Western RPGs are in a very dire crisis right now. No one knows what one is anymore which isn’t helped by the fact that every mainstream title which fundamentally isn’t really a RPG incorporates the many defining elements of one anyways. Even the ones who used to help pioneer and break the mold of this genre aren’t even capable of pulling it off very well anymore. Some don’t even really pretend that much anymore like Bethesda or whatever remains of BioWare, while others cling onto the greatest moment from their past history like some old hasbeen who realizes they really did just peak in high school like Obsidian. I think the last WRPG that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed for how much it certifies itself as being a genuine game-changer for the genre and defining everything that made the role-playing experience so good to begin with is… checks notes Fallout: New Vegas. And that was a game released about 10 years ago. This isn’t even beginning to scratch into the defining landscape for WRPGs as a whole since it birthed out of the iconically influential CRPGs of the 90s which gave the role-playing experience true shape and form in its potential. Deus Ex was Warren Spector’s brilliant hybrid game blending various traditional RPG systems, FPS mechanics, action adventure games, and what he helped pioneer as Immersive Sims. This along with BioWare’s mainstream success with the Mass Effect games, which are also hybrids albeit in their own ways, really defined the mold of what anyone would really associate with the modern RPG. This decade for WRPGs gave us some of the most interesting and worthy role-playing games to have ever been made to be played like Deus Ex (as previously noted), Knights of the Old Republic 2, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Mass Effect, Alpha Protocol, and many more which brought the genre into a new era for mainstream success and recognition.
But with these successfully excellent titles, especially ones like Deus Ex and Mass Effect, which are notable for marrying the traditional role-playing experience with the mainstream appeal of more action-oriented games also inadvertently ended up creating flawed precedents for what people (devs and companies really) should really be taking from it. Which is how you then get your laundry list of video games that try to mirror this success by adding leveling systems where it doesn’t quite fit, skill trees that become arbitrary, quest designs which become tediously banal, and a sense of choice and consequence that might be the greatest lie ever told to the player besides the superficial marketing. However, this would really change the tides on overall game design for the next decade to come and what we previously identified clearly as being an RPG started to become blurred. Even the games which were still fundamentally RPGs, one way or another, began to suffer from failing to compromise these conflicting trends to deliver a genuine role-playing experience. This is how we get Skyrim, Fallout 4, Outer Worlds, Cyberpunk 2077, and to a degree the Mass Effect games after the first one which only really becomes more streamlined and streamlined until you can barely call it that by the time of Andromeda. This is probably why New Vegas remained undisputed as being the golden standard for Western RPGs for being the one to successfully bridge these genres and design tropes together while delivering the definitive role-playing experience perfectly encapsulating what made it just so good to begin with.
The point behind this is to basically say that Western RPGs have really strayed far from their own roots and influences out of their own detriment and to the gaming industry. From every mainstream title nowadays further diluting the genre into being just aimless number crunching and “it has level ups i guess” because it’s the norm, to even the ones who originally sold the idea of the role-playing experience can’t even capitalize on it anymore because of the simple fact that the gaming industry has changed so much since the 90s. And then a weird little indie game made by Estonian fans of the genre, especially the very CRPGs which paved the way for it, came out and just casually shits on everything by darin to address the evolution and change of the RPG genre.
Disco Elysium dares to first address the sad state of Western RPGs by getting rid of the one aspect that really held the way the genre has adapted since the late 90s by having absolutely no combat whatsoever. This is actually a genius move to stand apart from the many role-playing games because so much of the mechanics we’re so used to seeing and associating with RPGs stem from how it tries to serve the gameplay’s focus on action/combat. Planescape: Torment was also pretty ingenious for the time in trying to shift the gameplay focus away from combat in favor of rewarding story and character exploration but Disco Elysium is where the developers ripped it out entirely to really deconstruct what makes a role-playing game what it is.
