I used to always try for the best outcome but with this have it seems like half of the time a failure also leads to an amazing consequence and story.
Like this from act one in the Underdark:
spoiler
I had to find a hidden gnome that could supply me with gunpowder, but she was so much on edge that she lit up the barrel of gunpowder and blew up the whole room, leaving half of my party dead. A suicide gnome bomber. I couldn’t convince her that I was not an enemy. Reloaded just to see if I could successfully do it, but much preferred the first outcome of the dice roll, so had to reload and try 6 times until I failed again. What a game!
Disco Elysium is a game about constant failures. It’s a central theme in the game. Save scumming in that game, it feels like it would lessen the impact of the story.
While I agree, DE does have a couple of moments where it breaks its own design principle of “fail forward”. Not so much when it comes to progressing the main story, but that isn’t really the point of the game anyway.
The vast majority of rolls in DE are totally fine to fail, however (and failure sometimes results in a superior outcome!).
DE IS a bit touch and go in the beginning though. Especially if you have a character without a ton of starting Morale. I lost of a good chunk of game time because I wandered into the pawn shop, realized that I had pawned my gun during a bender, and lost the game because my character just gave up on life. I had to avoid that line of discussion completely to make progress.
That’s true, and doubly so if you chose to start with a 1 in Health and/or Morale. Pretty soon you’ll have enough healing items to not care about damage to either, though.
I failed the notorious late-game Shivers check twice. Though I do sometimes wonder if I should have just savescummed it the second time, if I had, I never would have found one of the most memorable parts of the game for me (the phone call).
Yeah, that check is actually a great example of failure being a favorable outcome since that bit of content is great (I’m assuming you refer to a certain radio station).
I completely missed it on my first playthrough since I did every possible bit of side content before progressing the main story, so I had like ten bonuses to that check.