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Author Topic: What turns you off about DF?  (Read 313072 times)

James.Denholm

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Re: What turns you off about DF?
« Reply #1095 on: November 03, 2009, 06:37:46 pm »

I think I can summarise my initial experiences with Dwarf Fortress quite easily: If it wasn't for the wiki, I probably would have dropped the game fairly early on.

It's been said before, and we are no doubt all aware of it, but I'll say it again anyway: The initial experience of the player more or less defines if he is going to keep playing or not. If he finds the game confusing, he's almost certainly going to put the game in his mental "Too-hard basket" and move along to something else.

With this in mind, I've decided to write about what I believe the initial experience of the player should be. Some ideas shown here have already been posted on the thread, and I'll admit that these have been more-or-less stolen from those posts. I'd love to give credit to the creators of these ideas, but I can't remember who they are. That all got mixed-up during my sleep. Anyway, on with it all.

Keep in mind that I'm not suggesting that this all needs to be in the game immediately, this release. This post is all about the long-term. And it's only my opinion, I'm not trying to say that this the only way to do things.

First of all, we must remember that quite a few people that download DF won't be computer literate. At all. These are the kind of people that have never seen a compressed file before, and have no idea what to do with a zip or rar file, or even an exe file. Now, what I'm about to say is probably going to be met with extreme prejudice, and it won't be appropriate to implement before the 1.0 release, but I'll say it anyway: The game will need an installer. With shortcuts on the desktop and in start menus. For some people, that's the only thing that they've seen before. You give them an un-zipped copy of DF as it is now, and they won't know what to do with it. So it's essential that we get people actually into the game first off.

Of course, I'm not saying that these people are the majority, but there are a fair few of them. And we have to accommodate for everyone.

Anyway, the player starts up the game, but the first thing that they see isn't the into movie. As this is the  first time the game has been started, the game first asks if the player would like to go with the default ASCII, or an included, official tileset, possibly even recommending the tileset for new users. The game should also inform the player that they can switch between the two, or even install another tileset, at a later date.

Yes, I am an advocate of having an official, included, non-ASCII tileset. This may be a shock for some of you. But most people probably don't care. The points for and against an official tileset have already been stated by others, so I won't bore you by parroting them.

Then the user is hit by the awesomeness of the intro movie. Which is good, because it helps them see a little of what it's all about. Holes in mountains, dwarves, industry, war, and hidden fun stuff! Anyway, main menu appears, and half a second later so does a pop-up, welcoming the player, recommending the tutorial, which is pre-highlighted. Player presses enter, a little menu listing progressive parts of the tutorial. Perhaps the player cannot access part two without going through part one, but that's an idea for another discussion. Player chooses the first part, and a little pre-generated fort starts up. Someone suggested that most of the things (like everything from the chance of sieges down to dwarves needing food and booze) should be disabled, another said that most of the menus should be disabled and inaccessible, and yet someone else suggested only having one dwarf (I believe he suggested someone called a "prospector"). Let's discuss this.

First of all, the disabling of game features. If the player is trying to follow the tutorial, it's going to become very confusing and annoying if he is continually hampered by dwarves taking breaks, or even eating and sleeping, until such things are actually introduced by the tutorial. Until the tutorial introduces it, even things as basic as dwarven emotions should be disabled, so the fort can't possibly collapse into a tantrum spiral. Or even (especially very early on) disabling attacks  On this note, perhaps introducing things through scripted events are a good idea. Like fey moods - Somewhere late in the overall tutorial, perhaps after crafts and trades, the game announces that a peasant has been taken by a classical, garden variety fey mood, which itself is actually. The tutorial pop-ups then babies the player through the process of ensuring the dwarf has the materials he needs ("Oh, it looks like he wants metal. Remember that hematite vein we saw before? Go mine some of it out, and smelt it into iron bars."), and once the artefact has been made, start covering artefacts and their use, and possibly keeping them safe from thieves.

Secondly, the disabling of menus. There's nothing worse for a new player than to be deserted by the tutorial after accidently going into some menu or mode that you don't know get out of, screaming at the screen "WHAT THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO DO!" I've been there, and it's incredibly aggravating, and every time it's happened to me in any game that I've just started learning I've tended to just kill the process and move on to something else. It has happened to me while playing DF, but usually it tended to happen after I had gotten over the learning curve, and fortunately most of the menus already tell you how to get out of them. Still, there's no point letting a new player get lost in military squad screens before that's all introduced from him.

Thirdly is the idea of cutting down the number of dwarves early in the tutorial. The main point behind this, I think, is to give the player less to think about, and less to keep track of. I mean, when you go through the first tutorial of Age of Empires, you aren't given a fifty-man army to go from point to point with. You're given four or five guys, max. You only start to see large numbers of people later, when things like formations are introduced.

