Print

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

[G-Flex]

I don't think I want to micromanage tools down to the level of "what sort of countertop does my chef have?".

[NW_Kohaku]

I don't think I want to micromanage tools down to the level of "what sort of countertop does my chef have?".

Don't you already determine what material he builds the kitchen out of?

[G-Flex]

Yes. I'm talking about finer things than that, like what small parts of the kitchen are made out of.

[NW_Kohaku]

Maybe if they did the upgrades automatically (like, a chef would always want to go out and get the best knives they could or upgrade their personal kitchen), it might not be annoying.  It's no less a minor detail that is at most an "oh, that's sort of neat" if a chef gets his masterwork kitchen knives to menace with spikes of silk and become decorated with images of cheese.

That said, I don't see how this is a player reward.

[RiderofDark]

That said, I don't see how this is a player reward.

Rewarding experience! Although that idea probably deserves its own thread.

[Girlinhat]

That said, I don't see how this is a player reward.

Rewarding experience! Although that idea probably deserves its own thread.

The rewarding experience is the whole argument against in-built rewards.

My two-cents here.  I'd like to see a few in-game distinctions, perhaps.  Like, "Kill 1,000 newborn mermaids and sell 1,000 mermaid skull totems, and get 'The Abomination' added to the end of your fortress name.  eg. Boatmurdered The Abomination."  That, would reasonably fit into the style of game.  A reward like "Kill 100 goblins and get a trophy that you can place" is a bit less in the style of gameplay.  I suppose what it all boils down to is how meta-game it is.  Does the reward apply to the player, or does it apply to the hard-working dwarves.  Any device made purely to stroke the player's ego doesn't fit into DF, but if the reward fits into the game, is balanced out, and has some sort of purpose aside from simply bragging, then it may work.

After all, we sorta already have an in-game reward for trees.  If you cut down enough trees, you get the "reward" that elves start attacking you.  This is perfectly reasonable.  On the other hand, if you cut down X trees and get an arbitrary unlock for it, then there's no real point.  Another way to look at it is "How does this affect the actual gameplay mechanics?"

[Kogut]

Or: after n enemies killed, goblins will bring siege machines.

[zwei]

I am fairly sure that as game matures, we will see ingame rewards for ingame actions where it makes sense.

"The Abomination" could be, for example, be result of deeper diplomacy-ethics interaction, a nickname of fort by elves/humans/parent civ. the same way fort could be known as "The Forge", "The Armory", "The SteelProducerOfMagnificientProportions" if it focuses on smithing enough to be noticeable and notable in-world.

Lots of rewards work quite well: Player is, for example, rewarded for producing masterwork weaponry by havign military equipper with it. At basic level, pretty much everything is rewarded somehow. Trick is, i guess, to make it aparent that you did something extraordinary in context of world (diplomats/liaisons making note of your achievement) and to have actions infulence world in such way that subsequent embarks profit from estabilished previous forts.

[Bohandas]

My two-cents here.  I'd like to see a few in-game distinctions, perhaps.  Like, "Kill 1,000 newborn mermaids and sell 1,000 mermaid skull totems, and get 'The Abomination' added to the end of your fortress name.  eg. Boatmurdered The Abomination."  That, would reasonably fit into the style of game.

This sounds like a good idea to me.

[Neonivek]

I dislike the fact that the game names ages according to certain set names based off of conditions rather then what actually occurs in the world.

Why would I like titles to work around the same premise?

[Girlinhat]

Mostly because it's hard to define what happens in the world.  To a human, it makes perfect sense of "My fortress is flippin' insane!" but the computer only knows that you've got low booze stockpiles, vaguely unhappy dwarves, and a living fort.  It's hard for the programming to understand what's happening outside of raw numbers, or randomly generated numbers, so it's either based on stats or it's not included.

To think about it another way: Try to think of how you could get the game to realize you're working on a megaproject.  Without some very fancy quasi-AI coding, the game has no idea what you're building and doesn't care!

