Well what else can we do, as "consumers" here? We have a dev that's willing to talk with us which seems a lot more productive than simply making silly demands like that. I understand the point you're making, but it's better than waiting around twiddling my thumbs.
I agree with you in theory, but we've already had this conversation. In depth. So taking Toady's time away from the game is actually considerably less productive than twiddling your thumbs.
Here's the deal. Toady seems to be slowing down.
um... not really? Have you been reading dev_now? Keep in mind that Toady is only one person, and cannot - at least theoretically - produce as fast as a full team, so your normal expectations may be inaccurate.
The last time he's answered any FotF questions was close to 3 weeks ago.
Can't fault you here. I too, am saddened by the long wait on questions. I will pont out that it has little to do with your overall point, however.
It took halfway through October to even green out some items on the dev list.
He greened out quite a few at once. Had it been only one item, your concern here could be merited, but he greened quite a bit of stuff. Even if it had been only a single thing, it's quite probable that dev_now would have record of why.
Donations are only going to get slimmer as we get farther away.
In theory this is true, but in practice, not so much. Toady's monthly donations seem to be holding approximately steady. While they aren't holding steady at any particularly high number, Toady hasn't, to my knowledge, complained of financial troubles, so we can only assume it's enough.
People are only going to get more frustrated and abandon the project as well, and not all of them are going to come back even when it's eventually released.
Again, while this is theoretically true, it is not actually what we see happening. We can probably attribute quite a bit of this to the strength of the community; modders allow for new content, and the only thing awesomer than your new megaproject is taking a picture of it with VisualFortress and showing everybody.
However, the main factor here is that Dwarf Fortress is a good game. There are games that, years or decades later, people will still love, and will occasionally take for another spin, simply because they are awesome. If a game is good, development becomes irrelevant. Dwarf Fortress, even as an alpha, is of that quality. We can only imagine how awesome the completed version will be.
These things are important, and I'm wondering how Toady plans on dealing with those issues and others now and in the future.
I imagine he plans to keep doing the same thing as he has been; working on DF.
Honestly, this story is VERY similar to what happened (and his happening) to Killing Floor, a game available on Steam. I'll spoiler tag it as it's not 100% relevant to the greater topic at hand.
It was a cheap and pretty unpolished game, but a lot of people enjoyed it. It had a few fatal flaws that held it back that Tripwire, the developer, promised it planned on fixing. There was one patch, a free DLC patch with new weapons and perks and the like, that had a release date very similar to this one. The devs kept dancing around an actual release date and instead made vague goals they never lived up to. Eventually people just stopped playing. The update eventually released, some came back for a few days...then left again.
I was in love with KF, as were my friends. None of us play it anymore. We've moved on. We were tired of waiting.
KF is releasing another big update just this weekend. They really want to push it and are planning to actually offer the game for FREE this weekend to entice people to buy it. But my friends? They don't really care, and a lot of people were really annoyed at the developers which tainted their view of the game. I doubt any of them will play KF again.
That's different, bro. The Dev team were not subsisting off of donations; they already got payed when you bought the game. They didn't post updates of what they were actually doing. It was a post-release game, rather than an alpha in which pretty much everything is a placeholder.
And most importantly, it was not nearly as good a game as DF. Dwarf Fortress may have a bit of a niche audience, but the niche loves it. Such is the nature of long-unsatisfied niches.
edit: I swear my posts are going through some sort of "hate filter" before people are reading them, as this is the second time in as many days that someone has thought I was getting worked up on this forum. People can have disagreements, discussions, whatever you want to call them, online (and in real life!) without being angry or upset. I don't think I or Footkerchief, even with his original post (which was 100% fine) are upset with one another or bickering. Yeah, we probably disagree or he thinks I'm being silly or whatever, but that's alright. People are allowed to disagree with each other, and I think we're all doing it in a calm, rational way!
It's not because you're disagreeing, it's because you're being very negative without inducing any positivity. It happens to me too. Such is the danger of focusing on things you feel need attention. I was pretty negative about your post just now, but just setting stuff straight. So it goes.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items (Read 3657650 times)