I'd been thinking for a while now about the very worst quest in Cyberpunk (yes, I'm talking about Sinnerman and its questline) and just what makes it so awful. For anyone who doesn't know, in that mission a man hires you to get revenge on a murderous ex-con whose been mysteriously released from prison, and wants to be there to watch; following a 100% scripted car chase (since this predated the vehicle AI they eventually added) the cop car transporting the target stops under an overpass and the driver gets out; your client gets out of the car, charges the cop, is unavoidably scripted to die after a few lines of dialogue; and then the actual questline begins as the ex-con is revealed to be a born again fundamentalist lunatic who's intent on being killed in a corporate produced crucifixion BTL and for no discernable reason has decided he really wants to hang out with the player character to the point that the studio exec responsible for his release from prison pays you to come hang out with them.
Everything about it is awful, from the premise to the heavily scripted execution and the way that you literally cannot make it go any way other than it does even if you stop time and try to kill the target and driver before the conversation can happen: they're all locked to not go below 1 hp until the conversation finishes. But despite this, you can just take out the target as soon as that initial dialogue has finished, and the dialogue if you accept the contract to go and hang out with him does let you criticize the whole absurd farce, call the target a lunatic, and just leave, ruining the whole mad plan. That "but" is relevant for the sake of contrast: that questline was the absolute lowpoint of writing and quest design for that game, and even it let you go off on the characters or just outright kill them and leave.
Now let's compare that to Starfield. In true Bethesda fashion, quests are usually heavily linear with a single branching end of "do good thing (for money)" or "do bad thing (for more money, maybe)" that don't lead into anything else most of the time and (at least so far) never actually matter beyond their own little self-contained questline. They're also bland and full of brainworms, with only the occasional hint of decent writing hiding somewhere in there.
For example, in the one I'm on now you have to serve as a liaison between an ancient slower-than-light colony ship and the corporate owners of the planet they were headed towards. Both parties are insufferable, but the corporate resort is actively monstrous and proposes three solutions: you can pay the resort to enslave the colonists, buy the colonists a jump drive and get them to fuck off, or kill the colonists. The executives that give you these choices are flagged as essential and can't simply be killed, and those are your only choices for resolving the situation. Your options for dissent are little more than saying "gee that sounds mean" as a side option that just directs you back to choosing one of those three resolution paths.
It hits every note for what made Sinnerman such an awful questline, and then manages to be even worse on top of that. And that's just the normal baseline level for Starfield: quest relevant NPCs are always invincible and the quest doesn't account for the possibility of just killing them no matter how awful they are, there's never any option to tear into anyone over how awful everything about what they're doing is, and the options are always a very limited set of choices that are usually dumb.
Trying to play games with a large narrative component designed for mass appeal after playing Disco Elysium makes me wanna take a Dremel to my skull so I can carefully remove my brain and throw it into traffic.
every TES game since Morrowind. : p At least Skyrim was a little weird around the edges.
Morrowind had a wild plot, and it let you actively fuck questlines because there was no such thing as 'essential NPCs' (that was not introduced until Oblivion).
It would tell you if you did so (or if the NPC got murdered some other way), but otherwise...do whatever
Are there any games that come close to the story of DE?
Outer Wilds comes to mind although it tells its story in a very different manner.
I'm so mad about the Outer Worlds because it's a bad game with a similar name and release timeframe to a good game. They're forever tangled in my brain argh.
I played Outer Worlds for an hour and a half and uninstalled lmao
Agreed. It's the only game that impacted me on nearly the same level as Disco, even though the presentation is significantly different.
Sure, but they're old. Planescape Torment is the one that immediately comes to mind.
Would also add Torment: Tides of Numenera, the spiritual successor. It starts a little slow, but does have a similar super deep story telling thing. You can make it through the whole game without ever getting into combat if you want, though there are some sections you may still want to do turn based to get the timing right.
What was that game where you play an enforcer for the evil overlord and have to do a lot of legitimate lesser-evil choices because if you don't find a solution your boss will magic-nuke entire regions, or let his much less hinged minions do it? That supposedly has some good storytelling and actually makes being "evil" more complicated than just 'press x to kick puppies".
Tyranny. I had a pretty good time with it, but I wouldn't say it's outstanding.
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While I wouldn't say it's in the same league as DE in terms of style or impact, I feel like Pentiment scratched a similar itch.
Pentiment was really tight.
Planescape Torment's story rocks. The gameplay sucks ass though.
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Very different feel, but Night in the Woods had a similar effect on me. It's definitely not as poetic/high minded, but it's got a strong POV and good characters.
be gay do crimes