Post by Loendal on Sept 11, 2012 2:58:50 GMT -5
I apologize in advance for the length, but once I get talking on something I like, I have trouble shutting up 
So you like complexity do you? Think you can tackle a learning curve and batter it into the straight and narrow? Would you now, or have you ever wanted to eat baby alpaca biscuits? Think you can manage to keep an entire gaggle of angry little men supplicated with alcohol, beauty and commerce and STILL not offend some pointy-eared tree-huggers by trying to sell them a bit of wood? Think you can take on what's been described as "The most complex game ever made"?
Rule #1 of this review: DON'T PANIC! It’s not as bad as it seems! Ok, maybe it CAN be, but it’s still more fun than you can shake a pickaxe at.
First, a bit of background. I originally got the idea in my head to give Dwarf Fortress a try when I got hold of Minecraft. It was one of Notch's primary motivations for his game, and in hindsight, you can easily see the connections. I figured I'd give it a go and found a download of it and gave it a try. Panic immediately settled in as I had no idea what I was looking at, what I was expected to do or how to do it. I'm no stranger to Roguelikes and their mysterious ASCII ways, but this one had me befuddled! It has so MANY symbols in use and they all mean something. Perhaps I just wasn't ready to settle in and learn yet, but the initial reaction was one of complete and utter gobsmackedness and I deleted it shortly thereafter.
Some time later, I made up my mind to give it another go but this time I went in prepared. The Dwarf Fortress wiki was opened up, a quickie newbie guide was read, and the game was launched. I found my way back into making a new world. Let's start there with my deep respect for the game's design. As with Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress worlds are randomly generated with one exception. As Minecraft generates new terrain for you when you meander off its known landscape, Dwarf Fortress worlds are made all in one go. You specify a set of parameters for your world and fire off the creator; these include World Size, History, Number of Civilizations, Maximum Number of Sites, Number of Beasts, Natural Savagery and Mineral Occurrence. These are then used in the creation process to generate the world. Even a relatively young world (250ish years of History, Medium by definition in the parameters at world creation) takes time to create; so if you're playing along while you read don't let impatience get the better of you.
Yes, that's right; I said Civilizations and History... Not only does Dwarf Fortress create a world map for you, it creates HISTORY. History is composed of the rise and fall of civilizations, historical figures and places and things which become the stuff of legends and lore in the game. As an example, somewhere along the line in the creation process, it may create a Dwarf by the name of Trumpy Vandersnoots the Unclean (I made that up ). It will have a given year in which Trumpy was born. It will chronicle Trumpy's life for you, noting historical events such as Trumpy Vandersnoots went into the Swamp of Tears and fought the Dragon Slortwood, Trumpy defeated Slortwood! Both Trumpy and Slortwood are randomly created Historical Figures and each will have their own collection of enemies and allies throughout the years. One could conceivably play the game in Adventurer Mode (More on that later) and come upon the skeletal remains of Slortwood and possibly a bit of the old wyrm's treasure trove that Trumpy didn't make off with. The world creation process contains THOUSANDS of these figures, some live and some die. Some might even come and visit your Fortress during the course of play, I have been 'visited' by several notable figures over the course of my playing, though none have been friendly and I was forced to kill them to survive.
The same life-cycle process is in the world creation for civilizations as well. As the world is created, you'll literally watch the map change and shift based upon how far spread these civilizations go. There are essentially four races in the game, Dwarves, Elves, Humans and Goblins. You'll see small cities and villages spring up a short distance away from the original site, showing the effects of urban sprawl and expansionism. This may cause them to come into conflict with some of the surrounding civilizations and the historical record will note this and those two civilizations might be enemies once inside the game, while at the moment in game this has very little effect on you, there are currently work in progress at Bay 12 Games to allow armies to march across the land in conflict and that very well COULD affect you and your dwarves.
