I'm still pissed about the fact that they essentially gave the finger to everyone who has been long-term supporters - when they added the G to their UI, they essentially scrapped the old. In favor of a mouse-driven design, they dropped the old, keyboard-driven UI.
Long-term supporters, in this case, means people paying, and not insubstantial amounts either - before they partnered with Kitfox, they used to publish how much they were receiving. Tens of thousands of $ a month, mind you. For monthly contributions at that level for many, many years I would expect at least a nod - instead they straight-up told everyone they'd abandon keyboard users, a decision later recanted.
That said, Dwarf Fortress holds a special place in my heart. Only regret I have is that I didn't track how many hours I put in. In excess of 10k, I'm sure.
I was under the impression that the classic keyboard-only version was kept up to date with the Steam version? They're both on patch 53.16[1][2] which was released simultaneously on 8/5, so it doesn't look to me like keyboard-only is forgotten or left behind unless I'm missing something.
I understand why they did it - medical emergencies and all. Have to pay the bill somehow. But yea, 0.47.05's still my go-to. Just can't vibe with the new UI/keybinds.
Old controls were on their roadmap for a long time, but the benefit from their perspective shrinks as time goes on. I doubt we'll see it at this point.
They complain there are few Mac players on Steam. Well, I'm not going to buy it if it doesn't run on the desktop OS [1] i use most, duh.
[1] My Linux boxes are headless. And the windows boxes I have to RDP into them. That may work for a game with a beginning and and end via Steam streaming or something, but not for a forever game you just keep around.
While individual game developers choose whether to support macOS, the broader phenomenon of developers dropping macOS support is Apple's fault. They either have no interest in being a serious gaming platform, or else they've made catastrophic missteps in their quest to stay relevant for gamers.
I was a quarterly(-ish) contributor for years. There was no way for me to justify buying anything when they announced dropping keyboard support, when I've spent years developing muscle-memory to their (admittedly insane) control scheme.
Also - I might be wrong, but I was under the impression that running DF through a terminal is (was...) possible if you're not using a graphical tileset (perhaps even with... ha)?
It makes me sad to think about. I would love to get into the new UI, but the immersion just won't come back. My muscle memory, hands firmly on the keyboard, is too persistent, and playing with the new UI feels like stumbling around and misclicking.
I wish nothing but success to Tarn and Zach, it’s great that releasing on Steam and adding a friendlier UI helped the game reach new audiences. It’s the proverbial time black hole.
In a documentary about them putting Dwarf Fortress on Steam Tarn talked about how he had to split the $7 million first payment from Steam with his brother and it turned out the easiest way was to just use the bank app.
I had the muscle memory for the full keyboard control on pre-steam releases and the loss of some complete keyboard controls and things just changing made it so I never really got into the Steam release, which was pretty disappointing. I get it though.
I'm in a similar, but less extreme boat. The new interface has its perks, especially in terms of discoverability, but for tasks that need to be done repeatedly (request 10 beds be made before you have a manager, for example), you really miss the ability to rock some chords.
It took me some time to remap the muscle memory but it felt so worth it. The Steam version is not just a new AI, it introduced a lot of gameplay changes which really improved the underlying systems a lot.
“Friendlier” and still one of the worst UIs available. It’s nearly impenetrable and the game has no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players, and is probably the most overrated game I’ve ever had the displeasure of playing.
I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun. The promise of dwarf fortress is far more interesting than the actual gameplay.
EDIT: To people who are rebutting this by saying “it’s just not for you” - that’s entirely my point. Few people enjoy it. I am the majority opinion here.
Minecraft was very fun and was selling like hotcakes when it had "no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players". Even nowadays there's no tutorial as far as I know and much of how to play is left to discovery. The achievements tree is a bit of a guide, just by telling you some of the things that are possible, but it sure doesn't tell you how to do anything.
I think having an official tutorial or an on-ramp for new players is not a requirement for a good game. In a broader sense of the word "game", a game is separate from a tutorial, so a good game can exist without a tutorial. Chess has no official tutorial or on ramp for new players, and yet it's widely considered to be one of the greatest games.
