I wish nothing but success to Tarn and Zach, it’s great that releasing on Steam and adding a friendlier UI helped the game reach new audiences. It’s the proverbial time black hole.
The menus and lack of native ui controls for some things (dfhack) were by far the biggest problem, not the ascii. I get that the ascii is noisy and a matter of taste - not disputing that - but there were much bigger UX problems.
Steam version is much worse than the fan UI options that were already available, sadly. Its also why I explain why DF really failed to take off after the Steam release. It's nowhere near the best, or even best looking, way to play the game.
I pretty strongly disagree. I can see some preferring some fan art style over the official one, even if I don't. But the official gui having support for rendering all the various critters, and factoring in clothing, multi-level, etc, really made the Steam version's graphics vastly better than anything else that was available at the time.
Qud is a gem of a game, same publisher too! I get what you are saying, and it's use of ASCII plus ASCII-like graphics makes the experience a lot friendlier imo.
In a documentary about them putting Dwarf Fortress on Steam Tarn talked about how he had to split the $7 million first payment from Steam with his brother and it turned out the easiest way was to just use the bank app.
I’ve never received $7M but a few times I’ve handled large sums (when buying a house and previous startup exit) and it felt so weird to be how completely normal it was. Like just… oh yeah go ahead and write a cheque for six figures. Or do an e-transfer into your chequing account for six figures. It felt like… no there has to be a whole special world for large sums, no?
I'm sure there is special handling for large sums... but six figures isn't it. Businesses routinely write checks for half a million dollars, two million dollars... it's perfectly normal to see such amounts within the banking world. There might be some extra scrutiny on the back end that you don't see, but since it's well within the realm of normal operations that the bank sees happen every day, it's nothing special.
Now, eight or nine figures, that's probably going to pass the threshold for special attention. As in, you might be required to go to the bank in person with photo ID in order to authorize the transaction, that sort of thing. But under 10 million U.S. dollars? Many businesses will handle those amounts monthly, and the bank is used to seeing them.
It depends on the part of the system you are talking about. Under the covers, many a system will send reports higher up for 5 figure transfers, just for money laundering detection. And there will be all kinds of things blaring for anomaly detection. It's not the same if an account that normally moves large sums, and has been cleared and "explained lol moves a large amount than if it's one making nothing. See, for instance, how Notch's PayPal account was flagged when suddenly the game started to do great sales. So the special attention will vary, and there might be a human involved at some point even if they don't call you.
Oh, sure. What's normal for the bank sure isn't normal for most individuals. I see that someone misread my comment to the point of writing a presumably-angry message that got flagged (so I'm only guessing what it contained), so I wanted to clarify: that sure isn't the daily, or weekly, experience for most people. It's just the bank that sees such sums all the time.
And someone else correctly pointed out that there might indeed be extra scrutiny on such transactions, at a level you might not always see, e.g. when Notch suddenly started receiving tons of money from Minecraft sales, PayPal flagged the account for special attention. But then they figured out it was legitimate, and allowed the money to go through. Personally, having been on the receiving end of credit card fraud (which I caught early enough that the bank refunded me the two fraudulent transactions, a total of $300), I'm glad that "this looks funny" gets flagged. It causes me more inconvenience than it has saved me money: every time I try to buy airline tickets back home (I live and work overseas) it's a large enough transaction that it gets flagged, and I have to call the bank and say "Yes, that large purchase on (airline) is legit, please let it through next time when I try again". But it saves me from being on the hook for $2,500 if someone were to get hold of my CC number again.
Banking regulation varies from country to country, where I'm from a regular personal account isn't usually allowed to directly transfer more than a few tens of thousands of dollars per month. Anything beyond that is handled by the bank itself. Business accounts work differently.
I'm certain receiving a lump six figure sum on my personal account would trigger a review, if only because the taxman wants to know about it.
Backend-wise, it's just different sets of flags. The infrastructure is the same.
In Spain, if you try to casually use your bank app to transfer a big amount, you hit a limit. If you need to do that, you can go to a bank office or do a phone call, tell them, and they will temporarily lift the limit, and then yes, you can just go to your regular everyday app and type the large amount and it will work. Doesn't it work like that where you are?
Reminds me of when a guy earned like a million off of cryptocurrency, but the cash was in a foreign account (the exchange, I presume). He couldn't just transfer it to his own account because the bank had issues with it. He opened a new account with another bank that had no issue accepting it, and transferred it from there to his main bank which suddenly also had no problem with it lol.