On top of Civilization and History, the game does not just create a flat world with cities plopped on it; it creates entire multi-leveled terrains, ecosystems and temperate zones. These can run the gambit from desert dunes that stretch for ages to high, craggy mountain peaks that you can’t even build on. Then throw in Rivers, Streams and Brooks (All with their own specific life living in them and various depths and details). Add in ‘Evil’ and/or ‘Haunted’ areas of land where there are things like slime falling from the sky and noxious gasses that knock your dwarves unconscious if they’re caught outside. Necromantic temples, Kobold lairs, Goblin Kingdoms and anything from arctic tundra to rain forests and grasslands… They’re all here. And under the surface, detailed rock strata layers, veins of gems and ores, and huge, monstrous, multi-level caverns in which the Forgotten Beasts dwell. Further below those, there is essentially a Hell level that if you tap into it, releases demons and devils by the dozens flying upwards to come and wipe you out. The world itself is huge in game terms. There are essentially four levels of detail in the maps. A world map, a regional map, a local map and inside the context of a local map is what I call a ‘game’ map, which is the level at which you play the game when you’re actually manipulating it directly. One world map tile is equal to four regional map tiles (At least this is the case with a Medium sized world, I haven’t experimented with the other sizes much). One regional map tile is equal to 16 local tiles and one local tile is 24 game tiles. Each game tile is its own ‘thing’, be that thing a tile of granite stone, a tree, a goblin, a bit of string or a shrubbery (With or without a path going down the middle, depending on one’s familiarity or affection of Monty Python). There are “Over two hundred rock and mineral types … , placed in their proper geological environments”. You think DAOC was creative with 10 tiers each of Metal, Stone and Wood? Fiddlesticks! I don’t think I have enough “Wow’s” in me to describe how impressed I am with this world generator. It utterly amazes me with what it does.
Enough about the world and civilization though, let’s talk Dwarves!
Meet Ral Sebsurlorbam, or "Ral Valestandards" in the Common tongue. Ral is my best Miner. You'll note the high attention to detail here. I have 80 other Dwarves in my fortress just like that, but with their own collection of attributes, family tree, skills, likes, dislikes and mental capacity. In my fortress at home on my PC, I have 195 dwarves... Believe it or not, these detailed collections of information and preferences all have some measure of effect on my success in the Fortress. If you strip away the details however, the main thing you need to worry about is keeping dwarves happy. You do this by providing plenty of work for them to do, pretty things to look at, a bit of food to keep them fed and copious amounts of alcohol on-site. You have to meet their basic needs, but not quite drilling down so far as being sure the bugger owns a fire opal necklace just because he likes fire opals. It would HELP, mind you, but I've never found the need to get that detailed with any of my dwarves (yet). In that sense, Dwarf Fortress is like a very complicated Life Simulator. Some measure of micro management is a requirement here, to one's own preference for detail of course. If one was so inclined, you could have a collection of five dwarves whose sole purpose in life is to make cheese, or have every dwarf in there have every skill and never be a master at any of them.
This leads into my next point about Dwarves; you have no DIRECT control over them. I cannot, for example, grab Ral and tell him to go dig into that wall there and do what he does best. Instead, I designate what part of the wall I want to tunnel into and then a "Job" is queued up. A Dwarf is then found with the needed skill and comes to do what needs done. In this case, it would find a Dwarf who has the Mining skill and send him to the site to do the work. If, for example, Ral was asleep or currently throwing a tantrum, it might grab one of my other miners and have them do it instead. This applies to all dwarves and all skills and jobs. If it cannot find one, the work goes undone. It's essentially a Fire and Forget type of system and you may find yourself overwhelmed as you try to keep up with everything that's happening and making sure that what you WANT done is actually getting done. If not, you may need to grab a random dwarf and give him a skill you need to accomplish your set task or cancel out some unnecessary tasks to free up dwarves to do what you want. There are 13 classes of skills, and under those classes may be up to 20 sub categories that cover everything from Mining to Weaving. Fortunately, there are fabulous third party programs that help make this easier, such as Dwarf Therapist which gives you an organized, graphical display of your dwarves and their skills with clickable check boxes to enable or disable whatever skills you want a given dwarf to have. This is MUCH easier then drilling down through the interface to find a specific dwarf with a specific skill, or lack of a given skill among the populace.
Speaking of the system, let's talk interface. This is where a lot of people, I imagine, get turned off if they made it past the use of ASCII characters for everything.
