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[TherosPherae]

As many others have said before me, the learning cliff is there because our developer (Hail the Toady!) is developing content before he makes the game more easy to understand.

This has the added benefit of keeping these forums free of impatient morons/trolls, though, so I'm fine with it.

[plynxis]

beware: long rant ahead. you may receive heavy crits from the volume of text.

i guess on a more philosophical note i could say, there is a limit to how much you can help someone without blatantly insulting their personality and intelligence. that comic shows exactly the reasons i switched to linux, prefer FOSS software and play DF. not because i'm a snobby fuck that just wants to brag about doing difficult stuff (well yeah maybe thats a reason too), but primarily because i witness the loathsome trend to make everything easy to play and use, simple to learn at the expense of actually being engaging, being useful, working and actually taking advantage of the fact that humans are much more intelligent and capable than pop culture (including pop games) wants to let us believe.

i'm probably biased on DF. the learning curve was something i enjoyed, apparently contrary to a lot of people. thats understandable. but a learning curve is also stimulating and productive if you approach a game like this from a certain perspective. Equivalent examples are the complaints about linux systems being hard to use and requiring a lot of learning to do sometimes simple things. i place in the same category the gripe some people have with free software that it often has bugs, isnt as polished or super easy to use as some commercial software. but in my experience, learning is part of the journey - however at the far end of learning something thats made primarily to work, be interesting and engaging, is not bogged down by a ton of things that just pretend to make it fun or easy to use and begins with the assumption that someone who uses it has the capability, interest and takes pleasure in function rather than blinky lights, there is the true reward of having improved as a person rather than just wasted your time being talked down only to get something thats way below your abilities.

i understand a steep learning curve will make lots of people avoid DF. but i dont think those people will truly be able to appreciate it anyway - it wont really give them what it can, so i dont feel its necessary to make it any easier than it is. this is ofcourse coming from someone who has learned the interfaces and all, but i feel they are more useful to me this way than if they were super polished like most modern games. i've also found that tutorials and help screens are *not* as good at teaching than experimenting while having a strong community to draw information from and provide information towards.

[Ephemeriis]

The learning curve in DF really isn't as steep as people think it is.

The game is intimidating, initially, due to the interface.  Once you get over that, though, and start messing around - you'll see that it really isn't that complex.

It doesn't take a whole lot of learning to get a basic fort up and running.

Yes, if you decide to start playing around with machinery and traps and the military and doing cool stuff like that it'll take longer to learn...  Hell, folks who've been playing for years are still learning new things...  But that's not learning to simply play the game, that's mastering the intricacies of the game.

Take a look at something like Starcraft.  It doesn't take long to learn how to just build a base and kill the other guys.  But if you want to be competitive in multiplayer it is going to take a lot of learning.  Again - that's not learning to play, that's mastering the intricacies.

Yes, I agree that the UI could be improved.  But I'm not sure you really need much more of an in-game tutorial.  It's a sandbox game, there is no "win" condition.  Most of the fun comes from your mistakes, and learning from them.  Take away those mistakes and you take a lot of the fun out of the game.

And, to be completely honest, I usually find in-game tutorials more annoying than anything else.

I usually look through the key configuration to figure out what button does what, and then go to on-line documentation like wikis to learn things I can't pick up on my own.

In-game tutorials are either too brief to be useful, or too extensive to be tolerable.

[drvoke]

Not to sound elitist or anything, but am I the only person in the world who didn't find this game "difficult" to learn?  Granted, it's taken me since March this year to learn most of the ins-and-outs of the interface, what's possible/impossible, etc...  But I was playing it all that time, doing fun (and !!Fun!!) and interesting things as I discovered more surprises in the game.

Derp, I see I'm definitely not the only one.

Yes, even to this day I still reference the wiki because it's useful and has a lot of good information, and I reference the boards for strategy discussions... But I was already playing the game.  The fact that there is no "win" condition seems to really throw people off whereas for me, it liberated me and allows me to play freely without concern for my fortress turning into Hell.

I'm sorry if your fort died on its first year, or its third year, but it was going to fall at some point anyway.  And you were playing the game that whole time and you probably learned something new about it in the process.  You didn't do it wrong, and you didn't "fail," that's just the nature of the beast.

You can't lose anything because you didn't understand this-or-that feature, because there is nothing to lose.  You were never going to "win" in the first place.  Failure to REALLY understand this simple truth, I think, is what leads to a lot of (sorry for being indelicate here) whining about how hard the game is.  It's probably the easiest game in existence since you set your own rules and goals, there aren't any externally imposed goals you need to hit.  It may seem like it, because it may bother you that your dwarfs are lazy or unhappy without booze and beds you didn't know how to provide (like my first ever fortress), but there's nothing anywhere in the game that says your dwarfs must be happy.  You don't have to satisfy nobles' whims.  You don't have to establish a military.  And, in the end, there's no credible way to objectively distinguish between a "successful" and "unsuccessful" fortress.

