Reviews are 97% positive too. I'd guess the majority of people playing it are pre-existing fans though.
Dwarf Fortress on Steam
- Thread starter ChatMiauleur
- Start date
Yeah, I've got my eye on this one. It sounds like an unbelievably intricate, full-blown world simulation. Do any Watchers play it?
I've had a peek a few years back at the original version, but all the ascii just melts my brain.
I've had a peek a few years back at the original version, but all the ascii just melts my brain.
Yeah, I was the same. I love roguelikes but I generally, these days, only play the ones with tiles. Brogue is probably the exception to that.
Dwarf Fortress is a game that kept being mentioned, over the years, but it was near impossible to get in to. I think I just appreciated the ascii intro video, created a world and quit out after 2 minutes.
I've been pretty interested in this official tiles update, had it on the wishlist for a while. Got it, have played a few hours up to 125 mostly unhappy population, several of which are Elves.
So, where I start with DF impressions? It's a pretty daunting task - I don't envy the reviewers. The tutorial is minimal and chances are if I talk about something that's missing I may have just not found it yet. For example, trying to place down a large floor, using one type of rock, it seems like I need to individually click the same rock 100+ times. The options are "pick nearest rock" where you'll end up with a rainbow coloured floor, or "choose rock after placement". I've tried shift, alt, ctrl, +, clicking but I can't work it out. So, my review would be what a rubbish gui but I'm probably just missing something. It's like how I thought you could only pick to build 1 item or toggle infinite repeating then I read you need a Manager to make work orders. But then navigating the massive list of work orders was too much, anyway, so I just went with infinite repeat. The fanboys would probably yell at me for not getting it, yet surely it wouldn't hurt to let me queue up a few? Unfortunately, the way the game works a few would make more entries. You'd expect like "Iron Helm (2)" but you'd get "Iron Helm" then "Iron Helm" on the line below and the lines are limited to one page. Soooo, you have to use the manager to make work orders and I'm sure it works well enough if you understand it. But its still not very modern or accessible. I find navigating the gui is a constant effort. If I want to make a full set of Iron armour, I cant just go into Iron Armour and shift click them all. No, I have to do Helm then it exits the gui. Add new task, armor, iron, iron shield, back to add new task. That's a lot of clicks. Then If I want to make a set for my whole squad I can go work out how to save a work order or leave it on infinite loop. If I run out of resources it will remove the loop at the craft station.
Clearly, it's still pretty brain-melting. Sort of tedious. I have very little idea what I'm doing. However, basic survival and population growth hasn't really been any problem. Marking tiles to be dug, trees to be chopped and plants to gather is nice and simple. Placing a stockpile is easy enough, too. Though it's grown to be massive. Hang on, let me get a screenshot.
There you go. That's my brain-melting first base. Well, a fair amount of it. There's some nicer rooms for the officers below there who require lots of things to be content, like their own dining room and tomb and study, etc. Gotta build your Mayor a little mansion.
People keep falling in the water from above, drowning and making ghosts that scare the children to death. There's some damn invisible agitated parrot messing with stuff that I can't work out how to find/kill. I feel like the parrot might be bugged.
I don't know. Is the game really all that? Probably not. But its convoluted enough that finding the truth is hard. I'm sure there's more to find. There's a big world with a history that, so far, has been totally irrelevant. Other than a few visitors nothing exciting has really happened. No cool events. Yet? I'm going to dig down and try to find some magma so I can make better coal to make better armor. Maybe if I dig too deep I'll find a Balrog.
I keep thinking about KeeperRL while playing. I feel like it does everything DF does just in a much better designed way that doesn't require a wiki with a flowchart. At the same time, maybe once I take 200 hours to learn to navigate the shit gui, DF will have loads of cool events to uncover. That's sort of "benefit of the doubt" territory, though. I mean, I'm sure I haven't seen it all.... But if it's all random maybe the events are few and just mixed up. Get attacked by demon bears or by undead turtles. Maybe a dwarf child grows attached to a demon bear and gets adopted and runs off. Like, KeeperRL has cool prefab rooms to dig up and they're marked with a ? on the minimap so as not to waste your time. Are there similar rooms to dig up in DF? I just don't know, yet. Perhaps I'm just a few Z-levels off digging up an ancient city or maybe there's nothing?
Either way, I won't give up, just yet. It does seem like more hassle to play than it's worth. There are other colony sims like Rimworld where I could play pretty much the same thing with less effort. But there must be a reason that people can play it for years and years and still rush to post Steam reviews before even playing the new version. I hope there's more to it than the unnecessary amount of details on creatures character sheet. I mean, does it really add much to a game to have 100 types of wood instead of just wood? I don't think so. Just have wood and let you dye it. Just have stone. Then, like in KeeperRL, have a few tiers of ores to make better armor. Like, what would Starcraft gain from having 50 types of Vespine Gas? In DF there seems to be no way to tell the difference between armor made with different ore types and there's loads of them.
