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[UristMcScholar]

Hello everyone. I am an avid player of DF, and a lurker. I first heard about this game 16-18 months ago, on TvTropes. After a few days I decided to try it out. Without reading any online tutorial, or using tiles. As you can guess, I died soon, because I didn't know how to farm. And the small symbols didn't make any sense to me. However, I had decided to learn how to play. I try several times, always dying of starvation or dehydration. Anyway, after a while I stopped playing it. For a few months I didn't play DF, until January. Soon after I finally managed to survive a full year, set up farming, and so on. A couple of months ago I managed to survive two full years, and I have started to mess with the raws. Dwarf Fortress has become my favourite game ever.

Now I am going to college, for a BTEC Lv3 in Games Development. So I had to do a paper on one or two games. Of course I choose DF, along with Deus Ex (another game i love a lot). Now, I would like to include in the paper the opinion of the community: why this game rocks, what should be improved, what you think about the gameplay, the aesthetics, etc. I would be very happy if a few of you were to post your opinion on the game.

If this thread become massive, I will select the most awesome posts, and include a link to it. I am very thankful for any help to finish my paper.

[Gatleos]

For me, the best part of DF is the way it's built. There are no concessions, no abstractions, no narrowly-defined goals. Rather than building a game, Tarn Adams built an engine to simulate a world, and then let the game make itself. It's not a video game in the traditional sense, but a set of tools for creating your own, unique story.

Welcome, by the way.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

I think that one of the reasons the game is so good is because there's sufficient detail to impart motivation to your dwarves even where none exists.  In a way, it relies on our vulnerability to superstition.

You can see this in the fan fiction.  Our little dwarves don't have anything near the complexity they're ascribed, but they have sufficient complexity that it just seems reasonable enough to say, "He didn't want to do that job" rather than "That job didn't catch him when it flashed because he was too far away."  In other words, it's very good at creating the illusion of AI without necessarily using complicated AI.  This also frees the player from a sense of shame on failure: you didn't fail because you cooked the booze, you failed because your stupid dwarves cooked all the booze.  But you still get to take credit for the things you, as a player, are proud of.

Another reason it's good is because of design philosophy, which is sort of, "Let's do this right, even though it's expensive and hard, rather than using a quick fix to make it work well enough."  That's where the simulatory parts of the game enter play (I don't think it's pure simulatory sandbox, unlike Gatleos-- I find pure sandbox rather boring, and appreciate the gameplay elements of DF.)  You really see this shine in the bugs, where fun, unexpected behavior crops up, but it's in all elements of play, because there's a sense throughout the game that you CAN be smarter than the developer-- that you can do things the developer never thought of, because he didn't make a walled-in world for you to play in the way he intended.  Instead, he made a system, that you can play any way you can dream of.

Third, the game combines multiple goals into one game.  You can play it like an RTS-- defeat the goblins!  You can play it like simcity: make something beautiful and epic like a giant pyramid.  You can play it like a logic puzzle, by trying to figure out how to accomplish some particular goal, like making an obsidian factory.  You can play it like an RPG: level your favorite dwarf into a fearsome killing machine.  (That's not even counting adventure mode.)  These multiple goals work great together-- beauty isn't just based on scarcity and interesting design, but on function as well, for instance.  By the time your interest in one goal is fading, your interest in another is blossoming.

[IronValley]

To play the Devil's advocate here, not that I really want to, but I feel that it is something that should be mentioned.

Despite Toady's vision of creating a world simulator, and his unconventional way of developing Dwarf Fortress, it does have a few "basic" issues that have lingered in the game for quite some time.
The main issue here is of course optimization and long term performance. Dwarf Fortress is engine-wise, a rather simple game (or, appears to be anyways), Each entity on the map has its own thread, and receives orders from a pool of available tasks. Something that in itself is great, it's simple, manageable and quite easy to expand upon. However, there are extreme performance issues when the number of threads increases, for such a "simple" game Dwarf Fortress requires a hell lot of processing power.

Tests have been done that suggest the main culprit behind this is the path-finding system, and the fact that it can only run on one core. Baughn did for a while help out with some performance improvements (primarily output), but little has been done to improve what many consider the "Main" weakness in Dwarf Fortress.
There's also the long standing issue with Nobility that has yet to be fixed as well, but that seems to be more of a design philosophy question rather than a underlying issues.

Apart from these issues, I have to agree with Nil and Gatleos. The real beauty of Dwarf Fortress is that it gives you just enough information to really immerse yourself in the game, and include your imagination in the playing process....

It's sort of like Lego for gamers =)

[Greiger]

It's a sandbox game where what you do matters.

I could make a tower to the sky in minecraft and fill it with complicated rooms.  But those rooms would be empty and meaningless whenever the player isn't there.

Make a tower to the sky (by default z+ 15 but extendible, customization is another one of the things I love about it) in dwarf fortress and fill it with rooms and those rooms can have meaning all the time, workshops, party halls, animal pens, storage... they all serve a real and constant purpose that can affect eachother.


That and you can play the game in almost any way you like.
 
You could be one of those players that creates massive megaprojects likely visible from space, either turning off invasions or keeping them on and building your megaproject around them.
 
Or you can be like me, creating functional fortresses, that have some aesthetically pleasing bits, but never something massive that would take years to construct.  There is nothing stopping you from either approach.

[Jimlad11]

deleted

[Scarpa]

The game is an excellent example of Emergent Gameplay. That's the real hook for me, knowing that every time I play something unexpected and usually hilarious will occur.