I haven't read through this vast thread, so I'm sure that what I'm going to say has already been said a million times, but I'd like to add my comments anyway. I was glad to see this thread and I do hope the developers think carefully about what's said in it! I understand that the game as it stands is only at an alpha stage - work on the interface is obviously going to have to be done before it gets to beta.
I have only just started playing Dwarf Fortress, so I am still wrestling with the problems that face new players. I tried to get into it for the first time a few months ago, found it utterly baffling and impenetrable, and gave up. I'm doing better now with the help of TinyPirate's tutorial, but even so, it is an uphill slog.
Here are my main problems so far. Let me say first that I am enjoying the game so far (above all the almost surreal use of language, names, art descriptions, and that sort of thing, which give it incredible character). So these are meant to be constructive criticisms, not complaints.
(1) The graphics, as I'm sure everyone has commented. I have played roguelike games before (I still believe Moria to be the greatest game ever made), but never with a pure ASCII tileset - only with a graphical tileset. A graphical tileset I can handle, and I should think that most new players will be prepared to handle too. A screen that is made up of nothing but letters and punctuation marks is too much of a challenge for me and for everyone but a small niche group of players. One of the biggest helps I've found with TinyPirate's tutorial is that he includes a graphical tileset in his download, so it looks at least vaguely comprehensible "out of the box". I cannot emphasise enough how much of a help that is. If Dwarf Fortress came with a good graphical tileset as standard (still retaining the ability to use others, of course, including pure ASCII for those who really like it) then that would make it so much more attractive to new players. And that would surely be dead easy for the developers to implement, too.
(2) The interface. My God but this is a slog. I think the real problem here is actually twofold rather than a single "interface difficulty". The first is availability of information. When I played Moria on my Amiga back in the day, it was almost - but not quite - entirely keyboard-based. That "not quite" made the difference. I could press a certain key and then click on something with the mouse, and be told what it was. All the information about that thing would be readily available. With Dwarf Fortress, you can forget the mouse (except for drawing designations, it seems - but sometimes the game registers not the tile I clicked on but one a couple of spaces north, so that's not so handy) - you have to navigate purely with keys. That's annoying. More annoying is the fact that it's just so hard to find anything out. Is there a way to know how happy, overall, my dwarves are? If there is I've yet to find it, other than just randomly cursoring my way over to individuals, hitting K, and reading their little diaries. How can I know how much food and drink I have stocked up, or how much charcoal there is? There seems to be a Stock screen that ought to be telling me these things, but it's full of question marks and it gives me no information about the stuff in the stockpiles. I'm just telling my dwarves to brew alcohol and make charcoal in the vague sense that I'm probably going to need these things, but I simply cannot tell whether I do need them or if the fortress is about to explode in a wave of unneeded strawberry wine and coke. No doubt this information is available somewhere, but if so, it's hardly obvious. But surely in any resource management sort of game this is vital and should be one of the most straightforward screens.
A lot of this information should be accessible at point of use. I want to tell the dwarves what to plant in the vegetable plot. I'm given a list of crops that are available - great. Do I have enough seeds for each of these crops? I haven't the faintest idea how I would go about finding this out - but I shouldn't have to. This information should appear right on this screen, or there should at least be a link to a screen that holds this information. As it is I'm just telling the dwarves to plant random stuff and hoping it works.
Again, take the dwarf information. It's scattered all over the place. I can get one set of information about a dwarf by going to him and pressing K. I get different information if I use V. U, alternatively, gives me access to yet more information screens. Some of these different screens seem to be linked to each other, but not others. I seem to be unable to find out what a dwarf is doing right now from the K screen, for example. To learn that I have to remember his name and then go to the U screen and look for him in the list. This seems just deliberately obstructive. I should be able to click on a dwarf and be taken to a basic screen for that dwarf, which will contain all the available information on the little sod, or links to screens that will give me that information.
This goes for other things too. It's hard to remember which screens have which information even after you've discovered them. If I Q over a tomb it tells me who is buried there (I think. Or was it B?). If I K over it, it doesn't. Why?
I think this is possibly the biggest obstacle to new players who have got past the graphics hurdle: the fact that it's just impossible to know what's going on and how to find information. This is a game that is all about information - which, as far as I can tell, processes more details about a world than any other game in existence. But if players can't get to that information easily and pleasantly then there's not much point in its doing it.
