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[Meph]

Hello everyone,

Of course I know this isnt the modding forum, but I wanted to ask the entire DF community what they think about MasterworkDF. Some will have tried it out, others might dislike it, or prefer vanilla over any mod at all, or they just never heard about it. I often make polls and ask for feedback in the MasterworkDF board and on Reddit. The problem is that posting there is like preaching to the choir: People know it, People like it. Someone brings some harsh criticism, and meets quite a large resistance by people that think they need to defend it.

Thats why I made this thread. I want to know what Non-MDF-players think. Anything goes, praise or criticise away. Rant about it if you like. Negative feedback is still feedback, as long as it doesnt border on insults. And ask what you like. Anything you might want to know about the project or me.

Now before this goes out of hand, I do have to ask you to exclude two things:

• Vanilla DF vs. Masterwork. Please dont. Its not a contest, its not "versus", its not a Toady vs. Meph Deathmatch. I have seen discussions about this, and they never lead to anything, nor are they pretty.
• Mod questions. Dont ask for "whats the value of X", or "whats the reagent of job Y". This is not modding support, no bugreports, etc.

I will be travelling for 2 weeks, so you have plenty of time to figure out what you want to know, or discuss while I am away. I will most certainly come back and answer everything in due time. I am quite curious how this thread will look then.

EDIT: Now, two weeks later, I did answer everything and sorted through all the feedback: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=142210.msg5613192#msg5613192

[dudlol]

Just got into masterwork, and I enjoy it a lot so far. Entirely for the change that comes from plaiyng a different race every game.

[Elephant Parade]

I've played Masterwork a few times. It certainly adds a ton of content, and the content is very well-done. I don't really like the high-magic setting, though; it just doesn't seem right for a dwarven fortress.

[Tryble]

Dislike it.

I tried it for a while as I really wanted to try out generic materials (and you hadn't made the Accelerated Mod by then), and disabled nearly all the extra options so as to have a mostly-vanilla experience. 

Didn't get very far, as all sorts of small but weird issues kept popping up, eventually culminating with the first caravan obliterating the surface as they were carrying units of 'magma' with them, which took no time in setting fire to everything from the edge of the map to the depot.  I'm only a little familiar with DF's modding, but I have a general understanding on how easily things like this crop in, and I know it's sometimes unavoidable for new versions of mods to be perfect and error-free.  That said, I just don't want to deal with yet another layer of little annoyances and problems to look up and fix.  DF is pretty full of that as it is.


I'll probably sound a bit like a dick for saying this, but I don't much like additional modded content much, because I view most as 'random junk some guy added because he thought it'd be cool'.  Most mods in most games I've tried is just bucketfuls of snazzy-sounding but shallow junk piled onto the base game with not much thought into how well it meshes with the various aspects of the game..particularly things such as altering the atmosphere of the game (I remember seeing screenshots of some feature in Masterwork, something about a crazy cultist dwarf praying to the carp god to destroy the fortress...it honestly made me cringe) and screwing with the logical progression of gameplay.  I'm just the kind of guy who's naturally hostile to significant mods in general. 

[Meph]

Most mods in most games I've tried is just bucketfuls of snazzy-sounding but shallow junk piled onto the base game with not much thought into how well it meshes with the various aspects of the game.

You would be surprised how well Total Conversion work in DF.

You played Masterwork probably somewhere around V.2... now its V.6 and has much advanced. Not saying that you would like it more, since it adds even more things, but they are more refined and there is way less bloat than you might expect. Its split into different races now, so each race gets different mechanics to play with. The cult, lovecraft inspired, is one of my favourite additions btw. Obviously not everyone likes it, as it is not only a crossover but also rather difficult to defeat, but thats why the mod has its GUI. The cult is optional, people can play without it.

But overall you say that the extra content feels out of place, which is fair. Its all made up by Not-Toady-One, and has many references to other intellectual properties, which automatically puts some people off.

I've played Masterwork a few times. It certainly adds a ton of content, and the content is very well-done. I don't really like the high-magic setting, though; it just doesn't seem right for a dwarven fortress.

Magic is optional. One click on a button, and no more magic altars or magic dwarves. But yes, this one and blackpowder were among the higher-ranking complaints of "out of place in DF" I have gotten over the years. I might outsource the magic to another race, and remove it from dwarves completely, in future updates.

Just got into masterwork, and I enjoy it a lot so far. Entirely for the change that comes from plaiyng a different race every game.

That is good to know. If I had to guess I'd say that at least 1/3 of the people play dwarves exclusively.

[Paphi]

I'm not a fan. I played v5, if memory serves.