The UI is complicated; very complicated. There are only 3 places I've found that use the mouse at all, everything else is key-pressed menus and sub menus that you get used to only by playing and remembering. For example, 'k' allows you to look at the floor and get details on the items under your X cursor and 'n' will take you to the list of current nobility within the Fortress. You might drop down into a sub menu that uses the arrow keys to scroll up and down and left and right, while at the same time using * and / to adjust a given numerical value that you've used the arrows keys to highlight. One cannot be too hasty to let this be the turn-off for you, as once you get the basics down, the menu system gets easier to navigate. It's MUCH easier on a Numeric Keypad then a laptop, so laptoppers beware! You may have to occasionally flip the NumLock toggle on your keyboard or use the - and + keys to scroll up and down. As with all interface systems, only by use can you really understand how to run through it with speed and efficiency.
Once one gets past the appearance and the interface, though, you are left with a richly detailed game of pretty hefty capabilities. In the same sense as Minecraft, you can do pretty much anything in here that you may want to try. Want to build a tower up into the sky? Go for it. Want to dig a hole so deep that the Mines of Moria is a scratch on the surface by comparison? Take a shot. Want to use a complicated system of waterwheels, gears, pumps, levers and mechanisms to create a giant, functional toilet that uses magma instead of water? You can do that too, if you are so inclined. Every item, civilization or newborn goblin baby name that is created is random, in the tradition of Roguelike games everywhere. You can get some pretty bizarre results because of it. That is part of the charm, I suppose, when you get right down to it. What other game are you going to find, for example, an Iron Cap with the insignia of a legwear embossed on it in malachite; which is a symbol for the Goblin nation of “Tussled Foreclaws”?
The game is complicated; don’t let anyone try to tell you otherwise. But the complexity is part of the attraction (for me, anyway). The fact that if I manage to do something amazing, it was hard work to do it gives me a sense of accomplishment. It was gained by fighting through a high risk vs. reward system. I am by no means a master at this game. I don’t think I’ve even tried building any sort of automated pump system yet, for a giant toilet or otherwise. I routinely die to goblin raids, but learn from all my mistakes. That’s another point that could be a stickler for people; the Roguelike genre from which Dwarf Fortress is inspired has a tradition of permadeath. Die once, game over. The same applies to Dwarf Fortress. Forget to build traps or left a wall breach open so that the goblin raiders just waltz in and slaughter your entire population? That fortress is lost. The game DOES, however, allow you to try to reclaim a lost fortress with a new set of dwarves if you want to, and you could also always go there in person in Adventurer Mode and see what you can find. I won’t go into detail on Adventurer mode here (In truth, I’ve only played it once or twice) but instead of building and managing an entire fortress you are a single adventurer, doing the adventurer thing, going around and fulfilling quests for the locals and encouraging people to follow you into certain doom and the like. You exist in the same game world as your fortresses too, so you can walk up the side of the mountain and into a fortress you abandoned last week and explore it from a single adventurer’s point of view. Live long enough and do enough good, your Adventurer will get written into the historical record and you will be one of the thousands that already exist; right up there with Trumpy Vandersnoots the Unclean. You can retire an adventurer and come back to visit him/her later with another character if you wanted to and bring them along on your latest quest, which is something I know we’ve discussed before on here.
All in all, Dwarf Fortress is not for the faint of heart or the easily discouraged. There is no mistaking this game for something simplistic and easily grasped. Its well-deserved moniker as “One of the most complicated games ever made” is no lie. You have all the complexity of the Roguelike genre (Randomness, unpredictability, permadeath, ASCII representation) along with the complexities of a life simulation (Dwarves need to be cared for, protected and safeguarded though various means ranging from fortress defense to lack of drinkable water and nourishing meals). Add on top of this the sheer volume of things in the game that can be manipulated in various ways to different effectiveness based upon something as obscure as density and boiling points. The interface is challenging in and of itself, but can be grasped after a bit of playing and adaptation. I have never been able to play this game without the Wiki opened up in a separate window for quick reference. I love the game though; the sheer complexity alone is enough to keep me soundly hooked. My longest running fortress lasted around 10 game years, which is a lot of actual play time. I didn’t hesitate to start up a new one after that though. I tried reclamation, but it didn’t work out so well
If there's any interest here, I can do up a quick tutorial / newbie guide for the board if there was enough encouragement. I'm also willing to play a Legacy game with someone if they wanted to. Let me know!