Because of the lack of real functioning combat the mechanics have been substituted to hinge upon and reward narrative exploration and character creation. The skills in this game are arguably more deeply tied and important than they have ever been in any other RPG because they are crucial to creating your own type of protagonist. Many decisions you actively, or passively, make in the game (based on the stats set up) rewards you with Thoughts for the Thought Cabinet which essentially not just gives you bonuses to your specific stats but also defines the character you have started to mold. These help make the game feel way more introspective than any other video game I’ve ever played. Even rivaling New Vegas’ use of politics through its rorschach-test-like game design. While New Vegas accomplishes this effect through the traditionally effective blank-slate protagonist, Disco Elysium takes cues from Planescape: Torment in flipping this premise over its head again.
Like Torment, you seemingly play as a blank-slate protag with the way the game gives you a vague occupation, a simple enough goal to reach throughout the game, and how you quite literally don’t know what is going on in this world. But this gets deconstructed over the course of the game as you begin to discover you have this entire history that’s so traumatic you literally drink yourself to the point you’re an entirely new person in the world. But one way or another the sins of your past (and Revachol’s as well) start to fold back into your life and make you question if you can really live without failure enough to move on. That’s really what the game is about; the crushing failure of ideology, unstable identities, and how even despite that there’s still a way to make the best out of personal disaster. This is neatly best characterized through Kim Kitsuragi, your only companion throughout Disco Elysium, who might just be the very best that has and will exist in RPGs as a whole. While your character is very aloof, frankly very weird, and genuinely self-destructive when the situation calls for it, Kim is the one to add a sense of control over the madness exuding from you and what you represent. Because although Kim is very aware of his place in the grand scheme of the world of Elysium, from how it struggles to survive from the aftermath of a war, he is still willing to do what he can in his position to bring some good to the pain that Revachol still carries. Nothing you really do throughout the game will ever have any effect on what's going on beyond Martinaise but at the same time would it really make sense if it did? I can crack down on crime like I’m actually Batman but that won’t automatically solve the world’s fundamental problems. But as Disco Elysium solemnly preaches through its memorable cast of characters we do have to start somewhere to try and fight against it.
I also want to bring up how Disco Elysium’s own political commentary just casually shits all over the whole “I am anti-establishment because did you know…corporations are…bad??!” trend of political commentary that’s starting to become more mainstream. Especially when it’s treated like something to be taken legitimately seriously but more often than not just reeks of empty performative gesturing rather than offering an actual alternative to society’s problems. Disco Elysium had many points where it could’ve easily fallen into the same trappings as yet another weightless commentary on late-stage capitalism, especially through the very impressionable main lead, but instead it actively pokes fun at people who genuinely believe in this. Because what is this misguided attempt at commentary than just an elaborate masquerade for nihilism about the world we all live in. A complete neglect of what really can be done to save it from somewhere rather than being an unlikely participant in keeping the broken status quo going.
All in all, ZA/UM have really gone and outdone themselves with this game-changer of an RPG. It might be the only Western RPG since New Vegas to really prove itself as the golden standard for the genre which redefined why the role-playing experience is still so kino after all.
But with these successfully excellent titles, especially ones like Deus Ex and Mass Effect, which are notable for marrying the traditional role-playing experience with the mainstream appeal of more action-oriented games also inadvertently ended up creating flawed precedents for what people (devs and companies really) should really be taking from it. Which is how you then get your laundry list of video games that try to mirror this success by adding leveling systems where it doesn’t quite fit, skill trees that become arbitrary, quest designs which become tediously banal, and a sense of choice and consequence that might be the greatest lie ever told to the player besides the superficial marketing. However, this would really change the tides on overall game design for the next decade to come and what we previously identified clearly as being an RPG started to become blurred. Even the games which were still fundamentally RPGs, one way or another, began to suffer from failing to compromise these conflicting trends to deliver a genuine role-playing experience. This is how we get Skyrim, Fallout 4, Outer Worlds, Cyberpunk 2077, and to a degree the Mass Effect games after the first one which only really becomes more streamlined and streamlined until you can barely call it that by the time of Andromeda. This is probably why New Vegas remained undisputed as being the golden standard for Western RPGs for being the one to successfully bridge these genres and design tropes together while delivering the definitive role-playing experience perfectly encapsulating what made it just so good to begin with.