I'll say first off I strongly dislike generic materials. I take pride in having my militia outfitted in forgotten beast or titan leather cloaks and hoods, and am especially fond of depictions of their death on items in their own leather or bone, and I micro moods to use their bits whenever possible.

The sheer volume of content puts me off as well. It would be one thing if it were all coherently managed, but the progression methods and cobbled-together nature of much of the content just makes it a headache to try and figure out what to do next. Add in content that you haven't made personally and crash-inducing conflicts tend to rear their ugly heads, which is what every one of my MW games invariably ended with.

I don't see any aim to MW, just a bunch of neat stuff in a pretty box.

[Vherid]

Over the years as I've played DF, I've always had continuously differing opinions of masterwork. Way back when MW was in it's early stages, I had been primarily playing genesis. I was bored with vanilla at that point and a new update wouldn't be out for a while. Now there was aspects of masterwork that I found interesting. I think it was mostly the magic related things, that was a newer thing and I never really wanted to mess with chocolate. However at it's early stages, I found it to be buggy and very inconsistent with what was included. Sure you could turn things on and off, but whats the fun in that? Either way though I found it bloated and just not all that well sorted out. I went back to genesis and enjoyed that for a while, especially once genesis started adding some light religion elements and etc, it was pretty cool.

Then came the whole masterwork super overhaul. The mod started to collect even more things, and while this wouldn't really help with the bloat in my mind, it added more interesting ideas such as starting to include more playable races such as the orks, and delving deeper into things such as religion and guilds. I played it for a while, I even stuck with it for a while and enjoyed it for a bit. Hell I was about to make a whole playable race for it.

Now a new update is out again and while I dick around in vanilla again until things stabilize, I feel that I'm not that into MW again. At it's current point I feel it's bloated again, and the overall combination of things from so many different people leads to it again being inconsistent with itself. It's the lack of a standardization. That's half the reason I don't really want to play any of the other races. It's also the same exact problem I have with the current version of the warhammer fantasy mod. Not to discredit the effort pulled by the creators, but when 10 people come together and all build chunks at different times with varying amounts of detail or completeness, it's very off putting to me. I understand you have gone through some overhauls to remove a lot of bloat and redundancy in the raws per say, but the overall feeling of playing the mod, it just feels off. In the old version it felt awry as well, something just wasn't right. Currently as it stands, theres nothing in there that really pulls me in. All of these new things were included, but I would say a handful of them are just flavor additions, and not mechanic additions. The rest that do add to mechanics, not all of them are as interesting as I may have hoped, and that's mostly because of the limitations we currently have as modders.

I don't see any aim to MW, just a bunch of neat stuff in a pretty box.

I agree, In a way it almost feels like it doesn't really have a specific direction or idea internally, but rather just the external idea of, put cool things in here. It's like a toy-chest.

Maybe it just has to do with the fact that, as it's own little fantasy world, it's not really how I envision things. For example, the drow, I don't really see that as how it should be for the elves, but thats my view of it. Though there are some things I do like still, for example, I think having battleboars instead of wardogs is pretty cool.

So in a way it really just comes down to, it's just not for me.

[Urist Da Vinci]

Likes:

- I am generally supportive of most modding. It is interesting to see what people can come up with. I generally custom-mod my own raws, occasionally borrowing aspects from various sources, sort of a +vanilla+. Nothing that really changes the game feel.

Dislikes:

- DFHack dependancy. In any game I play, mainstream or indy, I somewhat dislike modding that depends on external code. External content is fine. I suppose it would be OK if things would not break horribly in the absence of DFHack. It is a handy utility. Therapist-like things that run and then are gone are OK. RAW-only modders need some love and attention, and they have limits. People who can handle coding or robust scripting can really raise the bar and leave the others behind.

- Mods that use launchers (any game, mainstream or indy). A holdover from the doesn't-trust-exe-files days.

- All encompassing absorbing mod. Eater of small mods. I am a veteran of the Neverwinter Nights modding community, up until the implementation of the "Community Expansion Pack", a good description of which is here: http://www.neverwinternights.info/cep.htm . It was too large for my internet connection at the time, and quickly became nonoptional. You just had to download everything and then only use the parts that you actually wanted. Bloaty AND created this atmosphere in the community where people would use it and nothing else. Without any malice or conscious effort, it killed creativity that was not dedicated to its enhancement.

- Drow. Underground elves, especially if they are dark elves, allegedly evil, or use kewl weaponz. Falmer (i.e. elder scrolls/skyrim) were despisable but tolerable when dead.

