Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Doomshifter]

I think the sheer level of intricacy is something of interest for me. On one hand, one fortress can be pretty plain, with a circular dining room and a big, unplanned, messy bedroom layout. On the other hand, you can have some massive tower with a vaulted dining room and bedrooms with balconies. On someone else's (yes, someone else's) hand, your fortress could be more like a slaughterhouse for sentients, butchering them to pieces, using their meat and bones, selling their clothing and making crafts from them.

Not to mention, I love to mod this game. It's very heavily customisable, and I think that's great.

[MonkeyHead]

Along with the almost infinte potential for complexity and depth, the sense of humor that the game has makes me love it. For example, one of my dorfs making "Moistnesslove" the copper anvil as a result of a strange mood, complete with engravings of tentacle demons, on Valentines Day. Wish I had taken a screeny of that one.

[Squidpalace]

I just had half the first migration wave torn up by marauding mandrills. I raged when they began breaking my expedition leader's arm. Not playing DF right now at all.

[eerr]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

because, uh, it's awesome?

I love building a fortress for the same reason I love sim city.
Urban improvements to improve stuff, making it better.


I love training up an era of legendaries at a silly speed.

I love the excitement and ability to start anew the fortress due to a tantrum spiral.

I love the reuseability of goblins, and their tendency to blindly charge traps that obviously just went off in front of their eyes.

I love magma for it's all-encompassing passion.

I love skeletal creatures for the fear they instill.

I love zombies for their narmyness.

I love carp for their excellent use of home-terrain advantage.

I love elephants for their massive size.

I love unicorns for their intensly valuble bones and guts. Dwarves killed the last unicorn, don't cha know.

Surprisingly I don't really care about metal that much. It's not really as useful I thought it would be.
Though I horde it anyway.

I love the pathing algorithm for it's simplification, and yet still loath it for it's speed.

I love pumps for their pressurization.

Those are way more prefstrings than any one person should be allowed to have. (You forgot tentacle demons for their corrupt intentions, btw.)

No, you're thinking of Sofia.

[RichardTheWizard]

Like the many others that have said it before me, DEPTH!

It truly is an astounding game with so many possibilities and that is what draws me in, but yet at the same time it seems simple. Of course it was far from simple when I first found it but the top down view maintains a simplicity but at the same time manages to create so much depth.

That and the building, sure there are games where you can build cities like Simcity or create villages like in Stronghold. It's the fact that I can make any shape of building I want and create whatever I want, I can tell you that one version of DF has kept me occupied far longer than £40 games that come out nowadays.

[Sutremaine]

The mixture of control and random surprises. You can dig out a little hole in the dirt and survive on water and raw mushrooms with every dwarf doing every job, or you can built a vast architectural and industrial wonder with hot and cold plumbing and half a dozen different ways of turning invaders to mush before they're three tiles into the killzone, and you can do this on the same site with the same seven founders. There are things that are oddly fixed (smelted minicows, anyone?), but the workshops and raws between them have enough variety and flexibility to cover most of what the player wants, and the next version will see even more variety here. The random surprises come from the dwarves themselves, as their personalities and habits encourage the player to ascribe motivations and feelings to these little bundles of pixels and random numbers (it feeds the human desire to make patterns out of chaos, I guess). For instance, the first artifact I got with my latest fortress was an obsidian mechanism created by the leader. Some time after this, apparently feeling a little overshadowed, her lover produced a steel sarcophagus. Just a little thing, but it's a touch that most games don't have.

[webkilla]

poll closed, thank you all.

first post has been updated with information on how i am going to abuse the information you have given me.

also, you guys are awesome for confirming this type of data collection as viable. go you

[Volatar]

Science. I like it.

[webkilla]

Science. I like it.

not all do. last semester i did a project on if i could make people physicall sick (as in throw up) from playing computer games

i could, although i stoped just short of aquiring physical evidence (didn't wanna clean up the bucket afterwards)

but i made my point none the less. good times.

[slink]

For something close to Presence, if not actually there, I will cite Daggerfall for me.  The feeling of immersion was almost drug-like for me.  I sometimes felt guilty about escaping so thoroughly into that world.  One time, after having lived through a character's time as a wereboar, including a game-year of hunting followed by a cure obtained from a witches' coven after the hunters began tracking me, I went to take a RL hot bath.  As I was soaking in the bath, I realized that I felt as mentally and emotionally tired as if I had actually lived the events. A year's worth of life in an afternoon!  It made me a bit thoughtful.  I'm not sure it is a Good Thing to have game sequences recorded in one's memory as an actual part of one's life.

In later time I played NWN online and took care to return myself to the RW at the end of each session.  For the duration of the events I was definitely in another world.  But even if I sometimes felt as if I was living those events, at least other RL people were involved.

I don't think it would be possible to make a city-builder ("god game") with this sort of immersion.  Yes, we might genuinely care about the Dwarves we are directing, but we aren't one of them.  We are Armok.   

[webkilla]

true slink - but playing Adventures can do that quite easily, since you are that one adventurer.

and in fortress mode some of the replies i got here do actually hint towards some levels of presence - its not that you feel that you are a dwarf in the fortress, but you are the one charge of the place... and you marvel when an artifact is made, and feel happy when two dwarves fall in love, and throw a party when the cruel noble is executed for his villainy. thats presence, thats putting yourself in the game, involving yourself emotionally.

[roguester]

Depth. I don't think I have ever played something so deep.

What happens when you play too deep?

[Vayre]

For me its the freedom of imagination, I have a very active imagination, and when i'm bored I often run through fantasy scenarios in my head. because DF has basically nil graphics it gives me full reign to twist what's happening in my imagination.

Plus the game is also amusing if you have the ability to cleanly translate the ASCII into pictures or what is going on.

[webkilla]

Depth. I don't think I have ever played something so deep.

What happens when you play too deep?

then it becomes FUN

and again: none of you have to post any more answers to the original question on the front page... i got the data i needed.