It strikes me as weird that a lot of people here (at none other place than Bay 12 Games Forums) disregard Sui Generis in many ways, some of them unexpected or plainly baffling.
When I first saw the trailers and read the (purposely) vague description, I couldn't think of anything other than our own Dwarf Fortress, and saw a few highlights to Toady's own intentions on game making.
Blasphemy! Who the hell are you to say such things?
I can hear those screams rolling on, and that would be reasonable. Sui Generis is not being written as an extensive simulator controlling everything from physics to the barest details of a given creature's brain, but their promises and effort are great starting points. Not only pointing out their (maybe exceeded) hatred for linear stories, their narrative framework is unnervingly similar to DF's adventure mode. "A persistent world, your character might die and it's not overpowered, but he might be able to change stuff, or at least do hilarious things". I have the same feeling whenever I select the region of my adventurer and choose it to be a peasant, a hero or a demigod, all of them mortal and pretty unimportant in the long term.
For sure, I'm certainly omitting something about the world itself, because it's not procedurally generated as our own DF world is, but I think they're pursuing similar goals with a well-crafted world, one that might could be quite large. If one of us has fully explored a 257x257 DF world and found it boring to do (well, at it's entirety) then they have all the rights to feel contempt about the feel and sights of Sui Generis's one, even knowing that there's an entire team that will potentially enlarge, and counting the people who pledged for the world editing features, making sure that the world will be impressive at least.
Where does it say that the camera is just limited to an isometric perspective? There are segments in the pitch where you can see the sky, why would they limit the camera when it works just fine on any other angle? Right, they haven't used any other camera angle on their fighting videos (more on that in a minute), but maybe they're just doing that because of player comfort, though they should showcase their engine's capabilities out of our comfort zone.
As with all the combat and magic complaints, here's a recent video just for the sake of it, uploaded today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqaRqih7Cuw&hd=1Now that's different, they've been hearing all these "drunken brawl" stuff and things seem polished. I'm no PR representative for these guys, nor they're paying me any royalties for this lenghty post, but haven't you feel a bit uncomfortable when you try to convince your friends to play a fresh, outstanding game, and they prefer to stick to all what is safe and sound? Toady has his own model to develop the game that has brought us to this forum, but when all those claims of 'getting 3D', 'having a full team of developers' and all those rambles (that usually appear on the General Discussion subforum) are answered by the promise of Sui Generis, what do we have to say?
Wasn't my intention to preach a lecture about a flawed pre-alpha, but we can always try.