[weegth]

I like new civs, overall modularity and "simple trees/meat/etc." options. However, new buildings, guilds, magic, etc. just add more bloat and micromanagement to an already somewhat bloated game. And even if I turn them off, some reactions still persist, bloating manager job list with a lot of stuff I can't even use. New armor is not very useful - not that it's bad, just there is very little noticeable difference between it and good old breastplate/high boots/etc. Also, if I turn off things like ore processor, there is still "metal-bearing rock" instead of ore - does it still give reduced results when smelting? If so, then it really shouldn't.
Overall, I would like to only enable new races/megabeasts/creatures/razing invaders/fear the night/fortress defense races/select few buildings like display case/exact reactions in still and have the rest of features off completely, with no new overly fancy metals or leftover reactions.
Oh, and a side note - timestream dfhack script is amazingly fun. But I wouldn't know it exists if not for masterwork.

[Nopenope]

Likes: I like how MW fills feature gaps, i.e. add stuff that's obviously missing and should be included in vanilla but hasn't been done due to the development scope. This includes features like the disease system, poison coating, the pantheon system, druidism, machinery, archaeology, etc.

I also like how it keeps up with dfhack development so I don't have to manually fetch every single plugin one by one if I want to test the latest features, which used to be a thing not so long ago.

Dislikes:
The animal revamp: it's just too confusing to have leatherwing bats and dew beetles and suchlike. First, they're not canon so it's "stuff someone thought would be cool", as someone in this thread said. Sure it's cool but it breaks the immersion and doesn't preserve the DF look-and-feel, which I believe was one of the avowed objectives of MDF. Second, you have to manually look up each and every animal to see what it does and completely change your management. Plus they're counter-intuitive. When you have turkeys, cats and dogs, you expect them to behave like turkeys, cats and dogs. Who the hell knows by heart how strong are boulder craps, how fast they breed, how much time they take to grow, etc.? At some point you stop treating leatherwing bats as actual bats and just see them as "flying leather generator", which is too gamey for my tastes.

Any non-canon mention of Armok in the game. Armok according to canon is the entity that generates, runs and reforges worlds, it's beyond worship and it certainly isn't equivalent to the procedurally generated gods. In my opinion "shrines to Armok" and such are cheap and don't respect the DF lore.

All workshops should be symmetrical. It doesn't make sense that you can only build some workshops from East to West or North to South. Also they should be 3x3 unless they represent extensive industries like siege engines, this would greatly simplify and reduce management pain and doesn't force the player to carefully dig every specific room for every specific workshop. Plus some of their requirements are absurdly difficult in comparison to most vanilla workshops which just require a block or a boulder. Most of these "specific workshops" don't have a mood associated to them either.

There are too many races. Since most of them are hostile it's just "generic enemy level 1", "generic enemy level 2", etc. with gimmicks, increasing difficulty and loot rewards. Since most of them are not canon they don't have an associated lore to them beyond generic stereotypes; they don't have associated sites or language files (as far as I know) and overall not as much thought put into them as for the canon races, which again breaks the immersion and doesn't preserve the DF look-and-feel; in other words I feel like I'm playing some weird LoTR spin-off instead of Slaves to Armok: Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress. Gnomes' features could very well be ported to Dwarves' without much loss, and Orcs are simply custom goblins. Succubi are just completely silly, even more silly than concubines in my opinion. I think you could cut the whole civilized races to Dwarves, Elves, Humans, Goblins, Kobolds without altering much of the actual content. Seriously, do we really need a whole civilization for Automatons or Frost Giants? Having them as megabeasts is fine; whole civilizations of them is just weird.

There are too many metals. Bloodsteel, bifrost, volcanic steel, etc. Again, they're not canon, and they're not realistic on top of that. I don't exactly know what I'm looking at when dealing with new materials. Microline I have a clear idea. Bismuth bronze? Sure thing, I can look it up. Now what the hell is bloodsteel? Steel with blood in it? Blood forged into steel? How do you set its melting point? What's its Young modulus? Why should it behave differently than volcanic steel? Realism is an important part of the game. Sure the vanilla game has adamantine, divine materials and whatnot, but they're hidden, are full of dangers and Toady has a long-term vision for them. Are you sure that you aren't going to scrap volcanic steel after a while?

Changelings and Djinns are way too silly to be casually embarked with. I know it's fun to randomly generate objects or creatures but it's yet another case of breaking the immersion. A smarter choice would be to have Djiins come up as rare animals or summons or something, and you could catch them and tame them.

Streamlining materials is too gamey to my tastes. Part of the whole game's charm is to be able to craft bolts from the forgotten beast's bones you've just slain.

The carp god doesn't belong to the game. Keep the community stories and bay12 references to the community and bay12.