I think generally speaking, there's two systems; the one is a scam / self protection system that disallows large transfers but the user can disable it themselves, the other is something that works after the fact that looks for things like money laundering and tax evasion, but these processes run nightly, yearly, or maybe even once a year. I'm half expecting a tax bill for some unreported crypto assets abroad, half because it's only a few hundred worth.
In the US there is ACH transfers which are free and slow and reversible and wire transfers which are expensive and fast and normally irreversible. Fednow is a new fast payment system.
At that point, there's an IB team handling the deal, an LLC holding the money, and probably several banks holding its accounts. Few banks are happy to handle that kind of concentration in a retail sight account.
Money should never be stored using floating point variables. That is why the Decimal type exists and why IBM Mainframes have hardware acceleration for binary coded decimal math.
I'm guessing at those sizes the bank holding that much of your stuff becomes a risk for them so they have someone you can talk to directly to smooth over any potential problems
Yeah I love all their Arkane stuff, and the two Half Life docs they did under their whitelabel company Secret Tape company for Valve. And of course the big Disco Elysium series.
It is actually their 10th anniversary in September, so if you like their work I would highly recommend their patreon to make sure they can do another 10 years.
Their discord is actually one of my favourite places on the internet to talk about games because everyone in there has such great taste and is knowledgeable about the actual production process of games.
They also have a second channel/patreon now called noclip_2 which is focused on underground/indie games which has been a constant source of joy for me, all the best games I've played in the past year I've discovered via their videos or their discord.
Just great vibes all around.
Edit: almost forgot, they are also running a project to digitize old videogame tapes so if you want to see old interviews with carmack or footage from E3 in really nice quality they have a YouTube channel for that too
Dwarf Fortress's Steam UI is by far, my least favorite thing about the game. Does anyone else agree?
After playing with the Lazy Newb's Pack and other similar tools for years, I found the Steam version to be a maaaaasive downgrade. The mouse was tied to the framerate, everything felt sluggish and hard to control.
It really irks me because I had been telling everyone for years to play this game, and finally it gets an "official" release and I found it to be... the worst version of the game I'd tried yet.
Maybe its improved since I last tried it. But it would be hard to outdo what the fans had done with the UI, IMO. Even features like seasonal color schemes felt almost vital to me. Not to mention customizing your own preferred sprites...
I almost wish Tarn and Zach had kept to building core gameplay and let the fans handle the UI, with some sort of official team-up to bring it to Steam.
I'd recommended Lazy Newb Pack to almost anyone but I don't think I'd recommend the Steam version, at least the version I tried.
I also experienced performance issues when it came out on Steam, but that seems to be resolved now, and they've fixed a huge number of bugs related to things like squads, crossbows, etc. I'd give it another shot.
Has anything changed where the original version of the game no longer receives updates? I understood that the whole reason for the initial release of the steam version was to get more people exposed to the game and to allow the creators to actually start making money from their efforts.
If anything, I would recommend purchasing the steam version to support the creators. Continue to play the game any way that you like afterward.
The free version got it's entire UI changed, matching the Steam version, just with ASCII graphics. Obviously you can still play old versions, but if you want to play with all the new features, you can't go full keyboard anymore.
I actually think this type of suggestion/thinking is not good for the game. the mystique of dwarf fortress is that it's a game that plays in your imagination, not on the screen. the point of the ascii visuals is to give a player enough context to understand the state of the world, but it's intentionally obtuse so fun arrises from your brain having to color in all the details. any suggestion that tries to add more polish to the graphics brings you farther away from where the fun lives
Going to have to agree to disagree here. Graphical polish would make it much more enjoyable for me, and I spent enough time with the ascii version back in the day to get used to it.
Granted I haven't played the steam version in awhile, I didn't have a ton of issues with it, and the non-steam version was just not for me.
Additionally, I believe they hired another dev who was cleaning up a lot of things, so maybe better now?
I had the muscle memory for the full keyboard control on pre-steam releases and the loss of some complete keyboard controls and things just changing made it so I never really got into the Steam release, which was pretty disappointing. I get it though.
I'm in a similar, but less extreme boat. The new interface has its perks, especially in terms of discoverability, but for tasks that need to be done repeatedly (request 10 beds be made before you have a manager, for example), you really miss the ability to rock some chords.
