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[Halconnen]

Great. I start writing a post, it ends up a -lot- longer than I initially had it intended to be, easily more than 10000 characters, on the problems of games nowadays, of RPGs in general, of graphics, and of the story writing in games. I read up and ask friends about the plot of Dragon Age to make sure I ain't spouting bullshit when I compare stories of different RPGs with each other. Then, when I'm like two paragraphs away from posting it, I accidentally hit F5 on the wrong tab. Sigh. (Anyone know if I could get the field contents back in Google Chrome? It seems to not have cached them. >_>) Teaches me to use a word processor to write my posts even if I do not plan for them to be long-ish.

Either way, since I don't feel like rewriting it, I'll condense it down to pretty much the first sentence:

@ KaelGotDwarves, that comparison picture you posted is numbered '4'. Any chance you could post the rest of them, too?

[Azkanan]

Great. I start writing a post, it ends up a -lot- longer than I initially had it intended to be, easily more than 10000 characters, on the problems of games nowadays, of RPGs in general, of graphics, and of the story writing in games. I read up and ask friends about the plot of Dragon Age to make sure I ain't spouting bullshit when I compare stories of different RPGs with each other. Then, when I'm like two paragraphs away from posting it, I accidentally hit F5 on the wrong tab. Sigh. (Anyone know if I could get the field contents back in Google Chrome? It seems to not have cached them. >_>) Teaches me to use a word processor to write my posts even if I do not plan for them to be long-ish.

Either way, since I don't feel like rewriting it, I'll condense it down to pretty much the first sentence:

@ KaelGotDwarves, that comparison picture you posted is numbered '4'. Any chance you could post the rest of them, too?

I mistake you will only make once, young padawan.

Yeah, I used to write up hefty posts for forum games, only to have a bug wipe out the entire post as if I hadn't write it. Caused the death of a Forum Game once... In other cases, I had to work out all the hit-damage calculations again. Not cool.

[Neonivek]

That is why I developed the habit of copying long posts before trying to post them.

Have enough long posts get deleted and it was cemented into me.

[Timst]

But that's like saving often in a game : most of the time everything is all right and you loose the habit... and then something bad happens, and you cry.

[Nexii Malthus]

Oh I get that a bunch, but no worry! Good old friend Back button is to the rescue.




< Firefox

[Soadreqm]

So, I only read the first three pages, but I'm still going to post. You can't stop me!

I think the reason commercial developers haven't made like ten Dwarf Fortresslikes already is the design philosophy. If your game has a budget, you're probably hoping to get some money out of it inside a reasonable timeframe. So you think of a finished product you can get done in time, and make it. Then you move on to the next project.

Whereas DF has... well, everything. If something exists in the world, the plan is to allow the player to interact with it in every possible way. For example:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Bloat328, IMPROVED SEASHORES, (Future): Coastal biome designations, grabs, gulls, washed up jelly fish, ability to skillfully build sand castles in wet sand which can be worn down by waves, shells, washed up objects from distance civilizations that are on the body of water, seaweed, tidepools with anenomes, driftwood interactions.

So, we'll be able to make sand castles. And then take a bit of driftwood, and carve little wooden soldiers for the sand castle. And if we ever get the magic system running, there will probably be a sand castle fairy or something with a magic aura that makes sandcastles spontaneously appear around her. There will be absolutely no point to any of this, Toady's just putting it there because he can.

This will no doubt lead to some spectacular "Holy shit I can do that!?"-moments, but I don't think it's really a feasible money making strategy. DF has been under constant developent for a couple of years now, and it's nowhere close to being anything like complete. In fact, it doesn't look like it can ever be properly complete. I'm sure that by the time we get through all the version one arcs and the post-version one arcs, to the Full World Simulator era, something new will have appeared that could be implemented. And there's really nothing outside the scope of the game. Steam power might not make an appearance in the vanilla game, but modders are still going to want to be able to do it. Same for electricity, nuclear power, space flight and geological simulation for dropping the freaking moon. Actually, that last one could come up in the vanilla game, dropping the moon appears reasonably often in other RPGs.

Dwarf Fortress as it is now isn't really a commercial-grade game. There's nothing to do in Adventure Mode. As there's basically no graphics, it's really difficult for new player to get into the game. Once the dwarf count goes up, it starts having serious performance issues on most machines. While the Dwarf Fortress described in the Dev Notes will certainly be the Best Game Ever, we're not quite there yet, and unlike lone indie developers, giant corporations constantly lose asstons of money for every moment they spend making the game instead of selling it.

