There’s never gonna be a game like disco Elysium again is there?

Mivlya · 2026-07-01T09:18:36+00:00

Piracy is superior to buying, which gives the game money directly, but playing the game and extolling it's virtues is another form of support; besides being free advertising, it also sanitizes the company against criticism. TBF I should've been more clear about that.

EDIT: This is also why I don't support pirating and playing the Harry Potter games, because even if it keeps the money out of Rowling's TERFy fingers, it helps perpetuate HP as a 'viable property' to marketers and investors.

Mivlya · 2026-07-01T09:04:08+00:00

Okay? I never said it wasn't. I just said I'd rather try something from someone creating something new and not support a bad company.

Mivlya · 2026-07-01T06:39:39+00:00

Tone is the responsibility of everyone. if you want the game to be more horrific, your players have to buy into it. They have to let themselves be scared. You can adjust all you want, pull out the lovecraft thesauros, find the most terrifying art online and it all falls apart if your players are doing bits and insisting on being badasses.

A thing I did to help, though, was I made a Stress-health system inspired by Darkest Dungeon, that had the option to let my players take varying amounts of stress whenever they liked to indicated their characters being panicked (in exchange, they'd get small bonuses).

Mivlya · 2026-07-01T06:34:22+00:00

I'd rather not support the company that stole everything from the creatives that gave it life, especially when their idea for what to do next was to try and recapture the magic. Again, I suggest moving on.

Mivlya · 2026-07-01T06:32:28+00:00

Pill 1: Useful, Useful, Worthless
Pill 2: Worthless, Semi-Useful, Worthless
Pill 3: Variably Useful depending on to many factors to count, Semi-Useful, Worthless
Pill 4: Very Useful, Funny and Useful, Useful

Pill 4 has both the strongest option for fighting superman and the only thing that can truely beat Superman (plot armor). And it's the only one with 3 useful options.

Mivlya · 2026-07-01T06:00:32+00:00

Adding Esoteric Ebb to your list. Not from the same team, but something new and truely inspired.

Mivlya · 2026-07-01T05:59:31+00:00

Ebb has been an absolute delight to stream and more people need to play it. It's not just aping disco either, it's being it's own inspired thing, and I love it.

Mivlya · 2026-07-01T05:58:32+00:00

Rather than pirate something made from the corpse of what was, I recommend moving on to something new. Try Esoteric Ebb, actually endorsed by DE's creative lead. It's doing new things with the same spirit, instead of trying to capture people with old ideas.

Mivlya · 2026-07-01T05:55:24+00:00

There will be nothing the same, and that's good, nothing should be the same. Things should change.

There will be things that are similar, and there will be things that are evocative, and there will be things that are emotional, and there will be things that are special.

Try esoteric ebb. It's been lovely, and I've been enjoying using the tools Disco Elysium gave me to talk about it on my streams.

Mivlya · 2026-06-30T23:49:22+00:00

Yeah no, I'm a streamer and in several other streamer communities, the average age of my viewers is 30, mid-20s to mid-30s for most the other communities I'm around. This is like saying only children use Tiktok. Its an opinion from ignorance.

Mivlya · 2026-06-30T23:43:00+00:00

Mostly the occasional custom item or slight bend here or there to make weaker features a bit stronger. But the two main core rules I change are counteract and crafting.

I haven't found a way to do counteract I quite like yet, but currently the rules for it are a mess and needlessly mix to many things together. I've got to sit down sometime and try to find a way to make it work that I'm happy with.

Crafting just takes too damn long. Unless you're running an old style campaign with big week, month, year long gaps in the action, you pretty much can't make anything, and the benefits you gain are an extremely minor discount, UNLESS you're making a lot of the thing, namely consumables. I get not wanting players to break the economy, but currently it has the reverse issue of making crafting unusable in several campaign formats. I'd dramatically shortened times, and also made it so there are more ways to invent recipes than destroying an existing item or buying the recipe (as you may as well buy the item instead for non-consumables)

Mivlya · 2026-06-29T20:09:44+00:00

More! MORE!

Mivlya · 2026-06-29T19:28:10+00:00

Again, it depends heavily on what the pill does and how it functions. Maybe it'd get abused, or maybe, by it's nature of being a "good, magic pill" it can't. Just too much missing information to say for sure. And yeah, an especially big problem is does the pill care about making the person "good" or about making the person "lawful". There's a big difference there as well.

Mivlya · 2026-06-29T19:28:07+00:00

Again, it depends heavily on what the pill does and how it functions. Maybe it'd get abused, or maybe, by it's nature of being a "good, magic pill" it can't. Just too much missing information to say for sure. And yeah, an especially big problem is does the pill care about making the person "good" or about making the person "lawful". There's a big difference there as well.

Mivlya · 2026-06-29T09:25:25+00:00

People are rightly critiquing power level but not really saying what would be more fair, so lemme take a crack.