It took me some time to remap the muscle memory but it felt so worth it. The Steam version is not just a new AI, it introduced a lot of gameplay changes which really improved the underlying systems a lot.
The version available for free on their website is the same exact program as the one you purchase on Steam. It simply includes a different set of graphics for the UI. These graphics are designed to look as if they are made up of text characters, but in reality they are still just sprites. The sprites that come with the version you buy from Steam are designed to look like a normal but stylized gui.
“Friendlier” and still one of the worst UIs available. It’s nearly impenetrable and the game has no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players, and is probably the most overrated game I’ve ever had the displeasure of playing.
I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun. The promise of dwarf fortress is far more interesting than the actual gameplay.
EDIT: To people who are rebutting this by saying “it’s just not for you” - that’s entirely my point. Few people enjoy it. I am the majority opinion here.
Minecraft was very fun and was selling like hotcakes when it had "no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players". Even nowadays there's no tutorial as far as I know and much of how to play is left to discovery. The achievements tree is a bit of a guide, just by telling you some of the things that are possible, but it sure doesn't tell you how to do anything.
I think having an official tutorial or an on-ramp for new players is not a requirement for a good game. In a broader sense of the word "game", a game is separate from a tutorial, so a good game can exist without a tutorial. Chess has no official tutorial or on ramp for new players, and yet it's widely considered to be one of the greatest games.
How would you suggest someone make a good tutorial for DF that doesn't leave the player exhausted by the time they start a new game?
That's my core complaint w/ strategy games. By the time I'm done with the tutorial i have to do other things only to forget everything I learned the next time I get to sit down with it.
At best "hints" or a glossary/help menu is the best way imo.
Several people have given the opinion in this thread that DF is basically immune to having a tutorial; I am trying to figure out why. I don't see a tutorial as an end-to-end blueprint of everything the game is capable of. It's just a series of info, hints, and follow-along instructions, possibly with railroaded / simplified UI. I mean, the first time I booted up DF with no context circa 2013, it took me a few minutes to figure out that we're seeing a top-down view. I certainly would have appreciated a hint or a tutorial (though I do not necessarily fault the game for not having one; it's _not_ a game that is aimed at onboarding heaps of fresh newbies by the truckload each week).
Regardless of the difference in complexity, I think the fact that it became the bestselling videogame of all time despite the fact that it essentially "has no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players" makes it a valid example for showing why tutorials and on-ramps for new players are not as important as the comment I replied to made it sound.
If you disagree, I'd like to hear your thoughts on where you think the threshold in complexity is when games should start including a tutorial and/or on-ramps for new players.
I don't know where the threshold is, but the comparison lacks in the same way that a coloring book doesn't need a tutorial, but a blank paper that has HANGMAN written on it does need one or people don't know how to play it.
You can't say because minecraft doesn't have a tutorial, dwarf fortress doesn't need one either. That's just retarded
Minecraft's early game is relatively boring. Empty busywork like punching trees, village raids and strip mining are vestigial gameplay loops that neither Mojang nor Microsoft had the confidence to fix.
I'd agree that they're a bad comparison though. Despite Notch's inspiration from DF, Minecraft has worse bosses, biomes, trading, mining, diplomacy, cooking, innkeeping and NPCs.
I had a good number of hours in Minecraft Classic's browser version, mostly in online servers though. Solo wasn't much fun.
Modern Minecraft is still not much of an appeal to me without mods. I'm happy to see more block games like Vintage Story push the medium forward while Microsoft... wraps up post-production on A Minecraft Movie: Squared, I guess?
It also has effectively zero physics. I still remember being annoyed at how water worked in Minecraft when playing with my kid, and the fact that trees don't collapse if you cut 'em down.
Yeah, I think this actually supports the idea that Dwarf Fortress is needlessly bad at onboarding players. Every time I try to get into it, I end up confused by why people enjoy it and unable to figure out how to play it. Whereas with Minecraft, exploring how to play it was actually fun, with Dwarf Fortress, it felt frustrating and unnecessarily obscure.
That's because the UX/UI is utterly awful. It's cargo cult: the game. (And BTW my complaints have nothing to do with the controls. The actual UX is just... not thought out at all).
