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Disco Elysium – Part 8-1

We have arrived at a stalemate. If we want to break it, and continue our investigation, we must first understand the city of Martinaise and the people who call it their home.

Streamed at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud
Andre at https://www.twitch.tv/kupoyogaming

As I pointed out to Andre before we started recording, this is not the first version of Disco Elysium. What we’re playing now is technically “Disco Elysium: The Final Cut”, which was released in March 2021, over a year after the original release in October 2019. Since l owned and played the original, my version of the game was updated to The Final Cut for free, long after I had finished with it.

Out of all the changes and enhancements made to the game with The Final Cut, by far the most impactful has been the addition of full voice acting and narration. You’ll notice these days, especially with big RPGs like this and Baldur’s Gate 3, that it is far more common to include full voice acting than it used to be. There are multiple reasons for this, but chief among them is streamer culture and discoverability. As someone who streams for several hours a week, and once tried to stream Phoenix Wright, I can tell you that one of the biggest problems streaming games with no voice acting is that it is both normal and expected for the streamer in question to perform the lines themselves. Your lips will dry out and it will become painful to talk after doing so for prolonged periods of time. For that reason, many streamers will often avoid games like this. (This is why I have not and will not do the third Ace Attorney game.)

Unfortunately, in today’s world, the most effective way to showcase and promote a video game is to put it in the hands of streamers to play live to their Twitch audiences. Other tools for discoverability are no where near as successful. Which means voice acting is often a necessary tool to encourage streamers otherwise nervous about overtaxing their vocal chords to give your work an honest try. I am one such streamer. Were it not for the narrator and voice acting, I simply would not be playing Disco for you or anyone else.

I can only imagine that ZA/UM’s success with the original version of the game is what gave them the funding required to go back and incorporate vocal performance, combined with the popularity Disco obtained as a stream game despite the initial lack of it. I’m grateful for that, because it enabled the Let’s Play you’re watching now.