For years, I have watched the gaming industry as a whole focus more and more on style and less and less on substance. Games have gotten shorter while the graphics have gotten shinier. Gameplay is rarely innovative anymore, despite the breathless proclamations on the backs of the boxes. More and more, games seem very clearly targeted at a demographic to which I don't belong.
Dwarf Fortress, by contrast, is a triumph of substance over style. It is very much aimed at a niche group of gamers. It neither seeks nor values mass appeal. It is a game where the creator has decided that shiny graphical bells and whistles are less important than the actual game. The gameplay is innovative, and feature-rich. It has given us Boatmurdered. It has recently given us
Bronzemurder. It has given us literally thousands of hours of enjoyment, both in our own games and in reading about the games of others.
So whenever I see someone say that DF
needs to change its graphics and/or its UI to make the game "playable", I enjoy a brief moment of schadenfreude. I always want to reply with something along the lines of "Suck it up you shallow twits! If you need shiny graphics to play a game, then Dwarf Fortress
isn't made for you. You're not the target demographic. You can just stand over there on the sidelines and watch the rest of us have fun. Bwahahah!"
I never
actually respond that way, of course, since that would be rude. But I always think it.
Mind you, I am not saying that the graphics and the UI are perfect and should never be improved. I use Mayday's d0rf and creature graphics and Spreggo's tileset, for example. I
am, however, saying that the game is perfectly playable with its current graphics (especially with the addition of tilesets and graphical sets) and its current interface, and it clearly does not
need to be changed just to suit the whims of a demographic that is already well-catered-to by the market.