I love so much about the game, but I get this pit of anxiety whenever a skill check below 50% comes up. I'm trying to avoid save scumming for particularly low checks, but I had leaving any stones unturned.
I'm enjoying the game, plenty, but is there an appropriate mindset or approach to the game to get the most out of it?
Also an aside, i have a question and a potentially minor spoiler for an early quest.
spoiler
Getting the two signatures for the youth centre, Kitsuragi seemed disappointed once I got the second signature. Without spoiling too much, is this something that will have a negative outcome for the fishing village and/or Kitsuragi's opinion of Harry?
You've been conditioned by lesser CRPGs to view failed skills checks (and failure in general) as something inherently bad. I'm DE, failures are opportunites to (maybe) find success elsewhere. Also, consider the character your play as -- failure is at the very core of his soul and was ever-present long before your clicked New Game. Accept failure. Embrace failure. Wallow in failure and let it make you strong.
Also failures are often incredibly funnier situations than actual successes
Are those white checks or red checks? The white checks you can fail, go do something else, and return when you've earned enough experience for a skill point. You can retry them by advancing the story or by spending a point on the respective skill. If there's nothing else to do and you can't skill up you can use drugs to increase your base stats and then add the point. So it's pretty safe.
The red checks you can't fail, even if you nominally fail them you never get a "bad" ending because of it, just a different story. There are several very iconic moments that won't happen if you don't fail certain early checks.
The game is very well designed to keep you from save scumming. It's not necessary and the game will even comment on it if you seem to have supernatural good or bad luck. There's even a place where the game tells you to stop worrying because failures are as important as successes to a story.
I’ve played through the game multiple times and there’s no way to really fail the game.
In fact, I highly recommend not save scumming and just roll with whatever happens. Some of the funniest bits of the game are found by spectacularly failing skill checks.
From what I understand you're likely missing an entire books worth of dialogue and encounters based on your copotype and other build choices. For example is your tie talking to you? So if you want to save scum to maximize what you have access to go ahead, you're not going to get everything in one playthrough anyway.
Can confirm. I don't normally like to replay games but I found playing through Disco Elysium a second time equally as interesting as the first because of how much the dialogue differs just from passive skill checks alone.
Disco Elysium is best enjoyed with a single save that you only save when you are finished playing for the session imho.
I play 1-2 hours at a time and if I die I just load up the same save the next time I play.
The game has 100's of hours of dialog and side quests and about ~30 hours of the main quest if you play it straight through.
No reason to save scum when you can easily play 50-100 hours a game multiple times and not even experience the whole game.
that's how i played the first time, bruteforcing shit by reloading saves 100s of times. It's one way to play the game, but you can just fail the check for other funny/interesting outcomes.
if you don't want to spend too much time save scumming, you may want to check out the trainer
spoiler
nothing much changes within the game regarding the signature, just some extra dialogue in the ending about how RCM is working with the union etc.
it's your video game play it any way you want if you want to savescum to see more of the content that's a perfectly valid way of doing it
I got stuck. lol
I tried to just let things play out but it is possible to get kinda stuck, so I would keep saves before particularly hard checks related to the main story
