The cryptic game's new interface welcomes newcomers but preserves the chaos:
After a long night of playing DwarfFortress, I had a concerned look on my face when I finally went to bed. My wife asked what was wrong. "I think I actually want to keep playing this," I said. I felt a nagging concern for many weeknights to come.
Available tomorrow on Steam and itch.io, the new version of Dwarf Fortress updates the legendary (and legendarily arcane) colony-building roguelike with new pixel-art graphics, music, some (default) keyboard shortcuts, and a beginners' tutorial. The commercial release aims to do two things: make the game somewhat more accessible and provide Tarn and Zach Adams, the brothers who maintained the game as a free download for 20 years, some financial security.
I know it has succeeded at its first job, and I suspect it will hit the second mark, too. I approached the game as a head-first review expedition into likely frustrating territory. Now I find myself distracted from writing about it because I keep thinking about my goblin defense and whether the fisherdwarf might be better assigned to gem crafting.
[...] Using the new tutorial modes' initial placement suggestions and following its section-by-section cues, my first run taught me how to dig down, start a stockpile, assign some simple jobs, build a workshop, and—harkening back to Johnston's final frustrations—craft and place beds, bins, and tables, made with "non-economic stone."
That's about where the guidance ends, though. The new menus are certainly a lot easier to navigate than the traditional all-text, shortcut-heavy interface (though you can keep using multi-key combinations to craft and assign orders if you like). And the graphics certainly make it a lot easier to notice and address problems. Now, when an angry Giant Badger Boar kills your dogs and maims the one dwarf you have gathering plants outside, the threat actually looks like a badger, not a symbol you'd accidentally type if you held down the Alt key. If you build a barrel, you get something that resembles a barrel, which is no small thing when you're just getting started in this arcane world.
[...] However gentler the aesthetics and guidance for a newcomer, all the game's brutally tough and interlocking systems are intact in this update. These systems crunch together in weird and wild ways, fed by the landscape, your recent and long-ago actions, and random numbers behind the scenes.
[...] But I'll be back. For me, the commercial release of Dwarf Fortress succeeded at transforming the game from a grim, time-killing in-joke for diehards into a viable, if not graceful, challenge. I will start again, I will keep the badgers and floods at bay, and next time, I might have the privilege of failing to a magma monster, an outbreak of disease, or even a miscarriage of dwarf justice.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday December 09, @12:18PM (5 children)
... and couldn't penetrate the AUI (ASCII User Interface). It's the sort of thing I would like so I am looking forwards to the GUI version. Hmm, christmas is coming... hmm...
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday December 09, @01:34PM (3 children)
I think I'll give the new and graphically improved DF a spin to. I had tried it previously but I guess I just couldn't really get into it anymore. It was a bit to arcane and abstract, it's just as arcane and abstract now but it looks better.
After all I had previously played a lot of ascii games in a somewhat similar genre such as the various Rogue or rougelike games such as Rogue, Moria or (z)Angband. I have very fond memories still of (z)Angband. Most of them where improved in that regard by first switching to add colours to the ascii output instead of just being greyscale and then by going a step further by having some kind of minimal pixel art tileset added on top instead of just having the pure ascii art/graphics. It did increase my enjoyment of them.
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(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday December 09, @02:27PM (2 children)
Just because a game was good for it's time, doesn't make it an actually well designed game. The GUI DF may be better, it may not be. The old DF probably relies too much on the past and doesn't hold up well. Good control design is key to a good game. Or rather the inverse of that is possibly more accurate. Poor control design, kills games.
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(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday December 09, @03:05PM
That is all true. It's probably better or at least more accessible, that said some things or aspects or control might have been lost in the translation. Old DF, or I think they refer to it as DF Classic now, was still very influential for that type of game. A lot of game since can probably trace it roots back to it or claim it as a source of influence -- Rimworld most definitely (also an awesome game), factorio might be another one even tho I couldn't really get into that one. It just wasn't appealing in setting up long production chains and just watching it go only so you could set up more production chains.
While poor design and control might kill games I would say there is something about DF that appears to have kept it alive now for a couple of decades. So it can't have been that horrible. It might just have had appeal to a very niche market segment of gamers while also scaring others away.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 10, @02:47AM
I'd argue that if the ASCII DF was worthwhile, it paid attention to the actual "game" mechanics, well balanced play, etc. Wrapping that in decent graphics makes it more accessible and hopefully the good game mechanics remain.
On the other hand, 3D open world audio-visual tour-de-force simulation games can be utter crap when it comes to actual game mechanics, letting you wander pointlessly or locking you into a script to enjoy the actual story and play challenge.
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09, @06:29PM
I love the ASCII interface and I will probably purchase a copy of this to give some support to the developers for all the free enjoyable time I've had over the years, and I'm sure I'll try it, but I will probably keep playing the one I know. I came up on ASCII games on unix and VAX systems, and I've always preferred that interface for games like this or nethack. Depending upon the tileset used, I have a hard time telling things apart because the tiles can be so small, but with ASCII, you quickly learn what the letters mean and what the colors of the letters.
(Score: 3, Informative) by sweettea on Friday December 09, @04:38PM
I am happy for the DF authors that they have finally found a way to make their life-work accessible to the world. I view it as a far more complicated work of art than TempleOS was, and admire the tenacity that has let them persist in creating DF for years.
It's a unique experience to do DF classic, to be sure. Personally I've got the shortcuts mapped into my head so hard that I don't cognizantly know them, and using to scroll between z-levels feels natural enough that I've accidentally tried to use them in Factorio. But then again, I've been a long-time addict... started playing in 2006, and stopped upgrading in 2009 -- I didn't like the addition of additional enemy elements to the game, necromancers caves and cave biomes and things like that, and I had a heavily modded version with lots of extra stones and tweaks to material frequencies in it, and I didn't see a point. I still fire up my fortress from back then occasionally.
But I'm happy for the Adams, and I'm happy they at last have millions of dollars, as they ought for their tremendous work.