So you like complexity do you? Think you can tackle a learning curve and batter it into the straight and narrow? Would you now, or have you ever wanted to eat baby alpaca biscuits? Think you can manage to keep an entire gaggle of angry little men supplicated with alcohol, beauty and commerce and STILL not offend some pointy-eared tree-huggers by trying to sell them a bit of wood? Think you can take on what's been described as "The most complex game ever made"?
Welcome to Dwarf Fortress!
Rule #1 of this review: DON'T PANIC! It’s not as bad as it seems! Ok, maybe it CAN be, but it’s still more fun than you can shake a pickaxe at.
First, a bit of background. I originally got the idea in my head to give Dwarf Fortress a try when I got hold of Minecraft. It was one of Notch's primary motivations for his game, and in hindsight, you can easily see the connections. I figured I'd give it a go and found a download of it and gave it a try. Panic immediately settled in as I had no idea what I was looking at, what I was expected to do or how to do it. I'm no stranger to Roguelikes and their mysterious ASCII ways, but this one had me befuddled! It has so MANY symbols in use and they all mean something. Perhaps I just wasn't ready to settle in and learn yet, but the initial reaction was one of complete and utter gobsmackedness and I deleted it shortly thereafter.
Some time later, I made up my mind to give it another go but this time I went in prepared. The Dwarf Fortress wiki was opened up, a quickie newbie guide was read, and the game was launched. I found my way back into making a new world. Let's start there with my deep respect for the game's design. As with Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress worlds are randomly generated with one exception. As Minecraft generates new terrain for you when you meander off its known landscape, Dwarf Fortress worlds are made all in one go. You specify a set of parameters for your world and fire off the creator; these include World Size, History, Number of Civilizations, Maximum Number of Sites, Number of Beasts, Natural Savagery and Mineral Occurrence. These are then used in the creation process to generate the world. Even a relatively young world (250ish years of History, Medium by definition in the parameters at world creation) takes time to create; so if you're playing along while you read don't let impatience get the better of you.
Yes, that's right; I said Civilizations and History... Not only does Dwarf Fortress create a world map for you, it creates HISTORY. History is composed of the rise and fall of civilizations, historical figures and places and things which become the stuff of legends and lore in the game. As an example, somewhere along the line in the creation process, it may create a Dwarf by the name of Trumpy Vandersnoots the Unclean (I made that up
). It will have a given year in which Trumpy was born. It will chronicle Trumpy's life for you, noting historical events such as Trumpy Vandersnoots went into the Swamp of Tears and fought the Dragon Slortwood, Trumpy defeated Slortwood! Both Trumpy and Slortwood are randomly created Historical Figures and each will have their own collection of enemies and allies throughout the years. One could conceivably play the game in Adventurer Mode (More on that later) and come upon the skeletal remains of Slortwood and possibly a bit of the old wyrm's treasure trove that Trumpy didn't make off with. The world creation process contains THOUSANDS of these figures, some live and some die. Some might even come and visit your Fortress during the course of play, I have been 'visited' by several notable figures over the course of my playing, though none have been friendly and I was forced to kill them to survive.The same life-cycle process is in the world creation for civilizations as well. As the world is created, you'll literally watch the map change and shift based upon how far spread these civilizations go. There are essentially four races in the game, Dwarves, Elves, Humans and Goblins. You'll see small cities and villages spring up a short distance away from the original site, showing the effects of urban sprawl and expansionism. This may cause them to come into conflict with some of the surrounding civilizations and the historical record will note this and those two civilizations might be enemies once inside the game, while at the moment in game this has very little effect on you, there are currently work in progress at Bay 12 Games to allow armies to march across the land in conflict and that very well COULD affect you and your dwarves.