> Few people enjoy it. I am the majority opinion here.
The majority of people do not play videogames.
The majority of those do not play any roguelikes.
Citing the majority is completely useless.
Furthermore I'm not convinced you can make a tutorial for Dwarf Fortress.
There's too much complexity, too many edge-cases that you end up needing to know.
Most people seem to burn out if fed too much info at once.
> I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun.
On my Steam friends-list I have 14 friends who have purchased the game.
The top three by play-time are at 314, 267, and 67 hours.
The remaining 7 with playtime average 22 hours, the other 5 have it in their backlog.
That to me is some excellent playtime.
Not Lethal Company numbers or anything, but that game didn't have a release before steam either.
I can't speak on the Steam version, but the UI was perfectly fine in the ASCII version. The worst thing that I remember was how things were categorized. IE it was something like (b)uildings, (q)ueries, (d)esignations and whatever (i) was, got weirdly split apart. I forget the exact nature of it because it's been so long since I last played. But that seemed more a quirk of the game's spaghetti code ontological structure, because these things did have genuinely different behaviors despite being conceptually similar. That's a problem at a deeper layer than the UI/UX.
The only other thing I can think of is the labor menu was kind of annoying for large fortresses.
No great game is enjoyed by everyone. Your options when making a work, of any kind, are to either A) make something utterly inoffensive to the point that no one will have strong opinions about it at all or B) make a game that some people will love and others will bounce off of.
Dwarf Fortress is solidly in category B. It's a sandbox game, which already selects for people capable of making their own fun with a toy, while alienating those who want more concrete goals. It's a simulation game, which selects for people who enjoy the thrill of experiencing something that nobody else has before, while alienating those who prefer a crafted narrative. And it's got a lot of fiddly little systems, that offer just a little bit of reward for mastering, which selects for people who like figuring stuff out, whether through experimentation, external resources, or a combination of both, and filters those who just want all their options presented to them in a streamlined experience.
If a player meets all those selection criteria, they'll likely find Dwarf Fortress one of the most fun games they've ever played. They'll marvel at all the intricate details, and invent explanations for things that are (probably) random, like imagining the master engraver who keeps carving masterwork depictions of that one time he single-handily defeated a forgotten beast all over the captain of the guards' bedroom as being petty as hell.
If a player gets filtered, then they'll bounce off the game, and because they haven't engaged with all its fiddly details, feel like the game is just boring.
As someone whose spent ~5k hours playing DF you are right, every person I have ever talked to about it has liked the idea and like 1/50 has gone on to play it for >10 hours.
I used to play it, and for me, I think it scratched the same creative itch that Minecraft does in other folks. Building grand designs, etc. But in Minecraft, I'd have to place it block by block, and the physics... well, they're just absent. DF is like Minecraft, but with Lemmings, and a full physics system.
I still remember some of those designs, and I can see them clearly in my mind - not as the game represented them, but as the dwarves would have seen them. A grand underground bridge, with water flowing alongside it, before spiraling down into the main hall - where the wagons would enter the marketplace, and the dwarves would pass through the mist generated by the waterfall (forgotten beast got 'em all.) A giant vertical chain, build out of stone, standing as a monument to the grand fortress that sprawls underneath it (half-completed, as the fortress succumbed to madness.) A fortress built into a volcano, underneath the open sky, with the forges powered by magma, and a small river diversion creating endless obsidian (fucking birds kept swooping down and either eating my dwarves, or knocking them into the volcano, because I couldn't build the roof fast enough.)
I keep wanting to go back in, and I should - but I'd literally have to dig out the `cheatsheet.txt` file I had to keep on my desktop while playing, PLUS I'd have to figure out if I still needed the third party app that makes managing dwarven jobs reasonable, because in-game it's a fucking nightmare - and whether that app even exists for OS X, because I think it was a Windows-only thing that would interact with the game by directly reading RAM.
The point of DF, to a large extent, is precise control and detail. It's the opposite of the approach taken by AI games that want to generalise based on simple prompts.
It's been a while since I last played DF and I'm surprised to see that both this article and the video are a bit light on details, IIRC they used to showcase upcoming updates a lot more.
