Also, for a CRPG in which almost all of the interaction with the world is through dialogue, the system becomes surprisingly skill testing for the player, since the player’s ability to read a situation and know what dialogue options are accurate, and getting a sense of when to trust and distrust what the skills say versus what the player has observed is a skill that is sure to emerge over a while with this system.Like all good detective stories, what appears simple at first becomes so much more than that in Disco Elysium – and here it gets so, so much weirder, too. This is an extremely organic way of implementing a risk/reward system into dialogue if players want to be able to become great at something, they must inherently accept flaws that are directly related to their choices, rather than the typical methods of having to avoid certain actions because your character build necessitated that those were your dump stats. If you’re trying to convince someone you’re a threat, it could just as easily make them less likely to talk to you than open them up. You really have to read the skill checks in this game, since succeeding on what you were trying to do doesn’t necessarily mean it was a good idea.
Disco Elysium also plays off the wish of players to feel like they are maximising their skills so that roleplay is better encouraged. Your desire to look cool might lead to your subconscious telling you to do dangerous things. Get as good as possible at detecting lies, and paranoia will take hold, and your skills will start seeing lies where there aren’t any. This perfectly illustrates what the skills are - they're self-interested parties, with no concern for the larger person that contains all the others. Physical Instrument wants to look cool, it's not concerned with how the charatcer as a whole is perceived, it just wants to get the character to use it, which became obvious to me when my character catapulted the ball into the sea to looks of bafflement and annoyance from everyone around me. For example, you pick up a ball, and Physical Instrument (essentially athletics) tells you to throw it. Skills will lead for you to do something that satisfies themselves, tell you to threaten someone who can kill you without a second though just because they want to. Especially in passive checks, the skills are intended to represent various aspects of a deeply flawed and dysfunctional personality, meaning that they will variously provide wrong information, bad suggestions or even squabble between each other. But in Disco Elysium, you are constantly reminded of your own build choices, weaving character build into roleplay with unparalleled efficacy.īut here’s the kicker, what really elevates Disco Elysium’s skill system. If the player is mid-dungeon and wants to level up Speech or Barter, levelling these skills will often have no demonstrable impact on the player’s roleplaying until far later in the game. Even in situations where the skill at hand is not actually used, the game is still able to create an atmosphere of usefulness by constantly rewarding the player for having certain skills appropriately levelled. It’s a great way of giving the player the feeling of sculpting their character’s personality as skills get stronger in gameplay terms, the aspects of personality that these skills represent also become stronger in conversation. You can identify drugs with Electrochemistry, tell if someone is lying with Drama, pick up on an imperceptible sound with Perception, all without any asks from the player.
As well as having the more familiar notion of “active” skill checks, in which the player selects a gameplay option whose success is affected by a character’s skill, the skills will often chime in (unprompted) during dialogue, advising the player of what to do. Disco Elysium contains 24 skills six for Intellect, six for Psyche (emotional intelligence), six for Physical and six for Motorics (roughly correlated to Agility in other RPGs).