On top of Civilization and History, the game does not just create a flat world with cities plopped on it; it creates entire multi-leveled terrains, ecosystems and temperate zones. These can run the gambit from desert dunes that stretch for ages to high, craggy mountain peaks that you can’t even build on. Then throw in Rivers, Streams and Brooks (All with their own specific life living in them and various depths and details). Add in ‘Evil’ and/or ‘Haunted’ areas of land where there are things like slime falling from the sky and noxious gasses that knock your dwarves unconscious if they’re caught outside. Necromantic temples, Kobold lairs, Goblin Kingdoms and anything from arctic tundra to rain forests and grasslands… They’re all here. And under the surface, detailed rock strata layers, veins of gems and ores, and huge, monstrous, multi-level caverns in which the Forgotten Beasts dwell. Further below those, there is essentially a Hell level that if you tap into it, releases demons and devils by the dozens flying upwards to come and wipe you out. The world itself is huge in game terms. There are essentially four levels of detail in the maps. A world map, a regional map, a local map and inside the context of a local map is what I call a ‘game’ map, which is the level at which you play the game when you’re actually manipulating it directly. One world map tile is equal to four regional map tiles (At least this is the case with a Medium sized world, I haven’t experimented with the other sizes much). One regional map tile is equal to 16 local tiles and one local tile is 24 game tiles. Each game tile is its own ‘thing’, be that thing a tile of granite stone, a tree, a goblin, a bit of string or a shrubbery (With or without a path going down the middle, depending on one’s familiarity or affection of Monty Python). There are “Over two hundred rock and mineral types … , placed in their proper geological environments”. You think DAOC was creative with 10 tiers each of Metal, Stone and Wood? Fiddlesticks! I don’t think I have enough “Wow’s” in me to describe how impressed I am with this world generator. It utterly amazes me with what it does.
Enough about the world and civilization though, let’s talk Dwarves!
Meet Ral Sebsurlorbam, or "Ral Valestandards" in the Common tongue. Ral is my best Miner. You'll note the high attention to detail here. I have 80 other Dwarves in my fortress just like that, but with their own collection of attributes, family tree, skills, likes, dislikes and mental capacity. In my fortress at home on my PC, I have 195 dwarves... Believe it or not, these detailed collections of information and preferences all have some measure of effect on my success in the Fortress. If you strip away the details however, the main thing you need to worry about is keeping dwarves happy. You do this by providing plenty of work for them to do, pretty things to look at, a bit of food to keep them fed and copious amounts of alcohol on-site. You have to meet their basic needs, but not quite drilling down so far as being sure the bugger owns a fire opal necklace just because he likes fire opals. It would HELP, mind you, but I've never found the need to get that detailed with any of my dwarves (yet). In that sense, Dwarf Fortress is like a very complicated Life Simulator. Some measure of micro management is a requirement here, to one's own preference for detail of course. If one was so inclined, you could have a collection of five dwarves whose sole purpose in life is to make cheese, or have every dwarf in there have every skill and never be a master at any of them.
This leads into my next point about Dwarves; you have no DIRECT control over them. I cannot, for example, grab Ral and tell him to go dig into that wall there and do what he does best. Instead, I designate what part of the wall I want to tunnel into and then a "Job" is queued up. A Dwarf is then found with the needed skill and comes to do what needs done. In this case, it would find a Dwarf who has the Mining skill and send him to the site to do the work. If, for example, Ral was asleep or currently throwing a tantrum, it might grab one of my other miners and have them do it instead. This applies to all dwarves and all skills and jobs. If it cannot find one, the work goes undone. It's essentially a Fire and Forget type of system and you may find yourself overwhelmed as you try to keep up with everything that's happening and making sure that what you WANT done is actually getting done. If not, you may need to grab a random dwarf and give him a skill you need to accomplish your set task or cancel out some unnecessary tasks to free up dwarves to do what you want. There are 13 classes of skills, and under those classes may be up to 20 sub categories that cover everything from Mining to Weaving. Fortunately, there are fabulous third party programs that help make this easier, such as Dwarf Therapist which gives you an organized, graphical display of your dwarves and their skills with clickable check boxes to enable or disable whatever skills you want a given dwarf to have. This is MUCH easier then drilling down through the interface to find a specific dwarf with a specific skill, or lack of a given skill among the populace.
Speaking of the system, let's talk interface. This is where a lot of people, I imagine, get turned off if they made it past the use of ASCII characters for everything.
