Dwarf Fortress

[Evilfisher]

i dont get it. both dungeon keeper and dwarf fortress is awesome. also they are similar in many ways!

im surprised there haven been more games like these.. well except from minecraft

[vertinox]

Oh well - I know DK has loads of fans - but personally, that's my interest gone.
There is already a graphically superior DF anyway called "Towns".
Captnduck did a video on youtube for it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Hf7r5_zckg

Shame though. I'll wait on for "Salem" - that sounds more like my sort of game.
Or or course "Haven and Hearth" - now it's fixed and everyone can mine etc.

Scritty

Yeah I tried towns and it is pretty much Dwarf Fortress light, but it has some glaring issues like not being able to produce enough food to keep your population alive or being able to easily get more towns people in general.

Personally, I really like Dwarf Fortress but it is really hard to play and would love someone to try to make a game similar which has a decent UI and doesn't require 20 hours worth of research to play.

[scritty]

You can't say that!
If you say easy to play - people read "Dumbed Down"
If you say "better UI" people hear "All you want is graphics..."

If we make the graphics a little better we might as well call it "Battlefield Modern Warfare 3 - turn it into a first person shooter and have done with it"
If me make the UI a little more accessible you might as well strip all the gameplay out and call it "Pong" and play on your 1978 Atari 2600

With the intolerant there are only extremes. Their way and the 100% wrong way

Scritty (2000+ hours Dwarf Fortress experience - from the first Alpha release day one till the present day)

[Dotto1979]

I find it funny Dwarf Fortress players when they say they don't care about graphics. WHen I started playing DF, I was atracted by it's graphics.

[Zarine]

I find it funny Dwarf Fortress players when they say they don't care about graphics. WHen I started playing DF, I was atracted by it's graphics.

It had somehow at first the same effect on me, I was like "wow a poor graphical game, that'll be nice, I could be able to run it on my laptop without sucking all the batteries". Playing it show me otherwise...

[Thomas Kenobi]

My two cents on the matter of DF:

First let me get something out of the way. For me, DF holds amazing promise. It's inherent complexity is something I tremendously enjoy and sorely miss in today's games (PI's titles excepted). I love that there is no iron ore in DF. There's limonite, magnetite, and so on which I had to read and learn they are iron ores and could be smelted for it. I love that butchered animals don't just give meat, but a million products like various cookable organs, different bones that can be used in art and fat which can be used in soap production. I love that the textile industry has a million steps from procuring wool or fiber to getting the final product. This game delivers a unique experience that I found thoroughly entertaining. That doesn't change the fact that its interface is not just bad, but abominable.

I find it interesting that I stopped playing DF after I had learned the game. I soldiered on through the sheer, ice covered cliff that is its learning curve and I figured out how to manage a fortress with 200 dwarves, how to construct a mega-project to bring magma 50 levels up to my smelters, how to make a thriving textile industry, etc. Keeping the great wiki close at hand, I stayed with the game through all the learning process because I found that to be fun. Throughout this process I was struggling with my own ignorance of how things worked and since I love learning new things I found the process extremely entertaining. It was only when I figured how everything worked that I got bored with it and the sole reason for that was the realisation that from now on, every project I decided to undertake the greatest source of challenge would have been not the game mechanics but the interface.

Let me say something that some of those familiar with DF might find weird. DF is not an inherently hard game. It is complex, but there is nothing there that means the game has to be hard. The difficulty factor comes mostly from the interface not from the mechanics themselves. To make this clearer let me give an example. It has to do with the huge variety of ore deposits in the game, which on your first play-through will seem beyond arcane unless you are a geology student. Now imagine the game actually used a mouse and when you placed it over a magnetite deposit there was a tooltip saying something like "This is an ore of iron found in sedimentary layers. It is magma safe and may contain veins of native silver." There... Complexity of the game untouched, learning curve smoothed and you don't have to alt-tab to the wiki for this information.