(3) The second problem with the interface is that it's equally hard to know how to do stuff. This is closely linked to the first problem. If I'm not sure which screen has the option of assigning a bedroom to a dwarf then I won't know how to do it. A particular problem, though, is the inconsistency of controls. When placing designations, I have to press ENTER at one corner and ENTER at the other corner of the area I want to designate (a pretty clunky system to start with). When placing plots and walls, I have to change the size of the area with some odd keys (H, K, U, M, is it? something like that, and I can't follow the logic which determines which key does what) and then press ENTER to plonk it down. Why the different system? I've already placed a lot of one-tile plots by mistake, expecting it to work like the designation system.
Or again: to designate a bedroom, I need to create a bedroom from the menu that I get from pressing Q on a bed (oh joy! *another* set of controls for changing the size of something!). Having done that, there is a key I can press for saying whose bedroom it is. Great - nice and simple. How about tombs? It seems to be exactly the same process. Except that this only works for live dwarfs - I suppose I'm saying where they will be buried when they die. It doesn't seem to work for that dead dwarf who's blossoming miasma all over the dining hall. No, to bury him I have to get rid of the tomb room, and I have to use the B key on the coffin and designate it as a coffin that corpses can be put in. Great, and off he gets dragged there. Now if only the dwarves would take the chunks of dwarf that are also lying around, and put them in the refuse area, that would be great. Why aren't they doing that? I've designated them to be disposed of.
At other times it's just not obvious what you've got to do at all. A sort of liaison dwarf from the Old Country turns up and wants to discuss the situation. I instinctively press SPACE to move to the next screen, because SPACE seems to do that elsewhere in the game. Ah - looks like I've cancelled by mistake. Can I still talk to him? Doesn't look like it. What should I have done? What would have happened next? There is nothing to tell me.
Similarly, I *think* I've traded with a bunch of traders who turned up. I ordered my dwarves to move goods to the trading post. My trader dwarf refused to come no matter what I told him - he was too happy engraving stuff - so I got some other random dwarf to do it. I went to a trading screen with the traders. I negotiated a price and the trader seemed happy. Then off he went. Can I find the goods that I think I bought off him? Can I arse. Does that mean I pressed the wrong key at some point and it all went wrong? Or just that they're hidden somewhere?
Or take object manipulation. I read a comment somewhere saying that it's a bad idea to put bones and shells in the normal refuse pit, because these might be useful. Great. How do I do anything about it, then? Using Q over the refuse pit I find what seem to be options to determine what objects get put there. But playing with these doesn't seem to make any difference. Another problem: a dwarf went mad and muttered about how he wanted leather. Right - I don't have any leather. But I have a dromedary walking about, and a butcher. So I ordered that the dromedary be slaughtered. It happened (eventually). Right, I thought, I see that the Butcher Shop has an option for "butcher dead animal", so I'll hit that, since that dromedary has been slaughtered and now needs to be cut up. The butcher cancelled the order since there were no dead animals to cut up. What happened to my dromedary? Can't it be butchered at all? I repeated the process with an ox. Eventually I realised that when an animal is slaughtered, it is butchered at the same time, and I don't need to order it to be butchered as well. So I had a skin to turn into some leather. Of course my tanner was cancelling his order on the grounds that no skins were available. Why not? I still don't know. Did the dwarves take those skins off to the refuse pile? When that happens, does it mean that other dwarves can't take them back again? Who knows?
A similar problem: some goblin thieves sprang my cage traps. Huzzah! Now what do I do with them? I've found information in the Wiki about taking their stuff off them. It seems incredibly complicated and also doesn't seem to work, at least so far. In fact I'm baffled by this. I've now got three goblin thieves sitting in wooden cages at the entrance to my fortress, slowly starving to death. They may or may not be naked - I'm not sure. No wonder the U page lists them as hostile. I hope this doesn't put off the next trade caravan.
So that's my summary of the sort of difficulties that I've faced so far. This is a game that I very much want to like, and so far I do like it, but I don't feel like it's being made easy for me. I'm starting to feel like I need alcohol to get through this working day. As I say, it's a combination of eccentric and inconsistent controls with great difficulty in finding information or understanding the information that is presented. Either one of these problems by itself might be surmountable, but taken together, I think they are devastating to most new players - more so than the more obvious graphics issue, which I've suggested is quite easily solvable for most purposes. I think this is going to be a fantastic game. Indeed I think it is already a fantastic game, but so much of the game is currently hidden away! Bring it out into the open and allow people to interact with it intuitively and easily, and we'll be able to appreciate how great it is.
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Topic: What turns you off about DF? (Read 314223 times)