Blissful Disco: Strict reasoning, abundant emotions and fascinating new world.

At the moment when the audio-visual expressive force of mainstream 3A games is constantly reaching its peak, the retro-selling "Blissful Disco" is quite eye-catching. From the early publicity, we can see at a glance many elements that can be regarded as the "standard" of CRPG(Computer role-playing game) works: numerical character construction, high-degree-of-freedom network tasks, huge dialogue texts, frequent skill verification and so on.

Whether it is for early adopters who have little contact with CRPG or for fans who admire this type, playing Blissful Disco may be a journey full of novelty. This work relies on strict logic and imagination interwoven in dialogue and choice, instead of confusing pictures with fake ones when constructing immersive experience; Under the familiar and unfamiliar world view depicted in the game, a drama of investigating the truth, knowing the world and pursuing oneself is waiting for the players to kick off.

(Note: this article does not contain spoilers for key plots, so readers who have never played this book can rest assured to read it)

On the poster of this book, there is an eye-catching slogan below the main title: A detective role-playing game (A Detective RPG), which highlights the theme of the gameplay design of "Blissful Disco".

In this play, you will play a policeman who wakes up from a hangover. After talking to the first NPC you meet, you will find that you have drunk the film so hard that you can't remember your exact name, identity and affiliation, lose your memory of your past resume, and don't understand where you are and the geometry of the world situation. Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi from another jurisdiction will be your temporary partner, and you will be confronted with an uncanny and complicated murder. You need to travel all over the game map, use your extraordinary skills to solve crimes, and start with various elements such as dialogue, tales of mystery, reasoning, objects, environment, etc., to break the hidden mysteries one by one, and gradually approach the ultimate truth of the case and fill the gaps in yourself.

Text reading and selection is the absolute main course of Blissful Disco. On the right side of the game screen, there is a fixed area for text display, which arranges the concrete presentation of almost all behaviors, such as role dialogue, psychological activities, the interaction between the protagonist and the outside world, including nuanced narration, vivid lines from various characters, etc. Both literary and martial arts dramas are included in it.

Personally, I think "Blissful Disco" may be one of the best games in the design of detective play in recent years. We can disassemble it into two aspects: mechanism and content. Let's talk about the parts related to the mechanism first:

The English text of "Blissful Disco" is as high as 1 million words. For comparison, "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt" is only 45, words, and the strong guarantee of the mechanism makes the heavy text content shine:

In fact, after fully understanding the overall gameplay and content organization framework of "Blissful Disco", we can easily trace back to some creative sources that inspired the work. Obviously, this is a video game work with a similar experience to TRPG. The full name of TRPG is Tabletop role-playing game, which is the form of RPG in its early days. According to the requirements of the specific theme rule book, participants need to first build a character file containing a large number of numerical values and background information as the embodiment in the game world, and then they will begin to explore a fantasy world based on dialogue, explanation and imagination under the guidance of the Game master.

With the rise of video games, many works in what we now call CRPG are trying to inherit the mantle of TRPG, paying special attention to absorbing charm elements such as diversified stories and extremely diverse ways to complete tasks. Affected by development costs, storage media or client performance, TRPG's endless imagination in theory will inevitably be constrained by the genre of video games. As a result, this kind of CRPG with great investment and wonderful content is often rare in the whole market.

It is gratifying that over the years, landmark CRPG masterpieces have been published intermittently, and I bet that the name of Blissful Disco is engraved on the nearest monument.

after introducing the overall situation, what I want to discuss further is the breakthrough in skill design, thinking deconstruction and the subsequent emotional atmosphere creation.

The number of points available to players in the character creation stage is very limited, and the addition of four dimensions, namely, intelligence, spirit, physique and skill, will profoundly affect the upper limit of natural growth of each skill. Specifically, the five-point spirit means that the initial level of all skills of peers is 5, and each skill can be doubled. Similarly, one point of physical strength means that the level of all skills in the bank can only be increased to 2 at most; Under this framework, it depends on the player's preference whether he prefers the "bucket-like" distribution of the mean or pursues the outstanding performance at one extreme and embraces the short board at the other.

