GameTech: Happy after a week of Fortnite Chapter 2

After a week of Fortnite Chapter 2, we think it’s fair to say Epic lived up to their name with the game’s ‘re-launch’. Players were introduced to the new island by seamlessly going straight from a cinematic into a live game, which was a really cool touch, and from there lots of little advancements to the interface and progression system became evident.

Still, while the new island has made people happy, some players have complained that the progression system is actually a little slower overall, making it more difficult to reach level 100 in a season. Considering the tagline to Chapter 2 was ‘More fun, less grind’, that may prove a problem for Epic. The battle pass has been improved though.

The new canal system and accompanying speedboats, plus the devolution of the game’s arsenal to basic weapons, make Chapter 2 a great starting point for new players, which was a key goal of the developer after the game had become somewhat inaccessible to beginners.

Overall, Fornite went from a literal black hole to burning brightly again, practically guaranteeing that the game will stick around another few years at least.“

WHERE’S ME JUMPER

Dancing in the disco, bumper to bumper – wait a minute, where’s me jumper?!” If you thought the Sultans of Ping attended weird discos, with their lyrics about Karl Marx taking psychedelics and the benefits of natural food, then wait until you get a load of Disco Elysium.

Disco Elysium has nothing to do with music or dance halls, or even the mythological place of death Elysium, but boy does it have some great moves. The opening steps say it all: a pitch black screen appears, in which various elements of the main character’s subconscious attempt to wake him (thus, you) from a terrible hangover.

Your ‘Ancient Reptilian Brain’ explains that ‘an inordinate amount of time passes’ as you lie on the floor, and that ‘no ex-wives are contained within it.’ Meanwhile, your ‘Limbic System’ warns you that ‘this line of questioning …will only lead to more awareness of the meat-thing’ that is your body.

You may already have detected that Disco Elysium is not an all-guns blazing, online looter shooter. In which case, your detective work is on a par with the main character, who wakes in such a stupor from his night of drinking that he has forgotten his own face. It turns out, however, that he is in fact a detective and that a murder has occurred in his town. Thus, he gets employed to solve it.

Disco Elysium is an old-school role-playing game in principle, but don’t expect combat like in Pillars of Eternity or even Planescape: Torment. This is a game almost entirely built around dialogue and exploration, closer to a point-and-click adventure than an RPG.

Still, that doesn’t mean your journey through the dream-like world of Disco Elysium isn’t full of options and choices. For a start, you can play the game as either ‘Thinker’, ‘Sensitive’ or ‘Physical’, which then affects your base statistics of intelligence, psychology, physicality and motor skills. In addition, there are 24 skills related to each statistic that affect your options in the game.

For example, drama allows you to detect lies and when people are playing things up, conceptualisation lets you imagine things beyond what is presented, authority will urge you to dominate and be aggressive, electrochemistry will give you a greater tolerance for drugs and higher libido (yikes!), the list goes on.

You can only prioritise a limited number of these skills during a single play-through, with items and clothing enhancing them in many cases, and almost every skill has both positive and negative impacts. For example,perception is a fantastic skill for the detective elements of the game, but the human mind can only take so much information.

Empathy will enable more connections with your partner detective and those around you, but it also opens the door to all the suffering in the world.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, Disco Elysium is a nutty fever dream of absolutely brilliant storytelling and detective role-playing, the likes of which we haven’t seen in years. There’s a lot of text to get through and the bizarre world won’t be for everyone, but if you starting feeling the rhythm — well, you’ll forget about your jumper altogether.