Dungeons & Dragons is a recognisable table-top role playing game (TTRPG), having been around for decades. My dad played it when he was in university, back in the 1980s, and today all my best friends play it every week. Traditional RPGs like DnD rely on dungeon masters to build, present and guide the story for players to interact with.
Role playing games, abbreviated to RPG, is about stats and skills. The player has a set number attached to a skill – 5 strength, 3 intelligence – and for every action they take, they check they have enough skill points to be able to accomplish the task. The aim is that the player takes a character and role plays them in a set setting with goals and objectives both personal and narrative.
It is a compelling story that often sets great campaigns apart from ordinary ones. When a player is so wrapped up in their character that the character development, interaction and involvement in the story becomes so detailed and vivid, it is often that these characters come to life.
RPGs are still strong today on the tabletop gaming scene, and it has had its features in other literary forms, such as novels in role playing game books such as Fighting Fantasy, created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. In recent decades, RPGs have crossed from novel to computer.
Role playing video games are single player versions of the traditional table top game. It removes the requirement of a dungeon master by setting up a single world and story. While this removes the need for multiple players, it also presents a limitation on the imaginative aspect of RPGs. Where DnD has multiple players and a DM to create a story, a video game’s only variable is the single player. How does one create a changing story that is interesting and vivid but can only rely on the player to shift the narrative?
This is where traditional RPG components come into play. You can absolutely have a game that has one dialogue and one storyline – games like Coffee Talk are popular in their own way. RPG video games, however, have multiple, and player profiles and stat checks are instrumental to telling a compelling story in RPGs.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a recent RPG game that nearly anyone in the gaming community would’ve heard of. The player builds their character, fitting them with armour and learning spells and fighting skills to help them in battle. They explore a world and interact with characters. Crucial actions and decisions are made through stat checks. The player’s chosen characteristics decide the story’s ending and which characters fall in love with them – or hate them. It is a very successful RPG, a massive game spanning hundreds of hours of fighting, conversations, questlines and exploring. Today I want to talk about an RPG almost entirely based on character interaction, and compare it to Baldur’s Gate. This RPG does not have a fraction of the massive array of multiple endings – it’s a miniscule game compared to Baldur’s Gate. I had fun playing BG3. I was changed by Disco Elysium.
On the surface, Disco Elysium, published by ZA/UM in 2019, sounds quite simple and easy. There is a murder and you have to solve it. What makes the game so magical is the sheer depth of the world created for this game. Not only do you have to figure out who you are, the main character, but you also have to learn the history of this world.
Disco Elysium is not set in our world – there are countries you have to memorise, from their name to their history to their politics to their military structure. For example, the drab town you find yourself in is called Martinaise, a district of Revachol, which is situated in the isola of Insulinde. Each of these words you will find yourself memorising and building a profile in your mind, cataloguing the history and politics of each word. Insulinde has gone through several power struggles in just the last fifty decades. The monarchy collapsed at the turn of the century, the king running away and the royalists either losing their money or buying into the new system. The country, having been taken over by communists, draws attention from the wider world. The other powers are not happy with the red country, and chose Martinaise as their invasion point. The communists broken and killed, Insulinde carries on as a puppet state, largely controlled by people from other countries.
In the smaller sections of the country, namely the town you wake up in, politics is a messy, troublesome topic. There are royalists, communists, and capitalists, with a few fascists and other ideologies sprinkled in for flavour. I found, as I explored Martinaise and learnt each character and interacted with them, that while Insulinde is the site of incredible political upheaval and change, individually, politics has failed each citizen in this drab town.
What a tale Disco Elysium tells you! This is storytelling at its finest! The writers, the developers, the artists, every person involved in this game has put their heart and soul into weaving a complex and compelling story that the player can interact with in their own way.
One limitation of a traditional novel is that there is only one path the stories tread – the road the protagonist takes. There are multiple methods that can break this single narrative, such as an unreliable narrative, or multiple viewpoints. I also won’t say that there are benefits to the limitations. For example, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov forces you into the perspective of an abuser, and you must analyse and break the protagonist’s thoughts and reasoning to see the ‘truth’ of the novel. This technique allows you to understand how abusers work.
What Disco Elysium does is have one story – a police detective solving a murder – and have hundreds of dialogue trees for the player to explore. The game looks at the limitation of a single story and turns it into a strength. Rather than trying to tell as many different stories in one world with one plotline, it aims to analyse the way the player interacts with the world through different personalities and perspectives.
On my first playthrough, I chose dialogue and actions that aligned with my personal politics and personality. I chose to start the game as a thinker, where my initial skill points were invested into the Intellect skill tree, with aspects like Encyclopedia and Conceptualisation. This was my first time, so I wanted skills that could help me learn about the world.
On my second run through, I wanted some help in the Psyche skill tree, which included Empathy and Suggestion. To my utter surprise, every interaction I had was completely different.
Disco Elysium, as a role playing game, has stat checks. I was familiar with the white and red stat checks, which were checks that had mighty huge signs saying that it was a stat check. WHITE CHECK – YOU CAN REROLL THIS LATER, the game would say. RED CHECK – YOU CAN ONLY DO THIS ONCE, it would also say. What I didn’t expect was that nearly every dialogue tree changed based on passive skill checks.