As far as the game process is concerned, it may be effortless for the "brain school" to bump into the door, and it will be difficult for the "skill school" to pass the verification of accurate shooting. However, no matter what skill combination, the game will always give an appropriate solution. When a door is closed, several windows will be opened. From the actual experience, the speed and quantity of players acquiring new skill points are considerable. In addition, a large number of props, clothes and consumables can be found to adjust the innate value in real time, and the numerical gap can be temporarily filled with targeted items. Generally speaking, the player will not be stuck in the process because he points out a strange skill tree and does not conform to some "hidden rules", and the story will naturally continue to develop.

The 24 skills of * * * are related to the efficiency of case-solving, for example, the first line of "Logic" points to reasoning ability, the second line of "Suggestion" points to inducing the opponent's verbal skills, and the third line of "Physical Instrument" points to the body that does heavy manual work.

but at a deeper level, they actually represent 24 kinds of ideas, which are far more than the auxiliary tools for solving crimes. "conceptualism" corresponds to the developed appreciation ability of artistic works, and "Inland Empire" can multiply the sixth sense. "Electrochemistry" makes people become heavy consumers of chemical drugs, and "five senses developed" makes developed senses scan the details around them all the time ...

These skills seem to have their own personalities, and will appear in the dialog box in turn, analyzing problems and throwing out opinions from their own perspective and "professionalism". Amazingly, they are not designed to produce only positive effects, so they are not necessarily your forever good comrades-in-arms: "Eating the marrow and knowing the taste" doesn't seem to be the right guy, and it is indeed the one who is most keen on encouraging you to smoke and drink, but dependence on drugs will also bring you high-powered skills to identify them; "Logical thinking" and "Encyclopedia" are both good helpers to improve cognitive level, but the former is too high, which will hinder perceptual thinking, while the latter is too high, which may make the knowledge points that are crazy to interrupt become noise.

It seems complicated, but it's actually very easy to generalize this novel experience qualitatively: the skill system of Blissful Disco is just to simulate the thoughts that people will pop up from time to time in real life, such as the touch of stepping on the sand, a salty sea breeze, and the fingers that others unconsciously scratch. Anything we perceive may stir up waves in our minds, and then naturally bring out more psychological activities; At the same time, the composition of the spiritual world will also deeply affect our behavior. For example, people who have no empathy are inevitably outspoken, and people whose IQ drops may have difficulty in calculating simple addition and subtraction, let alone looking at the essence through complex phenomena.

A large number of texts have created a thick image of "skills", which also allows players to indulge in self-talk in "Blissful Disco". You can easily capture the obvious differences in their "personalities", and know which "voices" are respectfully speaking, which are dead rationalists who don't read air and have no feelings, and which dare to instill opinions in a tone of reprimand.

but don't worry, no matter what they say in your mind, the power to make the final decision is always in your hands, just make a choice according to your own inclination.

As mentioned earlier, the system will record the players' choices in the whole process, and these choices also represent the players' expression of their own positions to a great extent, which is not uncommon in our daily life. For example, if you often hear someone advocate free market economy, you may naturally attach the label of "liberal economist" to him, and the speaker himself may consciously or unconsciously take this label to examine the problem.

whenever the number of times a certain option is selected reaches the preset threshold, the system will show the player a kind of "Thought", that is, it is time for the loose consciousness in the player's mind to be almost twisted into a rope, and it is time for it to be formally solidified into a mature thinking mode and enshrined in the "Thought Cabinet"; As for whether to take advice and Internalize this "thinking" into one's own part, you can first consult the skills responsible for introducing this "thinking" for details, and finally the player will make the decision himself.