The UI is complicated; very complicated. There are only 3 places I've found that use the mouse at all, everything else is key-pressed menus and sub menus that you get used to only by playing and remembering. For example, 'k' allows you to look at the floor and get details on the items under your X cursor and 'n' will take you to the list of current nobility within the Fortress. You might drop down into a sub menu that uses the arrow keys to scroll up and down and left and right, while at the same time using * and / to adjust a given numerical value that you've used the arrows keys to highlight. One cannot be too hasty to let this be the turn-off for you, as once you get the basics down, the menu system gets easier to navigate. It's MUCH easier on a Numeric Keypad then a laptop, so laptoppers beware! You may have to occasionally flip the NumLock toggle on your keyboard or use the - and + keys to scroll up and down. As with all interface systems, only by use can you really understand how to run through it with speed and efficiency.
Once one gets past the appearance and the interface, though, you are left with a richly detailed game of pretty hefty capabilities. In the same sense as Minecraft, you can do pretty much anything in here that you may want to try. Want to build a tower up into the sky? Go for it. Want to dig a hole so deep that the Mines of Moria is a scratch on the surface by comparison? Take a shot. Want to use a complicated system of waterwheels, gears, pumps, levers and mechanisms to create a giant, functional toilet that uses magma instead of water? You can do that too, if you are so inclined. Every item, civilization or newborn goblin baby name that is created is random, in the tradition of Roguelike games everywhere. You can get some pretty bizarre results because of it. That is part of the charm, I suppose, when you get right down to it. What other game are you going to find, for example, an Iron Cap with the insignia of a legwear embossed on it in malachite; which is a symbol for the Goblin nation of “Tussled Foreclaws”?
The game is complicated; don’t let anyone try to tell you otherwise. But the complexity is part of the attraction (for me, anyway). The fact that if I manage to do something amazing, it was hard work to do it gives me a sense of accomplishment. It was gained by fighting through a high risk vs. reward system. I am by no means a master at this game. I don’t think I’ve even tried building any sort of automated pump system yet, for a giant toilet or otherwise. I routinely die to goblin raids, but learn from all my mistakes. That’s another point that could be a stickler for people; the Roguelike genre from which Dwarf Fortress is inspired has a tradition of permadeath. Die once, game over. The same applies to Dwarf Fortress. Forget to build traps or left a wall breach open so that the goblin raiders just waltz in and slaughter your entire population? That fortress is lost. The game DOES, however, allow you to try to reclaim a lost fortress with a new set of dwarves if you want to, and you could also always go there in person in Adventurer Mode and see what you can find. I won’t go into detail on Adventurer mode here (In truth, I’ve only played it once or twice) but instead of building and managing an entire fortress you are a single adventurer, doing the adventurer thing, going around and fulfilling quests for the locals and encouraging people to follow you into certain doom and the like. You exist in the same game world as your fortresses too, so you can walk up the side of the mountain and into a fortress you abandoned last week and explore it from a single adventurer’s point of view. Live long enough and do enough good, your Adventurer will get written into the historical record and you will be one of the thousands that already exist; right up there with Trumpy Vandersnoots the Unclean. You can retire an adventurer and come back to visit him/her later with another character if you wanted to and bring them along on your latest quest, which is something I know we’ve discussed before on here.
All in all, Dwarf Fortress is not for the faint of heart or the easily discouraged. There is no mistaking this game for something simplistic and easily grasped. Its well-deserved moniker as “One of the most complicated games ever made” is no lie. You have all the complexity of the Roguelike genre (Randomness, unpredictability, permadeath, ASCII representation) along with the complexities of a life simulation (Dwarves need to be cared for, protected and safeguarded though various means ranging from fortress defense to lack of drinkable water and nourishing meals). Add on top of this the sheer volume of things in the game that can be manipulated in various ways to different effectiveness based upon something as obscure as density and boiling points. The interface is challenging in and of itself, but can be grasped after a bit of playing and adaptation. I have never been able to play this game without the Wiki opened up in a separate window for quick reference. I love the game though; the sheer complexity alone is enough to keep me soundly hooked. My longest running fortress lasted around 10 game years, which is a lot of actual play time. I didn’t hesitate to start up a new one after that though. I tried reclamation, but it didn’t work out so well
If there's any interest here, I can do up a quick tutorial / newbie guide for the board if there was enough encouragement. I'm also willing to play a Legacy game with someone if they wanted to. Let me know!
