Hi people, I joined the forums in order to post my thoughts in this thread, having read it through. First, I think it's legitimate to split concerns into short-term and long-term ones. The former are what are actually useful for the thread, but everyone likes a good moan, so sadly for Toady and Threetoe, the latter will be injected regardless!
Short Term/Initial Attention keepingWhat turned me off the very first time I came across DF was the graphics. I'd like to boast about what a hardcore gamer I am and stuff, but ASCII has never done it for me, even when I was a wee bairn who could barely see the monitor over the keyboard. Using Mayday is a big help - not just because it's visually more pleasing to me, but because there's more information, more easily and readily available. Having listened to Toady's recent interview I appreciate the rationale for not 'contracting' graphics out to others, but I would certainly encourage including either a tileset direct, or links to them, included in the game.
Having happened across graphics that worked for me, the next stumbling block was the sheer complexity of the game. More accurately the obtuse nature of it all. It's inevitable that, specialized tutorials aside, DF is going to be highly complex from the word go. There's nothing to be done about that; it is the nature of the beast. However, the wealth of options before me, combined with a near-total lack of understanding of how everything worked together, was a huge obstacle. I did have the wiki but even so it was fairly tough going until I came across captnduck's videos via Rock Paper Shotgun. I started to get the hang of things much better after that, but I still followed through TinyPirate's tutorial (The provision of a save, which you can play along with, is pretty much as good a tut as you're going to get). Using both tuts AND the wiki, I've learnt enough about the game to get things done fairly fast. People who don't automatically assume that there will BE a wiki and seek one out out of habit might not do so well.
Even so, there's a lot that could be done in-game. A line of help/info text for things would be a great start, along the lines of the aforesaid suggestions like "This is a Carpenter's workshop. Wooden logs are turned into furniture and other items here. Using it requires the Carpentry skill". "To place a bed, you need to have a Carpenter make one from wooden logs at the Carpenter's Workship." etc. etc. I feel that this would help significantly - these things don't have to be long. Just "This is X. It does Y. It needs Z to do it." would be a hugely helpful step for newbies to start getting their bearings.
The UI is the bane of all DF player's existence. Despite having played the game a lot (more than I ought to have thank you very much Toady One it's not like I have a degree to earn or anything
) it's still fairly difficult to navigate through. The major failing here is that not only are things often counterintuitive, but that they change from menu to menu. Now, obviously DF is no twitch game, and orders pause the game so there's no time pressure at all there, but establishing a simple, intuitive, or at least learnable system would be a major help. Scrolling through menus should be the same everywhere. Exiting screens should be the same everywhere. There are some convoluted things which I understand the reasoning behind. If your Dwarf's in a workshop, it's probably easier having different keys to select each than to be fiddly and try to choose between them. Nevertheless, much streamlining and refinine could be done.
A good example of where things could be made easier is when you 'V' over a Dwarf. There's no good reason that all the options aren't available. I shouldn't have to hit 'l' then 'e' to get to assigning dogs. I should just be able to hit 'r' right away. Basically, the UI needs to be streamlined along two broad axes - the first is to make it as unified and homogenous as possible, so that as little thought as possible needs to be devoted to figuring out how to actually get something done. The second is to reduce as far as is feasable the number of mouse clicks and button presses needed to get from any one menu in the game to any other.
Longer-term attention keepingThe astute amongst you may have put magma and kittens together, and come up with four! Yes, the fact that I learned so much about DF from captnduck and TinyPirate means I'm quite the newbie myself. Nevertheless, I'm already encountering some of the things mentioned by veterans as long-term problems, and I think if I'm coming across them within such a short time of getting into the game it probably bears mentioning in this thread.
The greatest problem, by far, is slowdown once the fortress gets large. From the figures others have given, I seem to be doing marginally better than most, but there's a very definite wall which makes the game not worth playing, and that wall comes long before I'm done with most fortresses. I'm no computer expert. I'm better than your average joe, and I can fix most basic problems, but I have little clue about this multi-threading business or anything else like that. All I know is - the slowdown needs to go, through some mechanism or another.
The second problem is that DF is, surprisingly, a very easy game. Once you actually know what's going on, know how to get food production going, know how to lay down a few traps and get a small military going, it's not that hard a game. Aside from HFS or unforseen magma, as long as you've paid attention to things and not deliberately created problems, it's not a particularly difficult game. (That said, it may be more that complete disasters are usually hilarious and highly enjoyable to watch, and so don't feel like failures because they're pretty much as fun as success.) Further, much of the 'difficulty' is arbitrary stuff that can't be fixed. Someone gets taken by a mood, and starts demanding glass on a map with no sand, or whatever. That sort of thing needs to be ironed out - moods should begin later and probably shouldn't ask for the entirely impossible (same goes for mandates.)
I'm confident that in time the second of those two major issues will be resolved. The Army, Caravan, and Diplomacy Arcs should all add significantly to what can be done off your own back, and it looks like stuff coming up in the next few months should help things a lot in the shorter term. I would also suggest a revamp of how quickly skills are gained. Make it take significantly longer, reduce how much a mood gives, and so forth. 'Legendary' implies, well, that the Dwarf is a legend. That his mere ability deserves engravings. This should not be attainable without years or decades of toil.
In order to attract more players, keep players, and to maintain the game's growth, I would suggest a medium-term two-pronged undertaking. The first is streamlining the UI, making it more intuitive and more unified in terms of what buttons do. On top of that, at least provide a page the first time the game is loaded which says "Hi there, thanks for playing Dwarf Fortress! DF is a fairly complicated game and can take some getting used to. To help you get started, check out the DF Wiki at URL, and there are popular tutorials for new players at URL and URL. Strike the earth!" The second major task is to streamline pretty much everything it is possible to streamline, do any multi-threading whatever, absolutely anything that can help improve late-game performance should be done. I realize that such detracts from implementing the stuff that Toady really wants to get in, but if we're not going to stick with a fortress long enough to see half of it, then there is a problem there, you know?
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Topic: What turns you off about DF? (Read 309102 times)