwaway conversation so few would ever come across. Love this game.
kevingadd
Having played the game before and sincerely appreciated it (plowed through the whole 25 or so hours in 2 days), I had no idea the flowcharts for the conversations were quite so complex. It makes sense though, it's a very dynamic game.
If someone wonder why conversation graphs look this way in Disco Elysium is because it's build using middleware called Articy:draft. Graphs is how Articy editor designed so it's only natural to visalize it this way.
Since my team also made a story driven game using Articy that far less complex than Disco Elysium, but still complex. After we done it I can say for sure that whoever written Disco Elysium is trully insane, in a good way. While Articy is a good tool it's have own set of problems specifically awful performance on huge projects and I can't even imagine how developers of Disco Elysium managed to accompish it.
So I pretty sure Disco Elysium isn't just masterpiece of storytelling and writing, but also insane technical achievement of whoever managed to get it all working together using tools they had. Even on a project of much smaller scale getting it all debugged, loop-free and free of tons of logical errors is very hard. Knowing how much variables Disco Elysium have I truly believe developers are all geniuses.
PS: It's just everyone always wonder at how cool and complex modern rendering is or performance in game with millions of objects, but very few people understand how hard is to create story-driven game if there is more than 10 variables and not just int skill checks.