In retrospect I realize I have been exceedingly harsh and I didn't expect my post to turn into a huge rant. Of course, you should know that we always notice what doesn't please us first, and this doesn't affect in the least the good features that have been added and mentioned above.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

- DFHack dependancy. In any game I play, mainstream or indy, I somewhat dislike modding that depends on external code. External content is fine. I suppose it would be OK if things would not break horribly in the absence of DFHack. It is a handy utility. Therapist-like things that run and then are gone are OK. RAW-only modders need some love and attention, and they have limits. People who can handle coding or robust scripting can really raise the bar and leave the others behind.

- All encompassing absorbing mod. Eater of small mods. I am a veteran of the Neverwinter Nights modding community, up until the implementation of the "Community Expansion Pack", a good description of which is here: http://www.neverwinternights.info/cep.htm . It was too large for my internet connection at the time, and quickly became nonoptional. You just had to download everything and then only use the parts that you actually wanted. Bloaty AND created this atmosphere in the community where people would use it and nothing else. Without any malice or conscious effort, it killed creativity that was not dedicated to its enhancement.

These two are big things for me.

On the former: This really applies to all the big mods out there, but at one point I had plans to do a rerelease of one of my mods, but then I saw the level that many of the other mods were doing, and it kinda pulled me back, especially since I was going to be changing it from an simple overlay mod to a total conversion.  With the scale that other mods were working at, I began to doubt that mine would really attract too much attention, since others have so much more.  I've tried a few times to go past the version 1.0 of my mod, but seeing the level of stuff others were doing always made me pull back and stop.  This problem has plagued me on the Xcom mod project I was trying to start up.

On the latter: With it being so large, it pretty much becomes the equivalent of a black hole, drawing to it many of the people who on a whim would want to try mods, then not wanting to try others due to there being so much that they can do.  While mods that are built based off of an existing franchise might not notice it as much, it deals a fair level of damage to mods where the creator is trying to develop original content.  I've had about 500 downloads of my mods df 34.11 final fixed state, which was made on October of 2012, and Masterwork has had over 100 in a day on just one of the mirrors.  While I can admit that this may be partially due to it being a more niche mod (playable dragons), it is the fourteenth most posted in topic on the Mod Releases sub-board, getting a few posts with gaps at worst being around 2 months.

I'm not saying I don't respect the level of work put into these type of mods, I really do.  It's just that they can easily outshine smaller mods who are trying to start up, possibly stunting their potential.  Maybe for some start-ups with unique concepts, there could be a post from the largely known modders with basically a 'Hey, check out this interesting thing.'  Maybe only a fragment will look at it, and only a fragment of those might stick around, but it would give the smaller modders a boost of confidence that a fair amount people are actually interested in the mod, which would drive them on to continue building it up, maybe even to the point their mod could be easily recognized.

That's just me.  I may be wrong on a few accounts, but that is how I view it at the current time.

[Orange Wizard]

I don't like Masterwork DF. The sheer amount of stuff that either doesn't make sense or just seems too fluffy has put me off.

I've also never played it, but I'll be prejudiced if I want to, damn it.

[Talvieno]

I'm honestly surprised I'm hearing so much negativity here. o.O Maybe General Discussion doesn't have much of the Masterwork crowd?

That said, Meph - you did remove my DF Rand Creatures from the new version, right? It doesn't play well (or at all) with 40.xx - not yet.

[Nopenope]

Before some people get offended at my discarding of most content in the game:

I'm not disparaging the work you've done. I'm not criticizing orcs or succubi themselves. I'm simply arguing that they don't belong to a mod whose original purpose was to expand the game while preserving its look-and-feel. Adding features that are missing like diseases is cool, but I don't think succubi are missing to everyone. Keep non-necessary features to a separate mod for people into that sort of thing, it'll make the mod lighter and overall less bloated.

[Meph]

I do not have time to answer everything atm, have to catch a flight, but one thing:

I'm honestly surprised I'm hearing so much negativity here. o.O Maybe General Discussion doesn't have much of the Masterwork crowd?

That said, Meph - you did remove my DF Rand Creatures from the new version, right? It doesn't play well (or at all) with 40.xx - not yet.

MDF is still on 34.11, and does include DF Rand Creatures. I need to wait for dfhack before I can update.

And please, keep it coming. Like I said, if you want to rant, rant. Negative feedback is still good, otherwise I wouldnt know what the change in future releases.

Ok, one other thing: ^^

I'm not disparaging the work you've done. I'm not criticizing orcs or succubi themselves. I'm simply arguing that they don't belong to a mod whose original purpose was to expand the game while preserving its look-and-feel. Adding features that are missing like diseases is cool, but I don't think succubi are missing to everyone. Keep non-necessary features to a separate mod for people into that sort of thing, it'll make the mod lighter and overall less bloated.

But Succubi, like any other playable race, have no influence on Dwarf Mode, in addition to being optional.