[Catastrophic lolcats]

I remember a while back I played a game where the achievements were hidden. It also contained a metric crapload of them to boot. At the end of the game the credits rolled and the various achievements you managed to earn were displayed.

If people really, really, really, want achievements in dwarf fortress this seems to me the most logical way to do it. This allows player rewards without the player being forced into set guidelines.

I have long since forgotten the game's name.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, wouldn't that be similar to the bizzare "achievements" you have in Super Smash Bros: Melee?  The one where you get a special award for a certain number of nonsensical points for doing something like grabbing onto a ledge, then dropping down, then jumping back up to the ledge 10 times in a row without standing on a regular platform? 

That sort of thing is pretty silly, and didn't really add much to the game - they didn't even continue it in Brawl.

I actually like the idea of having "the Abomination" as a title added onto your fort, though.  It means that the game world is actually, in some way, recognizing the actions you take, the way that a creature with a really big kill list starts to develop an impressive title and reputation.

Magma flood 100 goblins or elven traders?  Your fort that was previously just "BronzePulleys" is now "BronzePulleys the Rivers of Burning". 

That would give me some reason to care what the outside world thought about my fort, if only a small one.  Of course, it could also be completely arbitrary - I remember in 40d, I had a few human and elven caravans and goblin sieges get roasted to a cinder becuase I had a magma vent, and the fire imps would occasionally launch fireballs at the wildlife, starting grassfires that wiped out caravans before they arrived.  I mean, that stuff happens, but it wasn't really *me* that did it, so it would kind of be wierd to have a bad reputation because of that.  (Of course, it's not like reputations are always fairly and justly handed out...)

[dragonshardz]

Going back to rewards, achievements 'n' such: What about the model used in Sim City 3k? The challenge model?

In that game, you would be playing your city and from time to time, a challenge would pop up: "Build this!""Get

• people living in your city!" and so on.

Why not apply something similar to DF? You're playing along (after having been taken through a well-made gradual concept tutorial) and with the caravan comes a messenger from the Mountainhome. Said messenger has a request for you to build something or find a certain item in your embark, with an associated ingame, useful reward for completing the task.

What I never liked about the SC3k model was that in many cases, challenges were often crucial to the development of your city or timed (or both) - if you failed the challenge or ran out of time, your city was screwed. I'd say to make DF challenges optional - that is, it's a set of goals for you to aim for if you don't have any set goals yourself.

And of course, the ability to disable the functionality in the raws would be crucial.

[Babylon]

There are two major reasons that I commonly see why people don't want to try DF; <snip> the fact that the game does not provide any intrinsic goals for the player to strive for.

Umm... are you sure, because I see that as one of the selling points of these sorts of games. 

Yes, I'm sure. Its something I've heard quite a number of times now. Some people don't like to set their own goals, they either want the game to provide them with some kind of goal framework to start from or to provide some kind of conditions upon which they can "win".

The fact that DF is a sandbox game IS a selling point for it, no question. But you have to add "for a certain kind of gamer" to that to really be accurate. Some people have no idea what to do when faced with a pure sandbox game.

Look, I don't want the game "dumbed down". I'm not even necessarily arguing in favor of adding any sort of goals to the game. I'm just throwing the apparently CRAZY idea out there that maybe we shouldn't dismiss it out-of-hand.

There are a number of players out there who refuse to even try DF simply because the game doesn't offer them a way to win or even know if they're doing well. You may not identify with them or understand them at all, but trust me, they exist.

I think cutting off the conversation with "No I hate this", instead of discussing ways in which some reasonable goals for players that want them is counterproductive. Perhaps we can find ways in which goals could be established within the game without intruding on its sandbox nature, and maybe even conjecture what some of those goals should be. Those seem like they might be useful things to throw around if we want DF to continue to reach a wider audience.

The game offers some really clear concrete goals for those that care about them.

Getting more nobles is an obvious goal, especcially getting he king.  racking up kills for your military, the various wealth numbers can be seen as a score, and there's getting all your dwarves to extatic, just to name a few.