[Maggarg - Eater of chicke]

Yeah, morrowind is a bit lifeless. It lacks motion, and real folks that do... you know, the kind of things townspeople do. Work, cultivate farms, build houses, eat and drink, carry crates around, or just idly chat. Some mods partially fixed that, but most of the time, every NPC is standing still or just going back and forth to simulate activity. Bars are colder than a burial ceremony, and the music ambiance mods doesn't cut it.

To be fair, it came out seven years ago.

[atomfullerene]

Well, I think morrowind did a fine job, especially for the time it was released.  I have a friend who managed to lose the package you are supposed to deliver in the first part of the main quest.  He played for ages on the game, doing side quests, becoming head of factions, getting all amped up and powerful, killing vivec, all without even noticing he was missing the main plotline.  Now that's nonlinearity!

I almost think that with increased graphics it gets in some ways harder to do a really complex df style game.  I mean, it's one thing to say you have a breastplate made of *metal* engraved with an image of *item* and decorated with *colored* strips of *cloth*, when there are 12 metals, hundreds of items, 16 colors, and 4 types of cloth.  Actually rendering it, and rendering it worn by any sort of creature or lying in any number of locations, is more difficult, especially as the type of rendering becomes more complex.  Doable, but difficult.   

[Protactinium]

Yeah, morrowind is a bit lifeless. It lacks motion, and real folks that do... you know, the kind of things townspeople do. Work, cultivate farms, build houses, eat and drink, carry crates around, or just idly chat. Some mods partially fixed that, but most of the time, every NPC is standing still or just going back and forth to simulate activity. Bars are colder than a burial ceremony, and the music ambiance mods doesn't cut it.

To be fair, it came out seven years ago.

Finally. Reading every post in this thread, it's like half of you all expect that earlier games are supposed to be able to have that much depth. In Oblivion, they actually did walk around, sit down and eat, go through doors, appear in different areas in the town they lived in at different times of day, etc. Morrowind hadn't gotten to that point yet in development.

Morrowind is still absolutely immersible and I've roleplayed a buncha stuff in my head when playing. That's how we rack up +400 hours in these games.

And I played Morrowind after playing Oblivion. It's still fun to play even if it does lack elements. I don't let flaws in games or comparisons to other games cloud my fun with the 'lesser' games.

[Draco18s]

Oh I get that a bunch, but no worry! Good old friend Back button is to the rescue.

The back button doesn't recover your lost post when you hit F5.

[CobaltKobold]

Oh I get that a bunch, but no worry! Good old friend Back button is to the rescue.

The back button doesn't recover your lost post when you hit F5.

refresh doesn't nuke it, either, in FF

[Shoe]

No, but it probably should.  That's part of the point of refresh...

[Rowanas]

What's that? The sound of Safari having no way to accidentally refresh without pressing the teeny tiny button in one tiny corner of the screen. Irritating when you actually want to refresh, though...

[G-Flex]

Finally. Reading every post in this thread, it's like half of you all expect that earlier games are supposed to be able to have that much depth. In Oblivion, they actually did walk around, sit down and eat, go through doors, appear in different areas in the town they lived in at different times of day, etc. Morrowind hadn't gotten to that point yet in development.

The AI was still kind of lackluster compared to what they hyped it out to be, and it led to some kind of weird situations sometimes, but hey, it was an improvement for the most part. Of course, other parts of the AI were still totally ridiculous and bad, but then again, Bethesda never really seemed to have the best programmers available (I say this for a variety of reasons).

Oblivion definitely seemed to improve on things, but on the other hand, there are other things that seem *more* simplified where they shouldn't be, compared to Morrowind. Oh well.

[Naero]

There's nothing wrong with linear games in my opinion. Procedurally generated games just can't create stories as coherently empathic as something someone has sat down and crafted. They can provide a jumping block for the imagination, but I've yet to be emotionally moved by anything that's happened in DF. Maybe my imagination isn't linked very strongly to my empathy... or maybe I've seen too many Dwarves eating kittens to get too sad when bad things happen to them.

That said, Dragon Age is truly terrible. Gameplay alone is very shallow. Similar to Baldur's Gate, just without as many classes or spells to keep things fresh, and an annoying camera that tethers you to one spot and forces you into third-person to see anything going on beyond your own nose. I can summarise the entire plot in once (short) sentence - rally good guys to kill evil monsters. That's it. It was like a half-hearted attempt at a Baldur's Gate clone, with all the side-quests, varied combat, charm and exploration surgically removed and replaced with DLC scams and plagiarism (maybe that's too strong a word, but seriously they took stuff wholesale out of LotR, Warhammer, and A Song of Fire and Ice and just changed the names).

That said I wasn't wholly surprised personally - Bioware haven't made anything decent in nearly a decade now and that trend wasn't about to change AFTER they got bought out by EA.