The internalized "thinking" will provide skill system changes that are consistent with its name and description. Usually, it is not just a simple skill addition, but it may bring some breakthrough changes, such as greatly improving or completely unlocking the growth limit of a certain skill, or directly optimizing the performance of the protagonist in a specific situation (occasionally, some negative effects will follow), but the specific impact will only be known when the player completes internalization.

obviously, the "thinking pavilion" system is an artistic interpretation of the formation process of ideas in people's minds, that is, ideas guide behavior, and behavior further solidifies ideas, and it also establishes the position that "thinking" is higher than "skills". Perhaps it is for this reason that it is very interesting that "thinking" not only affects the performance of ability, but also has a great impact on the text reading experience. For example, after you have nodded yes to the "Komism" option in the game and given a lot of support to the demands of the working class, you will have the opportunity to internalize "Matsov Socio-Economics". After the internalization, you will be exposed to more content about this political tendency, and you can skillfully use the linguistic logic belonging to "Komi people" and start to use "comrades".

This is only a small example, and it does not mean that "thinking" is the product of taking sides. There are more than 5 kinds of "thinking" waiting for the call in "Blissful Disco". Players can explore slowly in the dialogue with curiosity, and reflect on their thoughts and actions while considering whether to internalize them.

At the same time as the detective drama continues to be staged, self-questioning like this has actually been running through the process. From the beginning of the game, "playing amnesia" has been pointed out, and dialogue with you through skills and selling "thinking" to you has attracted constant attention. There are countless dialogue options that encourage you to ask yourself and the structure of the world to the end.

First of all, from the perspective of creating an excellent sense of substitution, the basic setting of "playing amnesia" can be said to be not brilliant, because the players who are new to "Blissful Disco" have almost no knowledge of the game content, and the protagonist knows nothing about himself and the world. A trick of "amnesia" can precisely unify the situation of the player and the protagonist with the cognitive basis.

zooming in on the whole industry, this practice of making players lose their memory at the beginning of the characters projected into the game is also widely adopted. There are works such as The Legend of the legend of zelda: Breath of the Wild, Fallout: New Vegas, Call of Duty: Black Ops, etc. Zhu Yu is in the forefront, and quite a few works have made the truth behind the protagonist an important part in solving puzzles, and some will leave this past as the finale. However, the description of "amnesia" in "Blissful Disco" is unique, and the derived result is not a simple question or an inflection point.

With the continuous accumulation of game experience, you will gradually realize that the protagonist is not a blank piece of paper. If you are interested in yourself, you can dig out a lot of fragmented background information from the dialogue, which can only spell out the edges and corners at most. The main body of this "self-portrait" is still left to the players to "create". Next, players can trust these pieces of information with confidence, thread points into lines with their own logic and wisdom, and form a satisfactory "answer sheet", but they can also ignore them, treat the past as a black box that they are unwilling to open, and even scribble a new chapter on it that is not bound by the past.

More importantly, in my opinion, the freedom of playing with the protagonist image in Blissful Disco can not only increase the immersion of role-playing, but the development team actually creates a sandbox for players to explore and reflect on themselves.

Players can completely decide their behavior style according to their reasonable speculation about the background of the role, and relatively, they can do what they like without scruple. But no matter what choice they make, one thing is certain, that is, players have their own considerations behind their size decisions, and they must represent certain emotions and positions. Even in the best works, many of them will stop at guiding players to produce specific emotions, but "Blissful Disco" has not stopped. Developers not only keenly capture the generation of players' emotions, but also allow players to carry out dialogue and psychological activities in depth far beyond the questioning of many competing products. In this process of constant questioning, many dialogue options listed in the game are actually capturing and amplifying the fleeting thoughts in players' hearts, leading players to the source of their own thoughts in a series of multiple-choice questions, experiencing the entanglement between different ideas and between ideas and reality, and perceiving the differences between the game world and the real world to break through imagination and gain insights.