I missed the whole fight about scripting and about whether DF is heading in a good/bad direction. Maybe it's for the best
. I'll just make a few points in a (hopefully) factual and non-controversial manner.
On the scripting topic: I don't think it's a good idea for Toady to spend a lot of effort to support modding for an alpha game. So, when he puts game data or game logic in human-readable text files, it should only be because it eases his work. For me the argument doesn't go much further than that.
About the direction in which DF is heading, I just want to chime in with my experience. I'm a long time fan (since before Boatmurdered) and reading the goals for this game used to bring tears to my eyes. However I'm now mostly unable to play (I do try and make one or two fortresses and adventurers every major release), and consequently stopped donating more than a year ago.
Why? It's because I found the game fun when I was still discovering new stuff about it, i.e. the journey from complete noob to seasoned player was fun. However, now that I've explored most of what the game has to offer, and find running a fortress rather easy, I seem to only see the numerous frustrations that doing anything in DF involve. For instance, just in my last session I struggled with all of those problems:
- Digging a pit involves tediously designating one level of channels at a time
- Some construction orders get completely ignored, presumably because the game lets you cut off a planned building from the materials used for it without any warning
- Construction jobs get suspended all the time because a dwarf or a building material for another building is sitting on their spot
- Dwarves love locking themselves up or blocking their path to other planned constructions when building stuff or removing floors (the latter in particular has no satisfying workaround)
- Removing the ceiling from an area you've already dug up is basically impossible (or finding out how is so hard that I stopped bothering)
- Two years later, the military is still a nightmare to manage. They barely train, they don't reliably pick up equipments, soldiers with the miner/woodcutter profession are buggy.
- Some grazing animals starve to death no matter what you do, and the others don't even have the basic instinct of seeking grass on their own when you don't pasture them (which is really weird given than dwarves will do everything they can to get food, even hunt vermin).
- Burrows are a pain to manage, even though they're better than the old "keep dwarves inside" fiasco where they kept rushing towards the exit. Want to keep digging when under siege? You have to essentially double-designate everything, once for digging, once for burrow. To add insult to injury, it's incredibly easy to delete your whole carefully designated burrow by hitting d, which happened to me 3 times (perhaps because d is used so much for designating, and because the interface seems to be designed to trip you up).
- Dwarves actually still rush straight into danger as soon as another one is killed because they want to retreive their socks. If you're not sure where the body is, forbidding those is really hard.
- Unkillable thralls/undead.
And those are just a sample of those that really infuriated me, there's no point in relisting the whole bugtracker here. Overall, I find that I'm really playing Workaround: The Game and not having that much fun overall. Actually, every time I try to come back to the game, re-learning those workarounds seems less fun. I send one or two fortresses to their doom and laugh as limbs fly everywhere, occasionally wonder at a nifty new feature like migrant vampires and trials, then move on to something else.
The whole point of this post is to show that there are some players who really want to love the game, but can't. They're enthralled by the complexity of the simulation behind it, and are willing to put up with DF's huge learning curve and complexity, absence of graphics/confusing graphics, and even interface (to a degree), but they still get put off by the clunkiness of the gameplay. I think that I'm a representative sample of a large number of players, and that Toady would gain a lot* from adressing these problems agressively.
*as in: money, good will, larger player base, less competition that tries to fill the gameplay void of DF
Toady turning into Notch is basically my worst nightmare.
Why? Both are likeable fellas who write the games they want while blissfully ignoring the mainstream.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3813319 times)