The Acclaimed 91 Metacritic RPG with Choice and Consequence That Put Most RPGs to Shame (Even Compared to The Witcher 3)
When it comes to RPGs, one of the major expectations of the genre is that players will be able to shape their characters and personalize their playthroughs through a wide range of options by making decisions both large and small that ripple across the story, with the game world reacting accordingly. From games like The Elder Scrolls, Baldur’s Gate 3, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and Dragon Age, these IPs are held in high regard for offering a satisfying scope of player agency and subsequent consequences. Also counted among the best in this area is CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher series, especially the most recent entry, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
And while all of the above certainly provide great RPG experiences, particularly in how they grant players various meaningful choices and depict their aftermath, they are in many ways topped by indie developer ZA/UM’s 2019 debut, Disco Elysium. Becoming an instant hit upon release, Disco Elysium was hailed as a masterpiece in the RPG space. Through its interworking systems, stellar writing, and clever use (and subversions) of genre tropes, Disco Elysium lets fans experience an array of possibilities and paths to degrees that even the others mentioned can struggle to achieve.
Disco Elysium Offers Just as Many, if Not More, Impactful Choices and Consequences Than The Witcher 3 and Other Major RPGs
Disco Elysium is Built From the Ground Up Around Player Agency More So Than Most
Some fans may be aware of Disco Elysium‘s origins as a homebrewed Dungeons & Dragons campaign collectively built and refined by a number of the core developers. This aspect alone lends it an elevated sense of curated authorship, and the design principles are clearly on display in the final product. Disco Elysium‘s roots as an intimately handcrafted pen-and-paper RPG blossomed into a game world that extends to every aspect of the player’s experience. Its versatility and willingness to let fans indulge in a range of reasonable to more “out there” choices while providing relevant and meaningful (and in many cases, humorously surprising) results in all cases is one of its secret ingredients, and a major reason that it tops many of its contemporaries.
How Disco Elysium Outdoes The Witcher 3 and Other RPGs At Their Own Game
What makes Disco Elysium stand out even among some of the aforementioned heavy hitters is its premise and the commitment to the implications and mechanics that underpin it. Thrusting fans into the role of a haggard detective who has abused drugs and alcohol to such a degree that he has essentially erased his own memory and personality, Disco Elysium‘s narrative setup immediately opens the door to a myriad of potentially widely varying styles of role-playing. Being able to shape the protagonist’s psyche, identity, and worldview through Disco Elysium‘s core mechanics creates a natural path that ensures an ingrained sense of investment and agency, while providing a unique method of communicating and responding to player choice.
Disco Elysium‘s updated Final Cut version adds a series of political “vision quests” determined by dialogue responses corresponding to the four possible affiliations.
Contrasting this approach against some of the other games, they often have more well-defined characters, even if they still hand players the reigns to mold them. In the case of The Witcher 3 (though this can also easily apply to, for example, Henry of Skalitz), Geralt of Rivia already has an established history and persona well before the events begin. In some sense, this limits their breadth of role-playing, at least compared to Disco Elysium‘s extensive personality skills and thought cabinet mechanics.
Comparing just a few of the notable questlines between Disco Elysium and The Witcher 3:
|
Disco Elysium |
The Witcher 3 |
|
Dealing with Ruby |
Dealing with the Bloody Baron |
|
The power struggle between White Pines and the Dockworker’s Union |
The plight of Novigrad’s mages and non-human population |
|
Arresting or releasing Klaasje |
Romancing Yennefer, Triss, or both |
|
The situation surrounding the Church |
Choosing who to lead Skellige |
|
The confrontation with the mercenaries |
Cirri’s ultimate fate |
Both games do offer significant avenues and varying outcomes with these and others. The greater point, though, is that while fans can certainly shape Geralt’s choices and reactions to situations in the course of the adventure, he nevertheless retains some intrinsic characteristics that, whether implicitly or explicitly, serve to inform his demeanor. Whereas Disco Elysium lets fans adopt entirely new personas that naturally emerge as they explore and converse with NPCs and the detective’s inner self. Combined with the number of methods to solve (or ignore) various investigations, Disco Elysium grants players much more freedom to form the character and their decisions.
Disco Elysium’s Smaller Scope But Incredibly Dense Design Provides a Wealth of RPG Possibilities
Pound for pound, Disco Elysium‘s setting of the downtrodden Martinaise district within the world of Revachol may be dwarfed by the size of many of the maps in the games mentioned above. But it more than makes up for this in the impressive depth contained within it. Every location and NPC the detective comes into contact with add layers to the story, and there are multiple secret cases to uncover that can easily be overlooked. Each playthrough of Disco Elysium can be wildly different depending on which traits players decide to lean into and follow advice from.
In ways both subtle and outlandish, Disco Elysium bends many of the rules of RPGs and lets players do the same, all while incorporating their decisions and maintaining a coherent narrative that flows accordingly. It’s even possible to solve the main crime in a non-standard way. Disco Elysium‘s smaller but more focused world and emphasis on fully inhabiting the protagonist’s mind through carefully crafted design and top-notch storytelling make it one of the most immersive and reactive RPGs. It outshines many other celebrated titles as one where choice and consequence truly matter.