It depends, for me it is boring and has pretty dim graphics. I wanted to love it, but it is not fun. It looks like a Sims game, it lacks what e.g. factorio has, that "spark".
DF sounds like it might have that "spark", but I'm afraid to touch it.
Even though I'm a big fan of the game and have been playing it for over a decade now, "fun and engaging from minute zero" is not how I'd describe it. I've seen a number of people (both kids and adults) become frustrated with it almost immediately, and that's with someone experienced nearby to answer questions and let them know what they can do. Without such guidance, they'd definitely have quit and never played it again.
> Few people enjoy it. I am the majority opinion here.
The majority of people do not play videogames.
The majority of those do not play any roguelikes.
Citing the majority is completely useless.
Furthermore I'm not convinced you can make a tutorial for Dwarf Fortress.
There's too much complexity, too many edge-cases that you end up needing to know.
Most people seem to burn out if fed too much info at once.
> I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun.
On my Steam friends-list I have 14 friends who have purchased the game.
The top three by play-time are at 314, 267, and 67 hours.
The remaining 7 with playtime average 22 hours, the other 5 have it in their backlog.
That to me is some excellent playtime.
Not Lethal Company numbers or anything, but that game didn't have a release before steam either.
The tutorial is the wiki. I used to play Dwarf Fortress back in the 2008-2009 era, and I kept going back to the wiki when I needed to learn something. It was, and still is, comprehensive, containing not just a "getting started for beginners" tutorial page, but also a list of every building and workflow (from ore to metal to swords and armor, from seeds to plants to food and drink...). In-game tutorials are not the only way to learn about a game; a well-maintained wiki (that isn't on wikia, oops sorry they're called fandom dot com there days — but that's a whole other rant) is also an excellent resource. And certain types of games seem to lend themselves to having well-maintained wikis: Dwarf Fortress's wiki is perhaps the best I've ever seen, narrowly beating Minecraft's also-excellent wiki.
It’s the games job to create an on ramp to understanding. It’s not mine to spend 200 hours grasping every concept before I can play “the real game”, that’s just shitty game design.
This depends largely on your expectation for what a 'game' should be.
Puzzle boxes, for example, have zero on ramp, and yet many many people enjoy them, enjoy the struggle of discovery.
Arguably the edges of mathematics and science are inhabited by similar people, living where the rules are ill defined, where there is much to be discovered rather than pre-digested and spoon fed.
I have little patience for games that don't spoon feed, so I get where you're coming from. I watched my brother play DF and decided I didn't want to spend my time like that, trying to parse ascii, trying to figure out how all the things interacted.
I found exactly the discovery fulfilling in Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld and Minecraft. Once I mastered those (well, maybe it is fairer to say "once I plateaued", there are way more skilled players than me) I found much less interest in them. Sure, I still play occasionally for a bit after a big update drops, but that is pretty much it. Oh and yeah, puzzle focused games (as long as it isn't slide puzzles) are great too. I fondly remember Myst, Monkey Island and other puzzle games like that.
Some people like games where you need to grind (idle clicker games seem to be purest/insanest form of that), and that is something I don't get at all. It is just pointless busywork, just like those repetitive achievements ("kill N enemies with X style attacks") or collectables. (Achievements that are on the form "find this hidden thing" or "do this out of the box thing once" I do understand more.)
>It’s the games job to create an on ramp to understanding.
No, it is a games job to be entertaining for those it was designed to entertain.
>It’s not mine to spend 200 hours grasping every concept before I can play “the real game”, that’s just shitty game design.
Certainly there are many people who take a longer time to learn and grasp concepts and find challenging tasks something to be avoided, and this game isn't for you! That doesn't mean that every game should be designed so that the lowest commoner denominator can understand and enjoy the game! Some people not only enjoy being challenged by complex games, but seek those out those challenges and that complexity. The game market is flooded with easy to learn and easy to win games designed and made for simpletons, so there's no reason for you to complain about the rare game (these days) that deviates from that.
>It’s the games job to create an on ramp to understanding.
Its the games job to present their unique style of fun to the market, and let the market sort it out. A game made by 2 blokes has to have a set of priorities, and their priority has always been the simulation.