Digging a bit more it looks like the magic system will be built around deities, spheres of influence [1], and workshops/professions centered around magic leading to procedurally generated spells. I'm really excited to see how it'll turn out.
They have a history of at least trying to be transparent, especially in their Future of the Fortress posts[0]. Emphasize on trying to, as they're not exactly great at sticking to plans, though that certainly improved with the Kitfox partnership.
I’ve been tinkering with a game engine where magic is made of first principles for a very long time. Cannot wait to see the gameplay and mechanics here!
Only working on the magic system itself, unfortunately making the game around the mechanics is not something I enjoy, so I have been implementing different approaches with some minimal debugging UI. Did not reach the need for an actual game engine
What ive generally heard is that this is more of a refactor and base functionality improvement, rather than building out all the actual magic systems to start with.
2-10 updates in the future will have much more fleshed out magic
Historically, they did a big update every year or two. Since the Steam release, they've sped up significantly, with medium sized updates every 2-3 months.
this game will be updated until the creators die, its a passion project and is a genre defining masterpiece if you are into procedurally generated narrative driven world sims.
Does any other game have true procedural generated magic systems like DF talks about? I have always been curious how and if they'll pull it off and if it will just end up being all pretty much the same
I'm still pissed about the fact that they essentially gave the finger to everyone who has been long-term supporters - when they added the G to their UI, they essentially scrapped the old. In favor of a mouse-driven design, they dropped the old, keyboard-driven UI.
Long-term supporters, in this case, means people paying, and not insubstantial amounts either - before they partnered with Kitfox, they used to publish how much they were receiving. Tens of thousands of $ a month, mind you. For monthly contributions at that level for many, many years I would expect at least a nod - instead they straight-up told everyone they'd abandon keyboard users, a decision later recanted.
That said, Dwarf Fortress holds a special place in my heart. Only regret I have is that I didn't track how many hours I put in. In excess of 10k, I'm sure.
I was under the impression that the classic keyboard-only version was kept up to date with the Steam version? They're both on patch 53.16[1][2] which was released simultaneously on 8/5, so it doesn't look to me like keyboard-only is forgotten or left behind unless I'm missing something.
[1] https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/
I understand why they did it - medical emergencies and all. Have to pay the bill somehow. But yea, 0.47.05's still my go-to. Just can't vibe with the new UI/keybinds.
Old controls were on their roadmap for a long time, but the benefit from their perspective shrinks as time goes on. I doubt we'll see it at this point.
They chose to have social security over a keyboard only interface for a game they continue to publish for free.
They also dropped the Mac version.
They complain there are few Mac players on Steam. Well, I'm not going to buy it if it doesn't run on the desktop OS [1] i use most, duh.
[1] My Linux boxes are headless. And the windows boxes I have to RDP into them. That may work for a game with a beginning and and end via Steam streaming or something, but not for a forever game you just keep around.
While individual game developers choose whether to support macOS, the broader phenomenon of developers dropping macOS support is Apple's fault. They either have no interest in being a serious gaming platform, or else they've made catastrophic missteps in their quest to stay relevant for gamers.
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I was a quarterly(-ish) contributor for years. There was no way for me to justify buying anything when they announced dropping keyboard support, when I've spent years developing muscle-memory to their (admittedly insane) control scheme.
Also - I might be wrong, but I was under the impression that running DF through a terminal is (was...) possible if you're not using a graphical tileset (perhaps even with... ha)?
The game runs fine in Proton, including with dfhack. You can probably get it working on your Mac with a tiny bit of Crossover/Wine/GPTK tweaking.
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It makes me sad to think about. I would love to get into the new UI, but the immersion just won't come back. My muscle memory, hands firmly on the keyboard, is too persistent, and playing with the new UI feels like stumbling around and misclicking.
I know what you mean, but I have been playing since 2008? and the last few updates have been pretty great.
Yeah my biggest issue has been that none of my muscle memory transfers over and it adds another hurdle to ever getting back into the game.
I don’t understand. I don’t know what “added the G to their UI” means.
Also sounds like they added back the keyboard support so there’s literally no issue?
> In excess of 10k, I'm sure.
