It's rare for a game to come along and change the discourse around its genre. Disco Elysium has, at least in our office, made certain games from the past year feel lacking in a way they hadn't before Disco launched. While the writing is uneven in tone (on purpose), one thing the game excels at is making sure even the smallest player choice is reflected back in a naturalistic way. Player actions that are largely ignored in other games matter here because of its focus on characterization, something that modern AAA RPGs could use more of. We discuss Disco Elysium's narrative focus, the design arc of Rocksteady's Batman games, and more on this episode of Waypoint Radio. You can read an excerpt and listen to the full episode below.
I believe the reason the Waypoint Radio team did not watch the Peter Pan film was because it cast a white woman as Tiger Lily, because it seems that was forgotten this episode.
It seems everybody is in agreement that that Arkham games after Asylum were bad… I’ll just hide in my little Arkham Knight appreciating corner while I sob about how WB Interactive teased me about a sequel months ago and still haven’t shown shit.
Having not played anything after Asylum (except maybe an hour of City one time) I’ve been perpetually surprised by this consensus here. Prior to hearing waypoint talk about this series, everything I’d heard was that the sequels were both better than the original.
An important thing to add into the start of this year has been terrible conversation is the floods in Jakarta, which have killed more people than the bushfires in Australia, and displaced more people. There’s also a handy explainer on vice about them! I mostly post this because as an Australian living in Jakarta, it’s weirdly frustrating to see the richer country gaining huge international donations when the government back home should be entirely capable of funding the disaster response were they actually capable and not a bunch of awful human beings. The lack of donations for Jakarta isn’t even due to lack of international media coverage, there’s been plenty, people just either don’t care or find it too hard to donate.
When the only mention of Disco was Austin’s initial impressions (which were mostly speculation on whether the game can pull it off) and then silence for many weeks I was worried you bounced off for some reason and weren’t playing further…
I dunno about Knight, but certainly I remember everyone preferring City to Asylum, sure. [I never completed Asylum, and never played any of the later games - that Killer Croc quicktime sequence was just horrible and I bailed out after more than an hour of just failing to batarang consistently there - but I definitely remember the critical consensus]
Arkham City I think at the time was viewed as a good evolution of the series, but then the series (and every other series) triggered an open world fatigue in people that then ultimately made a lot of them reflect a bit and think “you know in hindsight I’d probably rather play something like Asylum again.”