In the first interaction between the main character and another character, you learn what you were doing last night. Or, so I thought, after my first playthrough. The actual dialogue from each character is exactly the same, but you react differently. If your Authority is strong, then you might demand the other character to explain. If your Drama is high, then you might be able to fake knowing the information. If your Shivers is the best, then you might be able to divine an answer based on gut feeling. These dialogue trees aren’t a closed circuit either – they don’t return to the same outcome. When I started my second playthrough, I didn’t realise this, and went to button mash through all the dialogue. Ten seconds later, I was staring at completely different options and a character that was reacting completely differently than before. I was so stumped and confused that I backpedalled and started a new file completely!
The dialogue trees in Disco Elysium is no joke – the total word count for the game is over a million words. For comparison, the entire Lord of the Rings and Hobbit is 550k words. There are hundreds of stories in Disco Elysium, and a single play barely scratches the surface. I had left many characters' storylines half finished, or yet discovered on my first finish. I had only caught a glimpse of Martinaise.
As I continue to play Disco Elysium, I experiment with the stat profiles and dialogue choices. Your decisions and reasoning is recorded – the game picks your cop type and it further changes your gameplay. Are you a communist? Are you a capitalist? Are you fascist? Are you a centralist? Once your alignment is decided, it influences how you respond to characters. The royalist makes snide remarks at you, the communist. The communist spits on you, the capitalist. The capitalist pitties you, the poor man.
I said earlier that while Martinaise is a site of huge political upheaval, on a smaller scale it has only left its scars and wounds on the town and the citizens. The game heavily plays around with politics and alignment - it is a medium for us to reflect on these ideologies. What does it mean to be communist? What does it mean to be capitalist? It doesn’t focus entirely on the interaction between the self and politics, it also reflects on actual events. What has communism done for the isola of Insulinde? It has left it a broken and struggling state. What has capitalism done for Martinaise? It has left it a forgotten and dirty town.
When I ventured through the story and world of Baldur’s Gate 3 I was frequently lost. I was supposed to know what a Harper is, what Baldur’s Gate is, what a Flaming Fist was, and all the names of every god and their domain. The turn based fighting system was so utterly alien and a total overload of information that I struggled to play the game the first time. Once I finally got my wits about myself, I’ll admit that Baldur’s Gate 3 was fun! I enjoyed myself. I liked exploring new areas, finding quests and trying to flirt with Karlach. There were challenges I enjoyed, like the Iron Throne, and I was immersed in the story and world.
And yet, despite the way BG3 completely dominates in terms of size, graphics, depth and diversity of paths, choices and endings, Disco Elysium still outshines. One game was a fantasy saga with epic tales and world-saving feats. The other was a story that sat like stones in my chest. It was a story of horrible humans, dried tears and parched throat, stumbling conversations and disco music.
Baldur’s Gate 3, I feel, tried to pose the evil or good endings like a weighty decision. You can take over the world or save the world. Many games like BG3 with grand ambitions and epic stories try to examine moral dilemmas like this, thinking the choice would be extremely difficult to make. Yet despite the high stakes, it doesn’t. Of course I’m going to choose to save the world, dying sucks, man. Killing other people is kinda bad too! When the moral dilemma is so obvious, it destroys some of that weight.
There are no moral decisions in DE, not like BG3. Disco Elysium has one ending. You solve the murder. There isn’t an evil ending or a good ending. The moral choices of the game lie in how you talk to characters, and in that way, each choice feels so much more impactful. The morals are grounded in reality, and despite the lower stakes, the emotional impact of being rude or disappointing cannot be underestimated. In Disco Elysium, the video game element of examining the same situation through different outcomes combines artfully with the question we ask ourselves – who could we have been if we made slightly different choices? This is role playing at its strongest: recontextualising our lives, choices and ideologies through different personas in different situations, where we are able to analyse and disassemble from a distance.
Games like Disco Elysium revolutionise what it means to use video games as a storytelling medium. The player is able to interact with the same story, characters and setting with hundreds of variations. The player is able to go to the same playground with different tools and strategies. The player is able to get different narratives and analyse them side by side. Single narrative books like Lolita are valuable because they force the reader into a perspective they would never consider, allowing them to analyse and reflect on themselves through that lens. RPG games allow players to reflect on their world, and their point of view.
Disco Elysium is an incredible video game, with an immersive world and an incredible variety of gameplay. It is one of my favourite games ever, with such charming characters like Kim Kitsuragi, Soona, the Phasmid, Novelty Dicemaker, René Arnoux and more. The artstyle is vivid, ugly and yet beautiful. It has some of the most breathtaking abstract paintings I’ve seen and used with such finesse and strength. The humour comes in and out and leaves you with tears in your eyes; the game leaves you aching with loss and grief so strong you cannot form a bond with every character. Pain and loneliness is depicted so viciously and tenderly.
It is one the strongest analyses of our world and the politics that build our society. It discusses the theoretical level of ideologies and also the reality of consequences. It is the perfect example of RPG gameplay; it is where video games and storytelling are at its strongest. If you are even vaguely inclined to plot-heavy videogames, Disco Elysium is an indie game that demolishes AAA games every day. Make sure to have a dictionary prepared though!
Banner photo by Matthew LeJune on Unsplash