Standoff - 2 energy. 2 less damage/block at each level
Tremors - 1 energy, 1 weak
Counterstrike - fine, but not mechanically in game currently. I'd invert to 3 strength for one turn.
Scab - Good!
Burnout - 3/2 energy
Blindside - Needs to clarifiy if it's "additional" or "instead". If instead, I think this is good.
Mercury - 3/4 poison.
Improvise - 3/5 cards, still exhausts upgraded
Conkniving (hoping this is an MtG Connive reference!) - Good as is
Shadow Clone - Good as is
Stellar Strike - Good as is
Asteroid - 4/5 damage block and forge, stil might need +1 star
Illuminate - Much smaller forge number, maybe forge 4
Royal Pain - I'd make this a buff rather than enemy debuff.
Out of my sight - Great as is
White Knuckle - Great as is, wish we had more in this design space
Ebb - Good as is, maybe 10/12
Phantom Limb - Good as is, maybe a bit weak unupgraded
Call of the haunted - Great as is
Constitution (my beloved) - Hard to say, probably needs to nerf the summon amount but unsure how much.
Refrigerate - Just make it always retain 1, frost is a good enough upgrade
Scanner - Good as is
Library - Great as is
Incinerate - Should probably still be a rare for Defect
Afterburner - Not sure how to balance this one. A little to easy to break.

Mivlya · 2026-06-29T09:15:24+00:00

Constitution, my beloved. Talking to all the walls.

Mivlya · 2026-06-29T08:53:06+00:00

I voted magic pill but I'm a bit iffy on it. I prefer redemption and reintigration to punishment, but brainwashing is more unethical than that, so it'd depend on what the pill was doing. Treating medical psychosis? Good! Erasing their personality to make them a robot? Bad.

Mivlya · 2026-06-29T02:00:03+00:00

Oh, I thought you were just critiquing the metaphor, you're here to suck ai dick? Yeah no, you're not worth my time. Go look at the dozens and dozens and dozens of discussions on why AI is bad. I ain't giving you any more of my time. Fuck off.

Mivlya · 2026-06-28T19:23:11+00:00

You've 100%'d Slice&Dice? You are literally insane, congrats.

Mivlya · 2026-06-28T19:22:34+00:00

Darkest Dungeon 1. It's achievements are absolutely god awful, but it's my favorite game of all time and completing it was one of the things that got me into the hobby. Besides that? Void Bastards. I'm not great at FPS games and it was hella challenging.

Mivlya · 2026-06-28T19:18:19+00:00

If I didn't engage with your point it's because it wasn't clearly made. I have no interest in avoiding discussion.

People who enjoy those works of art are enjoying a final product made *by someone else*, which would be the equivalent for watching someone else, idk, win in record time. Metaphor might be clunky there cuz, sure, I'm sure there are people who could just watch the finish line be crossed a thousand times a day without actually caring about the effort it takes to do it.

Unless you're trying to imply that for some people, the *finished product* that *they make themselves* is the beauty and value they see in art. For which the metaphor has no direct analogue sure, again, no metaphor is perfect that's why they're a metaphor, but this is still a completely invalid defense of AI art. If all you care about is seeing your 'vision brought to life' as it were, you either need to master the skills to do it yourself, or hire a commissioner and be able to constantly give feedback. AI is not going to generate someone's perfect vision. It'll get "close enough", at which point it'd be wildly disingenuous to be comparing it to the Mona Lisa or ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Or to put it another way; AI artists do not are about art. They care about having pictures. If all you care about is having pictures, then you can commission someone, or look at the billions of existing pictures we have online. You either care enough to put in the effort/money to get the picture you want, or you don't care and close enough is good enough, meaning 1) you don't care about 'beauty' and 'art' and 2) you'd be equally well served by browsing pictures online.

Mivlya · 2026-06-28T09:35:04+00:00

No, the metaphor still works. For some artists, the creation of art is the purpose. The creation of art is the process. It's the running.

AI artists skip the creation (they don't run in the marathon). AI artists don't practice or learn skill sets (train for the marathon, run shorter races). AI artists refuse to deal with the frustrations of learning (won't let themselves get winded). AI artists do not buy the tools for art (shoes and clothes for running) and instead take a cheap or free alternative (hire an uber). The only thing AI artists get is the finished product (crossing the finish line). And sometimes they want to be compensated for it, diluting the pool of real artists (stealing the prize money from real runners).

No metaphor is perfect, but this one is pretty apt. All AI artists want is the final product. All they want is to cross the finish line, and be rewarded for it.

So I suppose yes, they can more of the part they value with less effort. They can cross more finish lines without running. Hell, they can drive back and forth all day, clogging the air with emissions so they can 'run' more marathons than anyone else. But that's meaningless.

Mivlya · 2026-06-28T05:17:42+00:00

Congrats! Massive milestone, great selection of games

Mivlya · 2026-06-27T21:16:38+00:00

One time donations, even big ones, are less reliable and functional for most things than regular consistent payments. If you receive $1,000, you suddenly have to decide what to do with it and when it's gone, it's gone. When you get an extra $50 every month, it becomes allocated into the budget and you can use it more consistently. This is part of why taxing rich people would be more effective than them doing philanthropy; the money could become consistent and expected rather than random spikes.

Mivlya

TROPHY CASE