I'm sort of disappointed to see that the people who really, genuinely don't care what color Urist's left eye is are so off-handedly dismissed as being myopic by some of the posters here, but what the hell. Here's my two bits.
You're picking one of the most inconsequential parts of the new body system to criticize. There's a lot more to it than eye color, so you're telling us nothing.
The lack of interesting things to do for players with a "gamer" orientation rather than a "simulationist" orientation once you get comfortable with the game is a huge turnoff for me right now.
Of course it's annoying. Nobody's ever going to deny that. The problem is that, in order for more real gameplay aspects to get developed, the framework BEHIND them needs to be developed, or else Toady winds up just pulling things out his ass, which ends up wasting time because they'd just end up being placeholders for the real thing anyhow.
Even using self-imposed limits -- my last fortress was completely open-air design with no walls, no traps, no farming, and no shields or armor -- once you get the hang of the game any given fort ends up being pretty damn dull after 5 or 6 years. Invaders seem to run out, chasm and lava critters get exterminated, dwarves become stupidly happy over trivial things, and generally it reaches a point where you can quite literally walk away from the keyboard, stop back in to undo the auto-pauses once in a while and order in some more booze production, and the fort will hum on merrily for years with almost zero intervention.
No arguments there, from anyone as far as I know, and it's not like any of this is planned to STAY this way. The next version is going to see things like chasm/magma pipe critters entering the fortress map through those features, so you can no longer just clear out a chasm and be all set to do with it as you please, for example.
It's good that a lot of these things have either been tweaked already or are on the radar to be fixed, but until they are fixed, the appeal of the game is being limited.
Fair enough, and I agree. The thing is that, like I said, it's not as if Toady can just spend a single weekend plowing through all of those. "Make the game better" isn't on the dev list, and development for a game with the level of intended simulation of this one takes a long, long time, as I'm sure you've noticed.
The fact that all the simulationist stuff is hidden away where I don't have to pay attention to it unless I get curious is great, but it also means that there's been very few changes that are visible to someone (like me) who doesn't leaf through every description and history entry as a matter of course, and even fewer that I actually care about. I mean, do you really care about the state of the teeth and beard of every one of your 100+ digital dwarves?
Things like scars and missing teeth (aside from maybe some very minor functional effects) add flavor to dwarves. Yes, I personally do care if my battle-hardened general dwarf is full of scars and has a missing tooth and eye, even if the gameplay ramifications of it are rather minor.
I'd love to see an "Arcade mode" where it just generates enough random terrain for a single fort, abstracts out the entire world past the fortress map borders, and just keeps throwing more and more crap at you faster and faster until your fort collapses.
Honestly, then, you're asking for a
different game. The objective of DF is to simulate a world. The reason that such an "arcade mode" seems so appealing is because you aren't looking far enough into the future, where, ideally, the game will have you actually DEALING with the foreign civilizations/sites, sending people there, etc.
I don't need to know -- and really kind of don't care -- that the goblins are attacking because the demon got attacked by an elf that was enslaved by a dwarf (who had a brown beard that was unevenly cut and was missing his right incisor) that was kidnapped but rescued by those sames goblins 300 years ago.
But, like I've been trying to say for a few posts now, you WILL need to care once this framework gets developed more and you're actually sending armies out TO those sites, are AFFECTING/starting those wars, dealing with those historical figures, etc. These things aren't even terribly far down the development line; the Army Arc is relatively close at hand.
We got dwarves (all of whom look dwarf-ish), we got goblins (all of whom look goblin-ish), goblins attack dwarves because that's what they do, and we can move on from there to seeing just how long I can hold out against ever-larger waves of successively more pissed off and better armed goblins + friends.
I think I've made a good case already for how the game is moving in a direction far more complicated than that, and why that's a good thing.
Again, the only reason you're clamoring about these features you don't care about is because you don't yet know why you would care about them. Read dev_next or something and look at the kind of stuff you'll be able to do with it once the army arc is done. You'll have your world interaction, wars and civs will actually matter substantially, and more long-term dangers/goals for a fortress will be present.
I agree with 'change name please' that development is too oriented towards 'fluff' and not on core game play improving and blindingly obvious fixes/balance of already present features.
You're committing the exact same fallacy that tourrettedog is. You're assuming the the "fluff" has no gameplay relevance due to short-sightedness. You have to keep in mind the kind of gameplay it's going to make possible in the near future.
In effect, it's as if someone built a pool in the backyard of your house, you're yelling at them for digging a pointless hole instead of building you a swingset or something else fun instead, and not realizing that hey, they needed to dig that hole because they're going to fill it with water soon and you're actually going to be able to swim in it.