“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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
As soon as I bought Minecraft I opened the Wiki and used that to figure out how to craft stuff.<p>It was the first mainstream Wiki-based game. Now, every game does it that way.
You cannot be serious! That comparison is a joke. There's worlds between the complexity of Minecraft and DF.
Unlike dwarf fortress, minecraft is fun and engaging from minute zero, and exposes its systems to you naturally over time. Terrible comparison.
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.
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.<p>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.
It depends what you mean by "early game." The first night cycle happens within minutes of starting and it's very interesting.
Back in my day, villages weren't even in the game.
My highschool classmates and I still found something compelling about it.
I had a good number of hours in Minecraft Classic's browser version, mostly in online servers though. Solo wasn't much fun.<p>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 <i>A Minecraft Movie: Squared</i>, 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.<p>(Yes, yes, mods exist.)
So just because you couldn't get into it means everyone who's enjoying it is a poser? That's some pretty self-centered thinking right there.<p>No one should be judging you if it's not your thing. Those of us that enjoy it readily admit its faults and own the fact it's not a game for everyone.
Yep, the game is difficult to get into, it's not for everyone.<p>The game is great, though. You are in the "I have no idea what's going on" phase.
> Few people enjoy it. I am the majority opinion here.<p>The majority of people do not play videogames.
The majority of those do not play any roguelikes.
Citing the majority is completely useless.<p>Furthermore I'm not convinced you <i>can</i> 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.<p>> 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.<p>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.
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.<p>The only other thing I can think of is the labor menu was kind of annoying for large fortresses.
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 <i>love</i> and others will bounce off of.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
congratulations for stating what the the creators of the game have said many many time.<p>nobody is making you play it, and the people who enjoy playing it don't really care if it you liked it or not.
You're not wrong!<p>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.<p>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.)<p>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.<p>It sucks, but it's so good.
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").<p>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.
I am going to boot it up and play today just to spite you lol