Eventually, after the player has learnt most of the essentials, the game should run through genning a world, choosing an embark site, perhaps even creating an embark profile. There's no point in a player going through the entire tutorial and then getting lost on the embark screen.

Finally, after all that, it would probably be a good idea to point the player to the wiki, in case they want to know something specific (like the material value of granite), or another perspective, or even just to be part of the community.

I'm sure there are other ideas out there regarding the possibility of tutorials, and I'm sure that some of them are probably as good or even better, but this is just my interpretation of the ideas of other's and my own personal "vision".
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N3X15

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Re: What turns you off about DF?
« Reply #1096 on: November 03, 2009, 09:50:40 pm »

I've been playing this for a year now, and my biggest gripes right now deal mostly with the completely retarded dwarf psychology.

  • Goblin kills dwarf during seige
  • Dwarves repel goblins
  • Dwarves begin going crazy DESPITE ABUNDANCE OF WELLS, STATUE GARDENS, FOOD, AND DRINK
  • Dwarves all kill each other or go crazy.
  • Lose fort

This is counter-intuitive, as dwarves are usually portrayed as tough-as-nails warriors, not elves sensitive, emotional beings.  Might as well bring some cyanide with me on the next damn fort.

Another problem is the tileset, or lackthereof.  I am personally used to the ASCII tileset, but it would sure make it easier for new players to get involved.
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Skooma

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Re: What turns you off about DF?
« Reply #1097 on: November 04, 2009, 01:44:24 am »

The eyestrain I get from playing for hours and the studying that doesn't get done.

Also that 80 dwarves or so make the game's time keeping slow to a crawl. It seems like I've played as long as I have for 4 in game years and I have for 1 once I got a lot of migrants. That doesn't leave a lot of frame rate for projects with running water.
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Poojawa

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Re: What turns you off about DF?
« Reply #1098 on: November 04, 2009, 08:07:05 am »

My first experience with DF was about the same time Boatmurdered started (but I hadn't read the jewel)

My first reactions was: 'Uhh.... what?' as I saw a blue thingy zoom off and start pulling green thingies out of this blue moving thingy...

I tried, tried so hard >.>

Put it down, left it on my harddrive for a year or so, then decided to crack at it again, this time with the wiki! (Thank you people who made that <3 ) And I began the painful learning of ASCII. I find myself adapting to that language better than any other important real life one I've tried to learn so far

I assume that I only get bored with fortresses because it seems that the goblins are *never* at war with the dwarves, seriously. Though I think one of these days I'll throw in the Ork mod.
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Rozenbuddy

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Re: What turns you off about DF?
« Reply #1099 on: November 09, 2009, 10:22:58 am »

I don't like the fact above-ground forts are nearly impossible to build, mostly because, it takes about 30 something wooden logs to build a compressed 5x5 house with a roof, not including furniture. You'd have to flatten a mountain just to get decent walls. This restricts you to the under-ground wasteland. Of course, unless you feel like elfing it. I just get so tired of being bound to the ground... I want to be free!
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PermanentInk

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Re: What turns you off about DF?
« Reply #1100 on: November 09, 2009, 11:48:21 am »

I don't like the fact above-ground forts are nearly impossible to build, mostly because, it takes about 30 something wooden logs to build a compressed 5x5 house with a roof, not including furniture. You'd have to flatten a mountain just to get decent walls. This restricts you to the under-ground wasteland. Of course, unless you feel like elfing it. I just get so tired of being bound to the ground... I want to be free!

And you call yourself a dwarf.
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Footkerchief

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Re: What turns you off about DF?
« Reply #1101 on: November 09, 2009, 11:58:07 am »

I don't like the fact above-ground forts are nearly impossible to build, mostly because, it takes about 30 something wooden logs to build a compressed 5x5 house with a roof, not including furniture. You'd have to flatten a mountain just to get decent walls. This restricts you to the under-ground wasteland. Of course, unless you feel like elfing it. I just get so tired of being bound to the ground... I want to be free!

Uh, people do it all the time.  You don't need to "flatten a mountain," you just need a quarry nearby.
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Andir

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Re: What turns you off about DF?
« Reply #1102 on: November 09, 2009, 01:26:53 pm »

I don't like the fact above-ground forts are nearly impossible to build, mostly because, it takes about 30 something wooden logs to build a compressed 5x5 house with a roof, not including furniture. You'd have to flatten a mountain just to get decent walls. This restricts you to the under-ground wasteland. Of course, unless you feel like elfing it. I just get so tired of being bound to the ground... I want to be free!

Uh, people do it all the time.  You don't need to "flatten a mountain," you just need a quarry nearby.
Or use the underground for your resource.  You could start up one of them... oh, what do they call that... mining operations... to get stone from the ground.