To a more relevant point, since the game is not even 1/3 done, and most of the features haven't been "locked in," it presents too much of a burden on Toady and Co. to update some internal help system every time the game changes drastically.  Maybe once it's v1.00.00, we can start agitating for that (and try to make sense of exactly what kind of help people are asking for in the process, since it's almost always vague or nonsensical), but for now, bitterness about having to reference the extremely informative wiki that thousands have worked hard and collaborated on is misplaced, IMO.

[Monsterfurby]

I think the 'difficulty' of DF can be summarized in a simple anecdote:

Playing as Human settlers (switched around the CIV_PLAYABLE tag), I build a wooden castle on top of a hill. I tried to cram the living quarters as closely together as possible, on several levels - turns out you can not build a wall on top of a floor on top of a door. Why? No idea. Do I know better now? Maybe. Did I panic and build an awesomely complicated construct around it by accident that put M.C. Escher to shame? You betcha.

[gtmattz]

The only difficulties lie in the obscure WORK IN PROGRESS user interface, and the sheer massive volume of things you can do in the game.  Once you have a handle on the UI (which, tbh, is not overly difficult, simply obscure), and some basics of the game, you can get along quite well.

[plynxis]

i think we blew the lid on this one... made him feel so guity he edited his OP lol

[thvaz]

It was not so bad after all.

[Jordrake]

There is a learning curve. Every skill you can think of has a learning curve, but skateboarding doesn't have a built-in tutorial either. And do you know what?
I'd have more trouble pulling off an ollie than I would setting up a reasonably successful fort.
The reason for that is, when I briefly flirted with wanting to be a skater in my youthier youth, nobody was there showing me how when I failed.
Dwarf Fortress is one of the most lovely, helpful communities I think I've ever belonged to, all the more so for the game's difficulty to get into. They see a poor newb washed up on the twelfth bay and they clothe him and feed him and show him the ropes, and he becomes a member of their society, ready to help everyone else that sails in.
When they say there's only one or two men making Dwarf Fortress, I think they're wrong, and that's nothing to belittle the efforts of the Brothers Adams. Dwarf Fortress is a collaborative effort. We're all deckhands on the good ship Urist, captained by the Toady One, helping him guide us to the beautiful island of Version 1.
That sort of went on a tangent, but I think you can see my point.

[plynxis]

just remember, the booze on this ship is mine...

[drvoke]

That's mutinous talk, sailor!

[darkflagrance]

To be fair, there is probably a bias on this forum with regards to how easy we'd tend to find the interface.

If people who hang out on this forums enjoy playing DF, and one reason that one enjoys playing DF is that one doesn't find it as difficult as it's often cut out to be, then it makes sense that the sample of people who post here will tend to find the game easy.

Given the general population, however, I'd say all bets might be off.

[Cthulhu]

I considered the learning curve to be a six to eight foot wall followed by a slow but relatively easy climb.  If you can get past the initial "What the fuck is all over my screen" moment it's not that big of a deal.

It does bother me a bit when improving and streamlining the interface comes behind simulating the wind resistance on the hairs of the arm of the goblin when he punched your grandma 30 years ago, but it seems like we're getting past that now and moving into improvements we can actually take advantage of again.

[plynxis]

That's mutinous talk, sailor!

go clean the deck ye scrub! touch my booze and i'll see you meet the 7/7 water up close

[Ephemeriis]

To be fair, there is probably a bias on this forum with regards to how easy we'd tend to find the interface.

But it's primarily the interface that's at issue here.

The game itself really isn't that hard.  It's the interface that makes everybody freak out.

If this game was built with shiny graphics everywhere and friendly buttons that you could point and click, nobody would be complaining about the learning curve.  You'd still lose a couple forts getting started, but that's true of pretty much any game.  How many times did you lose the first time you played C&C, or Homeworld, or Warcraft 2, or whatever?  Dieing/losing is part of the learning process, and it's expected.

It's the whole ASCII interface thing that is the problem with DF.  People fire up the game and they don't see cute little dwarves, goblins, and kittens running through a fortress.  They see a wall of text.

And it isn't even that the UI is all that cumbersome...  You've got, basically, nested menus.  Look at pretty much any 4X title and you'll see the same thing.  Nested menus, or nested interface screens.  EVE's got a much worse UI (absolutely everything is done with a right-click) and it's all shiny and graphical.

The problem is purely the wall of text.

It isn't hard, it's intimidating.  People are frightened away from it.

It doesn't take a whole lot of effort to learn what the different symbols mean.  No more effort, really, than learning what the different units look like in any game.  It doesn't take a whole lot of effort to learn which command is in what menu.  No more effort, really, than learning the UI of any RTS or 4X game.  And once you've done that, DF isn't any more complex than Starcraft, really.

Well, it is...  But in an emergent way.  It isn't complex to build a working fort.  It's fairly simple to do that.  But it can be complex to build a megaproject, or get various advanced bits to play nice together, or deal with the new bugs introduced in various patches.