• 2 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: July 11th, 2020
  • baldurtothe most oppressed minority•Disco Elysium or Outer Worlds?
    1·
    4 years ago

    I know I’m a month late to this, but Disco Elysium by far.

    The Outer Worlds is pretty forgettable. I thought it was fairly enjoyable, and I did feel compelled enough to 100% it, but the writing is nothing spectacular. The politics especially leave something to be desired, it sort of presents itself as anti-capitalist but really, it’s nothing of the sort. It’s more “anti-corporatist” (ugh) and even then it never really firmly picks a side. Nothing’s really ever anyone’s fault, everyone is more or less well-meaning, so the best option is always to be a fence sitting centrist and attempt to compromise. What saves it is that it has some pretty good groundwork mechanically, and there’re fun characters and side-stories scattered throughout the world. But I found the main campaign to be really quite shallow, even insultingly so at points.

    Disco Elysium, meanwhile, is one of my favorite games ever, and easily the most well written game I’ve ever played. I could seriously go on for days about how fantastic it is. Almost every single character in it is layered and interesting and enjoyable to interact with. The protagonist is absolutely batshit. It has pretty much the best companion character of any game I’ve played. The role-playing mechanics are revolutionary. The setting is odd, unique, and mysterious. The best part about this game, though, are the political undertones that permeate every aspect of it, subtle enough to not be bothersome but pronounced enough that you really feel them. The devs hit a perfect tone here, a lot of leftist media to me feels like it’s preaching to the choir a little, but not Disco Elysium. The tone is actually very reminiscent of casual online left spaces, with a lot of subdued humor that only lefties will fully appreciate. And it’s a Marxist game in the truest sense, the most striking part about it to me is how cohesive the whole thing is, everything just fits together perfectly. At times, it feels to me like a work of critical theory in video game form, there’s so much to analyze and appreciate about every aspect. I’ve played through the game 3 or 4 times by now and I still feel like I could play it 3 or 4 more times and come away having learned something new each time.

    Anyway, I’m going to stop gushing about it now. It’s a great game, I think any leftist should give it a shot.

  • baldurOPtothe most oppressed minority•Disco Elysium
    9·
    4 years ago

    it’s an incredible game, i really do recommend you give it a try. even for non-marxists the game is a really enjoyable and well written RPG but there’s so much stuff here for marxists to enjoy, from in-jokes to poetic and beautiful scenes, ruminations on the relentless marching of history to funny passages shitting on centrists and fascists. it’s very well optimized as well, even extremely low-end systems should be able to play it fairly smoothly.

    tonight we riot has been on my radar since it came out, i’m gonna have to give that one a try sometime. love how there seems to be an influx of explicitly anti-capitalist games and developers recently.

  • baldurOPtothe most oppressed minority•Disco Elysium
    9·
    4 years ago

    just to inform you, the development team patched the game this year with their ‘Working Class Update’; essentially their goal is to make the game run well on the lowest specs possible to increase accessibility. i dont know what your specs are but the minimum required specs to run disco elysium now are extremely low, and they’re still working to optimize it further:

    Working Class Update!

    We’ve been working hard on optimizing Disco Elysium so that it runs on as many hardworking machines as possible. No matter how old or low-tech they may be!

    If you found that your computer struggled to run Disco Elysium before then this update will hopefully remedy that. Many more people can play for the first time, or have a much better and smoother experience than before. This one’s for all our bratan keeping it real by booting up games on their ancient potato machines.

    With this latest update, Disco Elysium’s minimum specs have been dropped down to Mariana Trench levels. That goes for both the Windows PC and Mac versions.

    New PC minimum:

    • Windows 7 and DirectX 11 compatible video card (integrated or dedicated with min 512MB memory). 2GB RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo, 20GB hard disk space.

    New Mac minimum:

    • MacBook Pro: from mid 2009
    • MacBook Air: from mid 2012
    • iMac: from late 2009
    • Mac Pro: from late 2008
    • Mac mini: from 2009
    • An OpenGL capable system
    • The higher fan speeds are normal effect, fans run faster when 20% or more of CPU capacity is used.
    • These are the oldest tested machines, we cannot guarantee all different specs run but we tried to push specs as low as possible without sacrificing gaming experience.

    We’re determined to take it further too. We’re going to try to keep optimizing so low that we break through the crust on the other side of the planet. Show us your scrapheap calculators and rusty adding machines and we’ll give it a go. Disco Elysium for all!