I didn't know Dwarf Fortress' demographic was 12-year-old girls. Oh wait, even Barbie Horse Adventures has you shoveling shit. And it doesn't look like this either:
@
I just find it dubious people would get their knickers in a twist over dwarves pooping in a game they probably picked up because they heard stories of babies being used as weapons
So, you're saying we should try to make DF more like Barbie Horse adventures?
Seriously though, dead babies are tragic comedy, while sewage is just bathroom humor.
Moreover, baby deaths are something the player is intended to try to prevent, while dwarves needing the toilet is probably something that he should allow for, if possible. Most platforming games feature falling to your death as a major game element, but if someone made a game where the player commits suicide by jumping off a bridge, that would still be distasteful.
However, when it comes to materials, DF is pretty taste neutral. Are you ready to defend this when the procedural world takes it to the logical extreme and starts creating creatures with sewage for blood?
Ok... so the Sims can piss themselves (and seem to do so fairly often) but DF can't have proper sewage without people worrying about grossing out the public? Really?
Actually, The Sims took some bad press from this exact issue themselves, but it was overshadowed by the controversy over all the sex and adultery(which naturally boosted sales).
EA has a large enough marketing department that they can weather things like that with ease.
Bay12 Games relies mostly on word of mouth, and thus has a pressing need to generate only positive buzz.
All that said, I do have something positive to add:
Instead of a
just simple [POOP:ON/OFF] switch, I think the matter just needs to be handled with care and taste.
To this end, I make four suggestions:
1. Handle waste with taste, even when it's turned on. There are people who want to see coprophilia and coprophagia in DF, but I think they are a small minority, and we would mostly much rather just have a sewer full of sewage, without anyone needing to do anything weird with it. The game is moddable enough that you can add the stuff to it, if you're creative, there's no need for Vanilla DF to cater to that crowd, specifically.
2. The biological waste material(s) should be tagged somehow, to prevent the game from using it in procedural processes. This prevents a lot of weirdness that would be pretty immersion-breaking anyway. Those wanting to see crap golems, elf pee rain, urine men, waste trees, manure titans and sewage gods can simply remove the tags.
3. A little abstraction goes a long way. Designing a sewage treatment plant made out of stone is a fun problem, and detailed information on what type of sewage is moving through it doesn't help any. It's been said before, but we don't need to know
exactly what Urist put in the bucket, only that the bucket needs to be emptied into a sewer.
4. Give people a chance to get used to the idea of sewage being around, before you expand on the concept. Dwarves pooping in designated recepticles is a lot easier to accept than mules pooping on the dining room floor. Manure is a valuable source of fuel and fertilizer, and tanners probably use it, but just start with stuff that flows downhill and stinks. Once that fails to end the world, people will be ready to see more.
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Topic: Feces and Urine (Read 36262 times)