Sure sounds like you got your moneys worth.
Ui+g=gui. As in since they added graphics
[dead]
I wish nothing but success to Tarn and Zach, it’s great that releasing on Steam and adding a friendlier UI helped the game reach new audiences. It’s the proverbial time black hole.
Weirdly the ASCII art was what drew me in the most. Once accustomed to it, feels like The Matrix where they're reading the world.
as someone who grew up playing ascii games I was pretty excited about the graphical update.
there is a novelty to ascii, but its a barrier to entry and major eye strain.
In a documentary about them putting Dwarf Fortress on Steam Tarn talked about how he had to split the $7 million first payment from Steam with his brother and it turned out the easiest way was to just use the bank app.
The noclip documentary series for any other readers who might be interested
1. The Origins of Dwarf Fortress: https://youtu.be/MxV24so-dw8
2. How Dwarf Fortress Evolved over 16 Years of Development: https://youtu.be/PiNeDarPzeI
3. How Dwarf Fortress Coming to Steam Changed Everything: https://youtu.be/TX65XCk2-6U anecdote about the money starts @ 18:40
4. Life After the Success of Dwarf Fortress: https://youtu.be/I5zgBXp4e8A
You are thinking of the NoClip documentary! It is fantastic and well worth your time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwLSgaYPKA0&list=PL-THgg8Qnv...
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I had the muscle memory for the full keyboard control on pre-steam releases and the loss of some complete keyboard controls and things just changing made it so I never really got into the Steam release, which was pretty disappointing. I get it though.
I'm in a similar, but less extreme boat. The new interface has its perks, especially in terms of discoverability, but for tasks that need to be done repeatedly (request 10 beds be made before you have a manager, for example), you really miss the ability to rock some chords.
It took me some time to remap the muscle memory but it felt so worth it. The Steam version is not just a new AI, it introduced a lot of gameplay changes which really improved the underlying systems a lot.
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steam release is a major improvement beyond just the graphical updates.
if you are a fan of the original I would encourage you to give it another shot.
“Friendlier” and still one of the worst UIs available. It’s nearly impenetrable and the game has no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players, and is probably the most overrated game I’ve ever had the displeasure of playing.
I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun. The promise of dwarf fortress is far more interesting than the actual gameplay.
EDIT: To people who are rebutting this by saying “it’s just not for you” - that’s entirely my point. Few people enjoy it. I am the majority opinion here.
Minecraft was very fun and was selling like hotcakes when it had "no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players". Even nowadays there's no tutorial as far as I know and much of how to play is left to discovery. The achievements tree is a bit of a guide, just by telling you some of the things that are possible, but it sure doesn't tell you how to do anything.
I think having an official tutorial or an on-ramp for new players is not a requirement for a good game. In a broader sense of the word "game", a game is separate from a tutorial, so a good game can exist without a tutorial. Chess has no official tutorial or on ramp for new players, and yet it's widely considered to be one of the greatest games.
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So just because you couldn't get into it means everyone who's enjoying it is a poser? That's some pretty self-centered thinking right there.
No one should be judging you if it's not your thing. Those of us that enjoy it readily admit its faults and own the fact it's not a game for everyone.
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> Few people enjoy it. I am the majority opinion here.
The majority of people do not play videogames. The majority of those do not play any roguelikes. Citing the majority is completely useless.
Furthermore I'm not convinced you can make a tutorial for Dwarf Fortress. There's too much complexity, too many edge-cases that you end up needing to know. Most people seem to burn out if fed too much info at once.
> I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun.
On my Steam friends-list I have 14 friends who have purchased the game. The top three by play-time are at 314, 267, and 67 hours. The remaining 7 with playtime average 22 hours, the other 5 have it in their backlog. That to me is some excellent playtime. Not Lethal Company numbers or anything, but that game didn't have a release before steam either.
Yep, the game is difficult to get into, it's not for everyone.
The game is great, though. You are in the "I have no idea what's going on" phase.
