Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Toboter]

Dwarf Fortress is a game that requires a large time investment. You can easily play a fortress for tens of hours, and probably will.

But I think the fact that the game can just kill you semi-randomly so easily might turn out to be a real problem for the Steam version, and the wider audience it brings. Things like invasions, were-beast problems, the terrors below and tantrum spirals. There's of course an established way to circumvent that problem: Save scumming. And indeed, a significant part of the community would consider turning back time on fortress death by loading an old save, or at least keeping yourself the option open if the death was completely accidental, an important part of playing the game.

But new players probably wouldn't know about that option, and might get frustrated when they die from accidentally digging too deep or something similar. So my suggestion is this: Add a "load last save" button to the fortress death screen, along a "retire fortress" (or whatever it currently is) button, that just reloads the fortress from the existing save file. I think that would be an easy way to (in a lot of cases), give new players a chance to retry a difficult challenge, without having to build another fortress for five hours - time not everyone can or wants to spare.

Because the true soul of dwarf fortress is to have your hard work live on in an everchanging world. Not just having it disintegrate randomly because you accidentally left a difficult to see hole in some wall somewhere.

[Mr Crabman]

Because the true soul of dwarf fortress is to have your hard work live on in an everchanging world. Not just having it disintegrate randomly because you accidentally left a difficult to see hole in some wall somewhere.

But it does live on; you can reclaim a destroyed fortress, and even if you don't, it still exists in that world, and the consequences of its former existence live on and spill throughout the history of the world. What you're suggesting isn't really conducive to this "true soul" you describe (of it being everchanging), it's being adverse to it changing, and would likely discourage people from doing more than one fortress (or even adventurer) per world.

Allowing saving without quitting, and seasonal auto-saves being on by default, are maybe good to do just in case of crashes, but having a built-in "reload last save" button is going too far I think.

[Toboter]

I get where you're comeing from, but if you reclaim you still loose all your dwarves and lifestock and potentially will have an infested fortress to deal with. That's many many hours of work just lost that you have to go through all over, and unless you are the kind of person that's okay with just loosing that much to dumb chance or something you couldn't have known, you will just quit DF, or quit the world and start over completely. And neither is conducive to the "sould of DF". And if you are that kind of person... just ignore the "reload last save" button.

Most people don't like just having hours of work randomly killed of forever, or having the ruins of those frustrating occurences forever on the map. If you want the general player to keep their world, you first have to give them the opportunity to suceed in it, and that's just not that likely without save reloads.

[crundle_bone_earring]

Gonna have to stronlgy disagree with that. There's a reason why "losing is fun" has been the community's motto for years: The process of having your fortress destroyed is as engaging as building it up. Dwarf Fortress is a game about stories, and how they end is every bit as important as how they start. Having the valiant defense your dwarfs held during a siege or the tragedy of a flood invalidated because you can just press a button and pretend it never happened goes against the whole design philosophy, and that after all those years we still don't have this function in the base game tell me Toady also doesn't want it. The game doesn't have any win condition, you are very much expected to die sooner or later.
Besides, i don't think a casual audience would be that opposed to it: roguelikes and the like have been on the rise, as of late. If there's a warning during the tutorial telling that death is permanent, im sure most people would be fine. Besides, abandoning the original design of a game to appeal to the "casual audience" is a good way to lose both the audience you already had and the new one you were trying to appeal to.

[Toboter]

The vast majority of rogue likes only have about 2 hours round time max. A DF fort can easily take ten times that time, so the loss hurts a lot more.
Also, the game has a win condition. Reaching your goals and retiring undefeated. If you just die you leave nothing in the world but a dead ruin, which is objectively more boring. And a lot of people are already save scumming, so clearly a lot of the current audience are okay with it. Especially since the game can just kill your fort via a bug or something, which is no fun for anyone

[Mobbstar]

Also, the game has a win condition. Reaching your goals and retiring undefeated.

"Reaching your goals" is not a win condition.

Especially since the game can just kill your fort via a bug or something, which is no fun for anyone

Sounds like, instead of making some in-game backup system, Toady should fix the initial frustration of that bug or something.

Backups make death meaningless, ergo boring at best and frustrating at worst.

[IndigoFenix]

It is not how the game is meant to be played, but it's not like it's that hard to do anyway, via DFHack or simply closing DF with the task manager.  I think it should be a worldgen option to make things more convenient for players who would just cheat anyway, but should not be on by default.

[Mr Crabman]

It is not how the game is meant to be played, but it's not like it's that hard to do anyway, via DFHack or simply closing DF with the task manager.  I think it should be a worldgen option to make things more convenient for players who would just cheat anyway, but should not be on by default.

If it were to be a worldgen option, I'd say it should be in advanced-worldgen specifically, not via the normal worldgen. It's really not something that should be encouraged by leaving it as a normal option even if it's off by default.