>It’s not mine to spend 200 hours grasping every concept before I can play “the real game”
I mean, ignore Dwarf Fortress for a minute, this is exactly what Paradox has built its little empire on. I was at 300+ hours of Crusader Kings 2 and had only a sort of intuitive grasp of most of the games systems. And at the time, most of the safer european powers were at risk of just getting rolled off the map by the golden horde mid game, and the work arounds for that were quite insane. I still dont reckon I have the war/conflict systems mastered. Paradox does tutorials, they just suck immensely and you end up on the forums or wikis anyway.
Dwarf fortress has managed to create a game with that kind of skill curve with 0.0001% of the resources.
>that’s just shitty game design.
I feel sorry for you, I get the impression that this hostility is coming from a place where you really wish you could share in these fantastic games but haven't quite got the gumption to stick with them. I get it I really do, I mod Battle Brothers to make it easier, because I love the texture of the game but I haven't been able to master the combat or save scumming required to play at a real difficulty.
If you have a steady food supply and you can hold off a military attack you're playing "the real game". A handful of hours can get you there, and you'll be learning plenty fast.
No, that’s not a game’s job. You will not enjoy every game. Those games that you did not enjoy are not necessarily failures. They are simply games that _you_ did not enjoy.
Sure, that's not what I'm saying though. It's the job of the game to be fun in general, not in specific to some individual, and one of those ways is to have a good onboarding experience. People saying DF is fun are having fun despite its terrible onboarding, not because of it; in other words, cope.
I remember the "onboarding experience" essentially being losing over and over again and learning from my mistakes, getting a little further or trying a new approach altogether on each new attempt. Maybe it's an acquired taste but by the time I started playing Dwarf Fortress, I was not only already used to that, but thoroughly enjoying it as a core mechanic of games like Rogue, NetHack and Ancient Domains of Mystery.
I don't believe in the concept of "fun in general" in the sense you imply here. I've played very successful games that have evidently achieved popular appeal but that nonetheless turn me off because they're the absolute opposite of Dwarf Fortress: carefully manufactured designs of intentional experiences that you are guided through at every step. Some people really like that, some will want to be thrown in the wilderness with no clue, some want something in-between. Different strokes for different folks.
Some games are not fun to anyone, that is what I'm talking about for fun in generality. Games must be fun for someone, at least some number of people, to be called a good game. Some games get there with a good onboarding and some do it despite that as I said.
Sure, maybe someone may enjoy Dwarf Fortress despite that, but as I recalled from my own experience, it wasn't despite it that I enjoyed getting into Dwarf Fortress, but in large part because of it.
So are you wrong in saying generally that it's "despite its terrible onboarding, not because of it", or am I coping by lying? Mind you, Dwarf Fortress is preceded by a whole genre of more traditional Rogue-like games that made losing hundreds or thousands of times for a lack of knowledge of the games' systems before you figured them out a fundamental part of their appeal, so I'm not exactly alone in this.
No, no. If you cannot figure out a game then it won’t be fun, and you won’t enjoy it. But other people _will_ figure it out, and will enjoy it. And many of them will enjoy it more _because_ it was challenging to figure out and to do well at. It’s ok to write an approachable game, but not all games must be approachable.
They should be approachable to have the maximum number of people be able to enjoy them and even cynically increase sales. That some people find them fun despite the lack of approachability is just that, cope.
Plenty of players have fun with the game, regardless of your personal opinions on the "on-boarding experience".
I think you want this game to be something it's not. It's not a casual game for casual gamers. It's a game whose mantra is literally "losing is fun". It's esoteric menus and attention to detail are the result of decades of work by a couple of guys that just wanted to make the game they and their fans wanted to make.
It's imperfections are part of it's charm and if that turns you off from the game then it's not for you and that's OK.
I play Dwarf Fortress quite a bit. It does not stop me seeing the flaws in it. It is not perfect so I'm not sure why people act like it is, they're just coping that it doesn't have a good onboarding experience and once Tarn adds it (as he's always been doing), suddenly gamers will act as if that's what was missing all this time. It's a sense of hypocrisy I've not seen elsewhere.
> It does not stop me seeing the flaws in it. It is not perfect so I'm not sure why people act like it is
You're being way too dismissive of people that think the onboarding is reasonable. They can disagree with that without being blinded and thinking the game is flawless.
Because it’s not a complete or compelling experience if the systems aren’t naturally exposed and taught over time in a progressive manner. This has been a cornerstone of good game design for over 30 years.
>This has been a cornerstone of good game design for over 30 years.
