quote:
Originally posted by Solara:
<STRONG>I can't believe people are giving up so easily - patiently wait nine months just to take a quick look at one screen (a labeled and fairly self-explanatory one at that) and immediately throw your hands up in defeat?</STRONG>
I'm not giving up in defeat, just waiting for proper documentation.
And I haven't been waiting for nine months; I'm part of the wave of people who found out about DF in the last couple months. I had the forums and wiki to help me learn, and it was still a chore. I've been gaming since TRS-80's in the late 1970s, too, so I've seen it all.
I think it might be easy for the core group of folks here to forget how indecipherable the game can be for those who haven't been immersed in it - buried in the wiki and spending months following the daily progress of the hundred-page FOTF threads.
I really do dig DF, and I don't want to come across as slamming the idea. I know a two-man dev team is going to have limits, and I'm glad they choose to focus on gameplay. That being said, there comes a time when you can't make excuses about documentation anymore if you want to draw in new players.
With the massive changes this version made, one expects equal documentation of it all. I understand that discovering how things tick is a big part of the fun, but imagine what it's like for people coming to the game now - the wiki won't be fully fleshed out by the veterans for weeks, maybe months. In the meantime, the only documentation resource is the forums. And in combination with unexplained gameplay elements, figuring out where commands are hidden in 4-deep menus and wrestling with the interface in trial-and-error fashion really isn't fun; it's work. Not a lot of people are going to fight their way up the learning cliff if they have to make a forum post about almost every simple gameplay/interface problem they encounter.
So, I am just sayin'... it's time for a real manual.
[ October 30, 2007: Message edited by: Joker ]