Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made
moakley@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoI think the problem is that it kind of isn’t an RPG.
It’s an adventure game with heavy RPG elements. Like the core gameplay clearly resembles old point and click adventure games. It’s just the experience and leveling system are also so central to the gameplay that it wouldn’t work without also being an RPG.
MarcomachtKuchen@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
I think trying to fit games into genres and people disagreeing with your reasoning is incredibly bad around RPGs.
I’d argue disco elysium is a stellar example of an RPG especialls since I enjoyed role playing as someone who is incredibly far from my own mental state. A game with somehow gets me to roleplay someone so different is a prime example of a good RPG for me.
But I get how messy the term has gotten. People argue about whether Dark souls or Witcher are RPGs, where both games have arguments for it beeing an RPG. Personality I think an RPG has an adaptility in the character AND the world in response to my choices. But I can totally see how others see it differently.
For me personally I’ve set up that there are the traditional RPGs like Fallout, Baldurs gate and Pathfinder WoR. But there are also a lot of games which use a lot of similar parts of the RPG gene that I consider them RPGs aswell.
moakley@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That’s fair. I guess what I’m saying is that describing it as “an RPG” doesn’t do nearly enough to convey what the game actually is. Like I can see the argument to say Elden Ring is an RPG, because it definitely has RPG elements, but you’d never describe it as an RPG without also mentioning that it’s an action game. You also wouldn’t describe Expedition 33 without mentioning that it’s a turn-based RPG.
In the same way, I find it misleading to label Disco Elysium as an RPG without mentioning that it’s an adventure game. It’s at least as much of an adventure game as it is an RPG, and most importantly: it lacks combat. Combat isn’t necessarily a requirement of the genre, but if you asked a random gamer to name 10 RPGs, he’d either name 10 games with combat systems, or he’d name 9 games with combat and Disco Elysium.