Looking through the lens of someone who plays RPGs, it’s terrible, because you don’t feel like you’re inhabiting a person with an overarching life path or quest path. Not that you want to force a story down someone’s throat but just that you felt like you’ve changed the world.
THIS! Exactly the main reason why I don't play fort mode!
Actually, Toady was talking about how
ADVENTURE MODE is terrible for people who only play RPGs because it doesn't let you feel like you're inhabiting the life of a real person yet.
What I think makes df adventure mode more unique then say, skyrim, is the fact that the world is quite literally alive as you play, there are actual wars happening in the background you can get involved with new sites being built and such. Its not fully there..(like titans arent wandering about destroying everything as they should, merchants dont move around yet) But its getting there.
For example the monsters don't just sit in their lairs anymore, they actually wander about the world and do things, the bandits are actively robbing people in the streets the game doesn't just "tell" you they are and they can even mug you and you can watch them mug other people.
You can also join any faction regardless, want to be bandit, go ahead join them as a lieutenant,A performer you say? Join em. that kind of thing. No plot restriction. And being stuck in a dungeon in say, nethack IS a plot restriction.
Actually, though I was lacking in motivation to do so, I noted that it was entirely possible to actually do something like this through modding in Skyrim. There already were things like mines that were filled with undead, but if you cleared them out, miners would go back into them. You could, with some work, fill the world with more NPCs, and have territory that you could gain or lose for cities, and tie the local economy to how many forests/mines/farms you had liberated...
Also, I mentioned this in the FotF thread, but you might want to look into Elona, which I find a really nutty but fun roguelike. Elona's performer skill doesn't involve making up dance moves, but
it can be quite funny, nonetheless. It has a total opposite sort of philosophy from Dwarf Fortress in that it proudly has zero sanity checks. (You can play as a "male" golem, have a "male" robot ally that you romance, and produce children with... somehow. Virtually any creature in the game you can manage to take as an "ally", including skeletons, ghosts, robots, fire elementals, and various other inorganic creatures can also be put on a ranch in order to breed that species of monster, as well as produce eggs, milk, and manure. Again, including males, and also human mercenaries you hire.)
Anyway, as a sandbox, I still think Elona is a better game than the current iteration of Dwarf Fortress, because things might happen, but they have little to no meaning in the Gray Goo that DF tends to create at this point. (I've mentioned before that I actually don't like killing vampires and such in adventure mode now, because that means there's one less actually unique and interesting character in the world...)
The main problem is that Adventure Mode right now lacks any sort of goal you can really set for yourself that has any sort of meaningful build-up, climax, and resolution. In Elona, just because I'm already using that example, I have train-through-use skills that could not only take me tens of thousands of hours to ever reach "skill cap" after 2000 level ups, but skills gain experience on a "potential" system that multiplies exp, and is multiplied by 0.9 after every skill level up, requiring spending platinum coins, gained as quest rewards or at the bottom floor of dungeons, to replenish. This incentivizes going for quests or dungeons as a way of multiplying skill gain, even with non-combat skills like performer or farmer because you need them to keep your skill gain growing at non-teeth-pullingly-slow levels. (Although there are performer quests and farmer quests like "Party Time!" (satisfy enough party-goers with perform skill before the time runs out) or "Harvest Time".)
In Elona, I can also build up towards buying my own house, mansion, or castle, and rearrange the landscape as I see fit inside. I can purchase shops, and sell my excess equipment inside if I leave an ally behind as a shopkeeper. My allies level skills through training I can control, and there are people who defeat the "final boss" monster using nothing but the "Little Girl" npc you can recruit early in the game, trained up to monstrous strength.
In Dwarf Fortress, I can train my swimming by setting a macro to swim back and forth over and over until I get hungry and thirsty, eat, drink, sleep, and set it to go again until I hit legendary swimmer. It takes 20 minutes of reading a book in the other room while the macro works its magic, or more if I'm less attentive.
I can go around killing things, but why? The game has few enough points of interest as it is without murdering everything that makes a few patches of terrain interesting until it all becomes Gray Goo... And it's not like killing things brings about anything of interest. Yay, I get to spread rumors of my murderousness, and that invisibly raises some sort of respect meter (or fear meter, who knows?!) in a way that is never particularly well-expressed by the people around me.
I can conquer a city, but why? Nothing changes but an invisible ownership flag and the capacity to get followers that don't actually follow me.
I haven't played 0.42.x yet, so I haven't done bard things, but I can't say that playing just to make my own band creates any such long-term goals or verisimilitude. I can make up my own song, yay, but it's meaningless procedural word placement without any sort of capacity to have that new song interact with the world in a meaningful way.
Even if we had a system to make it possible to buy low and sell high at this point, would it matter? There's
nothing to buy with money in this game. Nobody sells anything you could want besides food, which is
generally available in overabundant quantities free for the taking.
So, yes, I've played as an adventurer, but all I've done is be a tourist in a city, looking around the placement of buildings (and most of the time, they were
abandoned buildings
taken over by tables...)
Eventually, there will be a procedural world robust enough, and with things like mansions you can buy and decorate that would make it worth playing to me... although when I'm playing as a property manager and trader, then I'm honestly more playing Fortress Mode in a slower version than it's current state than an "Adventurer".
All of this hinges upon being able to set up meaningful AI reactions to a far broader range of inputs than currently exist and procedural conversations, which would be of benefit to either mode. Toady does many things well, but AI is one of his weak points, and I fear it will be many years yet before it really gets polished enough to shine.
Until then, I'm playing fortress mode, because I can set real long-term goals for myself in fortress mode, and there are no meaningful impacts I can have upon the world in the current version of adventurer mode that keep me playing.
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Topic: Why isn't Adventurer Mode the "main" Dwarf Fortress mode? (Read 24438 times)