Now, I'll admit that it takes 3-10 times as long to built up than it does to dig down, but that's do to the nature that mining isn't slow or laborious and constructions can take at least 2 professions where digging takes one.
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Durin

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Re: What turns you off about DF?
« Reply #1103 on: November 09, 2009, 03:01:53 pm »

You can definitely build above ground.  That's what mega projects are all about!   ;D

It is unrealistic that they make it easier to dig than to build, but then, this is about dwarves after all.  Just pretend they have an innate skill with the underground and ummmm... lobby for different build vs. mine speeds for above ground races?
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PermanentInk

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Re: What turns you off about DF?
« Reply #1104 on: November 09, 2009, 03:53:05 pm »

I think hauling is the pivotal difference between underground and above-ground construction.  If dwarves didn't have to take so many trips to get rocks/wood/blocks from where they're quarried/cut/shaped to the construction site, the difference would be vastly less.  Another consideration is the current simplification of mining, because of course it doesn't make sense that you can mine out all that stone and be left with just a little rock on the ground that anyone could carry.  Making mining more realistic than this would be tremendously user-hostile at present, but if we get things like mine carts and wheelbarrows and saddlebags and mule carts and so on, this would be a more viable direction.
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kjhvsadf

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Re: What turns you off about DF?
« Reply #1105 on: November 09, 2009, 06:20:29 pm »

I was going to post a new topic but this will do...

Why isn't there an actual warning that when you abandon fortress, you can never reload it again?
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Footkerchief

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Re: What turns you off about DF?
« Reply #1106 on: November 09, 2009, 06:29:14 pm »

What did you think "abandon" meant?  Anyway, there is a way to reload it.  It's called reclaiming a fortress.  It has some odd bugs but it works.
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Durin

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Re: What turns you off about DF?
« Reply #1107 on: November 09, 2009, 06:39:29 pm »

I was going to post a new topic but this will do...

Why isn't there an actual warning that when you abandon fortress, you can never reload it again?
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?

Thought there was...  Anyhow, for future reference (sorry, too little too late I am sure) you can copy the save to a different folder beforehand, load it into an entirely separate file tree of DF, open it from that separate file tree and abandon it there.  The original will still work on your original DF file tree.

That's how I go about getting a detailed look at my fort history.  Engravings are awesome and all, but after having to read the same ones 20 times to get to the new ones, it gets BOOO-riiiiing.

My own personal gripe is tied to the interface.  There are just too many things that have little tiny exceptions that break the normal flow of the game.  For instance, I have a lot of stuff set to dump now.  No one is dumping it.  I will now proceed to search the wiki and ask on the forums, but the bottom line is that the difference between a dump ZONE and a refuse STOCKPILE is rather arbitrary, and the function of each, and the interplay between the two is downright arcane.  Add to that the fact that a properly formatted dump zone can preserve infinite amounts of stuff forever, and what you have basically is a very old bug no one ever got around to fixing because it helps fix yet another annoying aspect of the game -- clutter.  It's entirely too difficult to organize.

Why in God's name is a rock bin not allowed???  That would 99% fix the whole issue.

Also, water is entirely too rare and hard to find.  If you are going to make it as important as it is to the healing process, make it importable and or easy to find.  Real aquifers tend to be deep and more or less accessible from anywhere, not just below the immediate surface and only in specific biomes if they exist at all.  It's a challenge, yes, but it is also dumb. 

Also, since you can cheat and make your whole world volcanic etc for the purposes of making it more likely to find running water, lava, and adamantine all on one map, why not just have a screen at world gen that automatically makes a plot of the size and with the qualities that someone wants, plant it randomly on the map, then build around it.  That way you do not have to either make your entire planet into Vulcan or go through 3-8 world gens to be sure you get a map you want.

Just silly stuff like that.

My tone always comes out more angry than I actually am... sowwies!  Um.. Good work guys!!!!
« Last Edit: November 09, 2009, 06:44:44 pm by Durin »
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G-Flex

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Re: What turns you off about DF?
« Reply #1108 on: November 09, 2009, 06:47:50 pm »

Finding water? Difficult? Almost all locations have murky pools that refill when it rains, brooks are all over the place, and aquifers are all over the place as well. The fact that murky pools can become refilled now means that there are actually rather few places you can't find a source of water easily. Not to mention underground pools/rivers, of course.
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Neonivek

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Re: What turns you off about DF?
« Reply #1109 on: November 09, 2009, 06:50:00 pm »

Well, sure Murky Pools!

But arn't they poisonous? And technically hard to get to unless you put a well ontop of them?

Aquifiers unless you use tricks are useless and inhibiting.
« Last Edit: November 09, 2009, 06:55:57 pm by Neonivek »
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