First, this is completely wrong. There are many good games that have been designed over the last 30 years that didn't assume you were an invalid and needed your hand hand held every step of the way.
Second, many of us (including myself) have been playing computer games for ~50 years! In the 80s and 90s the average game was far more difficult than even the most difficult games put out today. It wasn't assumed that everyone, or even most people, were ever going to beat the game. There were games I played for hundreds of hours back then, and enjoyed greatly, that I never finished or even mastered all the complexities of! That didn't make it any less fun. I want to be challenged by a game. If I load up a game and am spoon-fed everything it isn't a game I play for long.
There are plenty of good or even great games that dont give a shit about "good game design". And developing in the direction of "good game design" is sort of like Carcinization, AAA games have been tending towards a single unified structure. Its great for mass media but its terrible for art.
I learned Dwarf Fort through a mate of mine. We both played separately, and we would have phone calls discussing how we were able to achieve x or y outcome. Eventually we determined an ideal set of bootstraps to achieve a plateau of semi functional Dwarf society.
And then they dropped the dwarf economy update, and everything went to shit and we got to relearn how to pick ourselves up all over again.
Then Bees, then Taverns and Travellers. Then Danger Rooms started causing more serious wounds.
You are welcome to limit yourself to AAA games and yellow paint but thats you deciding to artificially limit what experiences you participate in. It doesnt cast a single shadow on people tooling around and experiencing the art of games.
I wouldn't consider that a universal feature. It can certainly help, especially if you are aiming for a generalized audience, but not every game needs to be either intended for or accessible to every person.
I would use Crusader Kings as an example, it doesn't even seem like a game at first, you have no idea what is going on, and large swaths of options and features may take dozens of hours to stumble across. But yet it is still a great game with many fans and players.
> it doesn't even seem like a game at first, you have no idea what is going on, and large swaths of options and features may take dozens of hours to stumble across
For me personally, figuring these things out was the most fun I got out of such games. I had an absolute blast loading CK2 without a tutorial and spending the next several hours trying to figure out what is all this nonsense about. Same with DF btw, once I figured out the idea, mechanics, control, and played for some hours to learn to build a somewhat sustainable fortress, it kinda stopped being fun.
Eh, I definitely can't agree with this one. Some of the most beloved games of all time had effectively no on-ramp of any kind - especially if you're willing to go back 30 years - and none of the fans of those games would say "they are not compelling experiences" because of a learning cliff.
Religiously subscribing to every "cornerstone of great game design" is how you end up with the plain oatmeal of videogames. Inoffensive, bland, and easily forgotten.
I, for one, hate games spoonfeeding me. Most games are unlikely to be a player's first videogame. I don't need every damn mechanic tutorialized. Present me with my toolbox, and let me get to it.
No great game is enjoyed by everyone. Your options when making a work, of any kind, are to either A) make something utterly inoffensive to the point that no one will have strong opinions about it at all or B) make a game that some people will love and others will bounce off of.
Dwarf Fortress is solidly in category B. It's a sandbox game, which already selects for people capable of making their own fun with a toy, while alienating those who want more concrete goals. It's a simulation game, which selects for people who enjoy the thrill of experiencing something that nobody else has before, while alienating those who prefer a crafted narrative. And it's got a lot of fiddly little systems, that offer just a little bit of reward for mastering, which selects for people who like figuring stuff out, whether through experimentation, external resources, or a combination of both, and filters those who just want all their options presented to them in a streamlined experience.
If a player meets all those selection criteria, they'll likely find Dwarf Fortress one of the most fun games they've ever played. They'll marvel at all the intricate details, and invent explanations for things that are (probably) random, like imagining the master engraver who keeps carving masterwork depictions of that one time he single-handily defeated a forgotten beast all over the captain of the guards' bedroom as being petty as hell.
If a player gets filtered, then they'll bounce off the game, and because they haven't engaged with all its fiddly details, feel like the game is just boring.
I can't speak on the Steam version, but the UI was perfectly fine in the ASCII version. The worst thing that I remember was how things were categorized. IE it was something like (b)uildings, (q)ueries, (d)esignations and whatever (i) was, got weirdly split apart. I forget the exact nature of it because it's been so long since I last played. But that seemed more a quirk of the game's spaghetti code ontological structure, because these things did have genuinely different behaviors despite being conceptually similar. That's a problem at a deeper layer than the UI/UX.
