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[plynxis]

to me its a functional choice. compare something like word *gag reflex* or openoffice writer, to emacs for example. the former are much more user friendly, admittedly focused on producing written text, while emacs is chaos for someone who first opens it. but emacs is immensely powerful once you learn it - word and such have a much more steady curve of improved usability. you start off a lot easier but you cant do things a LOT faster once you learn it and not terribly easier either. i value the style DF has for control because i favor the emacs approach since its more rewarding in the long run and i dont have a problem spending time learning it.

the same could be said about the representation of the world. DF already gets serious fps hits from all its fucntional complexity even with the sdl library which uses opengl, which AFAIK means it uses the graphics processor to do the painting, saving the main cpu from all that. even if you could claim a strongly graphical interface wouldn't impact the cpu itself, it still has to perform the calculations necessary to tell the gpu what it wants. the way DF is made, its representation is simple enough to code and saves all that extra overhead. i do believe that if improvements and optimizations are made it can run all the stuff along with a decent graphical interface (like a lot of commercial games do quite successfully) but it would still require more processing power from the gpu (which if you dont have, makes it a problem) and to me it feels like a waste tbh, though understandably i'd be in a minority on this.

looking at this thread though makes me think we've developed a certain mentality on bay12 that doesnt necessarily help newcomers lol - summing up the usual form these threads take could be done like this:

new_guy: hey DF is awesome, but all the bugs make it hard to understand, there's little help from the game and that interface is so hard to use!
(3 seconds later)
dwarves: *walls of text*
new_guy: but...
dwarves: *walls of text* *topic derailed*
new_guy: *crit* (signs off)

[Groveller]

I'd like to see an in game tutorial. I don't think it would be useful at all - the random nature of the game means there's a good chance that while the tutorial patiently explains how to dig your first hole in the ground, the new player is more concerned about the undead goats nomming down on his dwarfs, or the fact that the map is largely made of fire, or the realisation that the dwarfs are eating a lovely meal of fresh kitten eyes - but it could be pleasantly surreal.

[jmancube]

I think the 'difficulty' of DF can be summarized in a simple anecdote:

Playing as Human settlers (switched around the CIV_PLAYABLE tag), I build a wooden castle on top of a hill. I tried to cram the living quarters as closely together as possible, on several levels - turns out you can not build a wall on top of a floor on top of a door. Why? No idea. Do I know better now? Maybe. Did I panic and build an awesomely complicated construct around it by accident that put M.C. Escher to shame? You betcha.

Heh, that reminds me when my dwarves refused to pull the lever again to close the floodgate that was supplying my underground well with water from the river, causing a localized flood of  my hospital. I learned from this that you shouldn't place a lever near the source of water in case of a flood. I also had a fun (and eventually Fun) time sealing off my hospital and trying to develop some sort of mechanism to drain the hospital.

For me, the learning curve of Dwarf Fort is what makes this game great in some ways. Finding things out through trial and error are quite fun in this game for me. I don't usually enjoy the initial mistake, but the attempt to fix the situation is always fun and challenging. If you approach the game with the right attitude the things that are odd or frustrating become fun and interesting.

[Immacolata]

One of the fun thing about DF is that learning about it is fun, sort of a metagame. Oh how my boss has paid dearly for me surfing DF stuff in my office slack time. It is the most ridiculously complex game I ever found, but in its own crazy way it makes sense. The complexity comes from somewhere plausible. Well, mostly. And it is fun. No, !!FUN!!.

Few things annoy me a lot, such as it being impossible to go from K to Q without ESC detour. And why does the cursor reset everytime, PLEASE LEAVE THE CURSOR WHERE I LEFT IT, for Armok's sake.

Not trying to defend what ever the guy did, but I have enjoyed this game for hours, no days. At first the tile based and horizontal based "slice" graphic kind of infuriated me. Who dare he? The nerve. But today I see the simple graphics as a force for my imagination, fueled by the outrageous funny and awesome simulation stuff that the "culture generator" of DF comes up with.

[chewie]

I think when you read and completed the tutorial from tinypirates, it's really hard to screw things up. Of course one or two dwarves die from cave-ins or starve on an edge because you walled them off, but with the next immigrant wave 20 new dorfs gonna join your fort, so who cares about that one little guy? I never had a real tantrum spiral (even not when I tried to provoke it!) and had to abandon one fortress, because there weren't any other dwarves in my world. An other fortress i accidentally flooded and approximately 5 or 6 from 40 dwarfes died, but draining it was easy as hell and no one cared about the losses, so huh.

Also if we get an update every 2 months that brings something absolutely awesome and new I'm happy to see that the Great One doesn't waste his time on ingame tutorials so he can programm new features.

[decius]

I remember games where the tutorial was in the manual, which came in the box. I realize that printed manuals and boxen are no  longer a part of many games anymore, which is a shame.

In any case, there is room for a primer of sorts; discuss what furniture is, how to place it, how to make it (discuss what a workshop is, how to build it, how to get the raw materials (discuss mining and woodcutting (discuss tool-making (discuss metal industry (discuss fuel...

The work required to know how to meet dwarves basic needs is non-trivial. Add in that that work must be done concurrently with learing the interface, and there are some major issues.

But this is an alpha release. That doesn't mean "There will be significant and possibly game-breaking bugs." it means "A significant amount of the game is not implemented, or is implemented partially, or is implemented via placeholder. Also, there will be significant and possibly game-breaking bugs."

[Solace]

There is no learning curve, there is only a learning cliff.

But seriously, it wasn't that hard. My first attempt got me to the actual world creation screen, which I thought was adventure mode, and I was frustrated that I couldn't find out how to open the menu, but was impressed by the detail. After that I searched online for a tutorial, which I only half-followed, and got everything done until my dwarves died of thirst about a year and a half in. Which is also how my next two fortresses ended, but hey, learning. So far I've done basically everything quite successfully but having a functional army or full-scale steel industry (lack of coke and a stubborn refusal to use trees when I could be using magma ), and I didn't even have to go beyond the keymap screen to learn the adventure mode, unless I'm forgetting some very obscure problem I had to ask on the forum about. Totally agree it's more an intimidation factor than actual problem with the game itself.

[plynxis]

so DF is like this?: you look at a postcard of a castle, you think its awesome, you go there and when you do, you look at it and say "wtf am i doing here". then you go "fuck it" keep going until you get inside where you find buttons and levers everywhere. you think, "hey its more user-friendly than i thought - for a castle". then you pull a lever and drown in magma.