The point behind this is to basically say that Western RPGs have really strayed far from their own roots and influences out of their own detriment and to the gaming industry. From every mainstream title nowadays further diluting the genre into being just aimless number crunching and “it has level ups i guess” because it’s the norm, to even the ones who originally sold the idea of the role-playing experience can’t even capitalize on it anymore because of the simple fact that the gaming industry has changed so much since the 90s. And then a weird little indie game made by Estonian fans of the genre, especially the very CRPGs which paved the way for it, came out and just casually shits on everything by darin to address the evolution and change of the RPG genre.
Disco Elysium dares to first address the sad state of Western RPGs by getting rid of the one aspect that really held the way the genre has adapted since the late 90s by having absolutely no combat whatsoever. This is actually a genius move to stand apart from the many role-playing games because so much of the mechanics we’re so used to seeing and associating with RPGs stem from how it tries to serve the gameplay’s focus on action/combat. Planescape: Torment was also pretty ingenious for the time in trying to shift the gameplay focus away from combat in favor of rewarding story and character exploration but Disco Elysium is where the developers ripped it out entirely to really deconstruct what makes a role-playing game what it is.
Because of the lack of real functioning combat the mechanics have been substituted to hinge upon and reward narrative exploration and character creation. The skills in this game are arguably more deeply tied and important than they have ever been in any other RPG because they are crucial to creating your own type of protagonist. Many decisions you actively, or passively, make in the game (based on the stats set up) rewards you with Thoughts for the Thought Cabinet which essentially not just gives you bonuses to your specific stats but also defines the character you have started to mold. These help make the game feel way more introspective than any other video game I’ve ever played. Even rivaling New Vegas’ use of politics through its rorschach-test-like game design. While New Vegas accomplishes this effect through the traditionally effective blank-slate protagonist, Disco Elysium takes cues from Planescape: Torment in flipping this premise over its head again.
Like Torment, you seemingly play as a blank-slate protag with the way the game gives you a vague occupation, a simple enough goal to reach throughout the game, and how you quite literally don’t know what is going on in this world. But this gets deconstructed over the course of the game as you begin to discover you have this entire history that’s so traumatic you literally drink yourself to the point you’re an entirely new person in the world. But one way or another the sins of your past (and Revachol’s as well) start to fold back into your life and make you question if you can really live without failure enough to move on. That’s really what the game is about; the crushing failure of ideology, unstable identities, and how even despite that there’s still a way to make the best out of personal disaster. This is neatly best characterized through Kim Kitsuragi, your only companion throughout Disco Elysium, who might just be the very best that has and will exist in RPGs as a whole. While your character is very aloof, frankly very weird, and genuinely self-destructive when the situation calls for it, Kim is the one to add a sense of control over the madness exuding from you and what you represent. Because although Kim is very aware of his place in the grand scheme of the world of Elysium, from how it struggles to survive from the aftermath of a war, he is still willing to do what he can in his position to bring some good to the pain that Revachol still carries. Nothing you really do throughout the game will ever have any effect on what's going on beyond Martinaise but at the same time would it really make sense if it did? I can crack down on crime like I’m actually Batman but that won’t automatically solve the world’s fundamental problems. But as Disco Elysium solemnly preaches through its memorable cast of characters we do have to start somewhere to try and fight against it.
I also want to bring up how Disco Elysium’s own political commentary just casually shits all over the whole “I am anti-establishment because did you know…corporations are…bad??!” trend of political commentary that’s starting to become more mainstream. Especially when it’s treated like something to be taken legitimately seriously but more often than not just reeks of empty performative gesturing rather than offering an actual alternative to society’s problems. Disco Elysium had many points where it could’ve easily fallen into the same trappings as yet another weightless commentary on late-stage capitalism, especially through the very impressionable main lead, but instead it actively pokes fun at people who genuinely believe in this. Because what is this misguided attempt at commentary than just an elaborate masquerade for nihilism about the world we all live in. A complete neglect of what really can be done to save it from somewhere rather than being an unlikely participant in keeping the broken status quo going.
All in all, ZA/UM have really gone and outdone themselves with this game-changer of an RPG. It might be the only Western RPG since New Vegas to really prove itself as the golden standard for the genre which redefined why the role-playing experience is still so kino after all.
Drekaris
1 year ago