Needlessly complicated!
Edit: Just one more thing about the character sheets. All these little unmet wants, I have no idea how to address them. They want to see more of their family or more time to be creative. It's like, fine, just do it. If it stops you going insane and killing people I'm fine with it. Go be autonomous! Just about the only one that has a clear goal is when they don't have a place to pray to one of the many gods so clearly I need to build a bunch of temples to the various gods, since often they'll want to pray to 4 or 5. But it's just not high on the list of things I want to do. I want more exploration and discovery! What's with this huge world? Isn't there stuff to find, isn't there dungeons and treasure? I really don't care about these little details.
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Yeah, KeeperRL is very fun.
You can even swap it to turn based mode and control your whole squad like a tactics game. Can play it a bit like a roguelike and head out raiding easy enemy towns with just your Keeper and focus less on the base building side.
Also a good one for those who liked Dungeon Keeper.
I mean.... Dwarf Fortress... 97% on Steam... 100 clicks to place a 10x10 floor? That's just rubbish design. Please someone correct me and tell me I'm doing it wrong!
You can even swap it to turn based mode and control your whole squad like a tactics game. Can play it a bit like a roguelike and head out raiding easy enemy towns with just your Keeper and focus less on the base building side.
Also a good one for those who liked Dungeon Keeper.
I mean.... Dwarf Fortress... 97% on Steam... 100 clicks to place a 10x10 floor? That's just rubbish design. Please someone correct me and tell me I'm doing it wrong!
Yeah, look... The cat story, it's a fun story. But the most important point is that the user who made the bug report had no idea what was going on. All this stuff, simulating eyelids and blood alcohol content and whatever else was invisible to the bug reporter. I certainly had no idea any of these things were in the game.
It just really isn't well designed as a game. It's an eccentric simulation that I'd say was created just for fun where the developers just keep adding more and more and it doesn't really matter to them how readable it is to players because they know what's happening. "Years of spaghetti code held together with autism", as one user colourfully described it.
Once you get get over 100 population the game starts heading into what the players call "FPS Death" and it starts to run quite poorly. It actually stops registering mouse clicks properly while unpaused so paused becomes how you spend most of your time. You could spend hours paused building temples to all of the maybe 50 gods or making guilds for a similar number of factions. You unpause it for a moment and gather a bunch of alert icons, then pause for another hour to address all these chores.
I do admire it as a cool project from a couple of guys. If they were friends of mine and showed me it I'd tell them it was awesome, because, in a way, it is. But as a $45 game, I just don't know. I feel like they could do a better job making a Dwarf Fortress 2 from the ground up. Keeping the important things people will actually notice and removing all the confusing bloat that makes the game so unique.
They have fixed my issue with selecting a single material type for the floor, so it wasn't just me not being able to figure it out. But that feeling of not knowing whether it's just you or not isn't a good one. I feel like if the game were well designed that wouldn't happen.
Is it a genius game? Well, to quote that Bond movie, "The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success". I suppose it evidently is genius. But, it's also undoubtedly insane.
It just really isn't well designed as a game. It's an eccentric simulation that I'd say was created just for fun where the developers just keep adding more and more and it doesn't really matter to them how readable it is to players because they know what's happening. "Years of spaghetti code held together with autism", as one user colourfully described it.
Once you get get over 100 population the game starts heading into what the players call "FPS Death" and it starts to run quite poorly. It actually stops registering mouse clicks properly while unpaused so paused becomes how you spend most of your time. You could spend hours paused building temples to all of the maybe 50 gods or making guilds for a similar number of factions. You unpause it for a moment and gather a bunch of alert icons, then pause for another hour to address all these chores.
I do admire it as a cool project from a couple of guys. If they were friends of mine and showed me it I'd tell them it was awesome, because, in a way, it is. But as a $45 game, I just don't know. I feel like they could do a better job making a Dwarf Fortress 2 from the ground up. Keeping the important things people will actually notice and removing all the confusing bloat that makes the game so unique.
They have fixed my issue with selecting a single material type for the floor, so it wasn't just me not being able to figure it out. But that feeling of not knowing whether it's just you or not isn't a good one. I feel like if the game were well designed that wouldn't happen.
Is it a genius game? Well, to quote that Bond movie, "The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success". I suppose it evidently is genius. But, it's also undoubtedly insane.
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