The only other thing I can think of is the labor menu was kind of annoying for large fortresses.
They fixed all that. Go give the free version another try; it has the updated UI but not the new sprites so it feels a lot like playing the older versions of the game but with more polish.
I used to play it, and for me, I think it scratched the same creative itch that Minecraft does in other folks. Building grand designs, etc. But in Minecraft, I'd have to place it block by block, and the physics... well, they're just absent. DF is like Minecraft, but with Lemmings, and a full physics system.
I still remember some of those designs, and I can see them clearly in my mind - not as the game represented them, but as the dwarves would have seen them. A grand underground bridge, with water flowing alongside it, before spiraling down into the main hall - where the wagons would enter the marketplace, and the dwarves would pass through the mist generated by the waterfall (forgotten beast got 'em all.) A giant vertical chain, build out of stone, standing as a monument to the grand fortress that sprawls underneath it (half-completed, as the fortress succumbed to madness.) A fortress built into a volcano, underneath the open sky, with the forges powered by magma, and a small river diversion creating endless obsidian (fucking birds kept swooping down and either eating my dwarves, or knocking them into the volcano, because I couldn't build the roof fast enough.)
I keep wanting to go back in, and I should - but I'd literally have to dig out the `cheatsheet.txt` file I had to keep on my desktop while playing, PLUS I'd have to figure out if I still needed the third party app that makes managing dwarven jobs reasonable, because in-game it's a fucking nightmare - and whether that app even exists for OS X, because I think it was a Windows-only thing that would interact with the game by directly reading RAM.
FYI, the newer versions with their mouse-driven interface solve a lot of those issues. Dwarf Therapist (the RAM reading tool you were thinking of) isn't needed any more, because there are much better in-game tools for managing what kinds of work certain dwarves do. The new menu layouts are a lot more discoverable, allowing you to find most things with just a little bit of clicking around (and the descriptions of stuff are a lot better now, so no more googling "what the heck is a quern?"). I miss the old keyboard controls sometimes, but they're gradually adding them back in the form of shortcuts. DFHack is still around, and basically necessary for automating some of the more fiddly resource chains (stuff like, "request 50 trees get cut down out of this patch of forest if our number of logs gets below 200").
I hadn't played in like 10 years when I picked up the Steam release, and I found it pretty easy to get back into.
You may prefer a game like 'Going Medieval' which is a similar concept to Dwarf Fortress but is heavily simplified, almost as though someone played Dwarf Fortress then decided to make a version for their kids.
As someone whose spent ~5k hours playing DF you are right, every person I have ever talked to about it has liked the idea and like 1/50 has gone on to play it for >10 hours.
The point of DF, to a large extent, is precise control and detail. It's the opposite of the approach taken by AI games that want to generalise based on simple prompts.
I would pose that's a matter of holding it wrong. Like, integrating generative AI as a prompt to an API endpoint exposed to the user is one of the worst, most naive and bland ways to use it as a game subsystem that I can think of.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of problems with trying to use generative AI as a subsystem for a game, problems which exist at a conceptual level. But all the games I've seen that integrate AI as a subsystem don't even come remotely close to hitting that ceiling. I think it's ultimately up to the fact that an interesting usage of generative AI requires a level of technical competency and theory that's well beyond that of the layman. The people making games that utilize AI generally seem to lack the chops to make a good game or do interesting things with AI. The people with the chops and manhours to make a good game with AI:
- Don't want the backlash of having a generative model in their game, because no matter the context that's a lot of very bad press for something that's very difficult and time consuming to implement.
- See the immediate problems and difficulty that arise from a decently integrated concept and execution, and even without the bad press, understand that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. That it's always going to be an immensely stupid gimmick in the end, one that's trying way too hard.
That won't stop us from having 10,000 pieces of shovelware getting churned out that have the worst, most uninspired integrations imaginable mind you. We clearly already have those. For those that could do something better with the tech, there's too many good reasons to not touch it.
> The point of DF, to a large extent, is precise control and detail.
I don't know, it's basically Minecraft with Lemmings. You control a lot, but at the end, the AI comparison might be somewhat apt - you tell the dwarves what to do, and they mostly do it. When they're not struck by a strange mood, or when they're not too depressed to work, or when they're not being eaten by a Forgotten Beast (beware its deadly dust!)