I am no longer playing this game because I want to spend 90% of my time designing a massive above-land fortress and 10% of my time building it, where as it is now I have to spend 25% of my time pressing hotkeys like 'b-shift c-f' (that's to build a floor for those unfamiliar with DF), 25% of my time moving the cursor with keyboard arrows to designate construction areas and 25% of my time freeing trapped masons who didn't do a pathfinding check to their bed or something before starting to build and ended up on the wrong part of the wall.

*The above numbers are a product of a rigorous statistical study best known as 'just made them up'.

But enough about DF. This is a forum for a different game. From what I can tell, aGoD's only similarities with DF are that they are both underground-settlement construction god games. And they both have dwarves... We don't know enough about its gameplay to judge it really, but from what I've seen so far I'm intrigued and will certainly be reading the following dev diaries and keep track of its development. Another settlement building god-game is more than welcome in my book. It's a very overlooked genre.

[ZechsMerquise73]

My problem with DF is that its so hard to picture whats going on> oh, hey, there's a moving thing here and a still thing here... Gee.

[jaxpac]

I hope its like Dwarf Fortress, if it is and it has a useable UI I'll follow it until its released.

And this is why developers put something about Dwarfs in the title of their game. Everyone is hoping for a easier learning curve to play DF. But there will never be another game like DW. To recreate the amount of work that has gone into that game makes no sense for any developer. But the amount of people hoping for an easier version of DF makes it very sensible to put Dwarf in the title to get some interest.

Not that I'm being critical of doing this. A better version of DF would be awesome. But just bite the bullet and play for a couple hours. It's one of the all time legendary video games and it's really not that much harder to figure out than the first PI grand strategy game you played. After a couple hours of playing (and looking at the wiki when necessary) and you will definitely have a good grasp of the basics and you might get hooked on a great fortress.

[TezzaMM]

I had a good crack at DF and loved it, but it really is too hard on the new player (IMHO). Being a fan of DF and Dungeon Keeper I'm looking forward to this game either way.

Would have been even better if it was for Xbox as well as PS3, but I'll just have to hope my dusty old PC can run it

*Edit*
I'm downloading the Towns demo now, so thanks to the person who recommended it.

[fudd_bopo]

My two cents on the matter of DF:
...stuff...

As much as I like DF I agree with pretty much everything you mentioned here.
The biggest challenges would be figuring out what everything is and working with the interface. One of them being fun while the other. . . not so much.

[Gebhard Blucher]

As much as I like DF I agree with pretty much everything you mentioned here.
The biggest challenges would be figuring out what everything is and working with the interface. One of them being fun while the other. . . not so much.

Same here. I didn't mind the graphics but the interface was very tedious. Also, I began to get annoyed at the baroque level of detail and its effect on my computer with large fortresses. That said, DF is one of the greatest games I've ever played.

[Freshock]

I don't mind if it turns out as Dwarf Fortress, as long as the graphics isn't text based. Dwarf Fortress hurts my eyes...and brain!

[Dragula]

Ehm, there are lots and lots of graphics packs for Dwarf Fortress. Don't whine about the ASCII when there are options.

[Headjack]

I don't mind if it turns out as Dwarf Fortress, as long as the graphics isn't text based. Dwarf Fortress hurts my eyes...and brain!

Then they are both weak and un-dwarfy!

[Alex_brunius]

Ehm, there are lots and lots of graphics packs for Dwarf Fortress. Don't whine about the ASCII when there are options.

And none of them have a fully integrated interface + basic dungeon keeper "3D"...
So none of the packs really change the game the way people that whine about the graphic would like them to do.
(when I tried it last time anyways).

[Headjack]

The Stonesense graphics add isometric perspective. Or did you mean mouse support and interface buttons? That's just unlikely.

[Kalelovil]

The Stonesense graphics add isometric perspective. Or did you mean mouse support and interface buttons? That's just unlikely.

Last time I tried it Stonesense was just a visualiser rather than a game-integrated graphics pack. You couldn't interact with the game through stonesense.

The main problem I had with the graphics packs was that they made the interface text look quite bad with large and uneven spacing between letters and the occasional random symbol replacing a letter. Has that been fixed in newer versions?

[blue emu]

Awww... look what my faithful Dwarves made for me:



Microcline is a BLUE semi-precious stone, by the way... it's a Blue Emu!