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I can't speak on the Steam version, but the UI was perfectly fine in the ASCII version. The worst thing that I remember was how things were categorized. IE it was something like (b)uildings, (q)ueries, (d)esignations and whatever (i) was, got weirdly split apart. I forget the exact nature of it because it's been so long since I last played. But that seemed more a quirk of the game's spaghetti code ontological structure, because these things did have genuinely different behaviors despite being conceptually similar. That's a problem at a deeper layer than the UI/UX.
The only other thing I can think of is the labor menu was kind of annoying for large fortresses.
No great game is enjoyed by everyone. Your options when making a work, of any kind, are to either A) make something utterly inoffensive to the point that no one will have strong opinions about it at all or B) make a game that some people will love and others will bounce off of.
Dwarf Fortress is solidly in category B. It's a sandbox game, which already selects for people capable of making their own fun with a toy, while alienating those who want more concrete goals. It's a simulation game, which selects for people who enjoy the thrill of experiencing something that nobody else has before, while alienating those who prefer a crafted narrative. And it's got a lot of fiddly little systems, that offer just a little bit of reward for mastering, which selects for people who like figuring stuff out, whether through experimentation, external resources, or a combination of both, and filters those who just want all their options presented to them in a streamlined experience.
If a player meets all those selection criteria, they'll likely find Dwarf Fortress one of the most fun games they've ever played. They'll marvel at all the intricate details, and invent explanations for things that are (probably) random, like imagining the master engraver who keeps carving masterwork depictions of that one time he single-handily defeated a forgotten beast all over the captain of the guards' bedroom as being petty as hell.
If a player gets filtered, then they'll bounce off the game, and because they haven't engaged with all its fiddly details, feel like the game is just boring.
As someone whose spent ~5k hours playing DF you are right, every person I have ever talked to about it has liked the idea and like 1/50 has gone on to play it for >10 hours.
congratulations for stating what the the creators of the game have said many many time.
nobody is making you play it, and the people who enjoy playing it don't really care if it you liked it or not.
You're not wrong!
I used to play it, and for me, I think it scratched the same creative itch that Minecraft does in other folks. Building grand designs, etc. But in Minecraft, I'd have to place it block by block, and the physics... well, they're just absent. DF is like Minecraft, but with Lemmings, and a full physics system.
I still remember some of those designs, and I can see them clearly in my mind - not as the game represented them, but as the dwarves would have seen them. A grand underground bridge, with water flowing alongside it, before spiraling down into the main hall - where the wagons would enter the marketplace, and the dwarves would pass through the mist generated by the waterfall (forgotten beast got 'em all.) A giant vertical chain, build out of stone, standing as a monument to the grand fortress that sprawls underneath it (half-completed, as the fortress succumbed to madness.) A fortress built into a volcano, underneath the open sky, with the forges powered by magma, and a small river diversion creating endless obsidian (fucking birds kept swooping down and either eating my dwarves, or knocking them into the volcano, because I couldn't build the roof fast enough.)
I keep wanting to go back in, and I should - but I'd literally have to dig out the `cheatsheet.txt` file I had to keep on my desktop while playing, PLUS I'd have to figure out if I still needed the third party app that makes managing dwarven jobs reasonable, because in-game it's a fucking nightmare - and whether that app even exists for OS X, because I think it was a Windows-only thing that would interact with the game by directly reading RAM.
It sucks, but it's so good.
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I am going to boot it up and play today just to spite you lol
Makes me think how would an AI interface to a game like dwarf fortress play out. Where you tell it what you want like some sort of dwarven ruler.
The point of DF, to a large extent, is precise control and detail. It's the opposite of the approach taken by AI games that want to generalise based on simple prompts.
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been messing around with this idea in godot for a few months, if you are really interested i can send you an alpha build once its in a playable state.
It's been a while since I last played DF and I'm surprised to see that both this article and the video are a bit light on details, IIRC they used to showcase upcoming updates a lot more.
Digging a bit more it looks like the magic system will be built around deities, spheres of influence [1], and workshops/professions centered around magic leading to procedurally generated spells. I'm really excited to see how it'll turn out.
[1] https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Sphere
This seems more like a teaser trailer. I presume more information is forthcoming.
They have a history of at least trying to be transparent, especially in their Future of the Fortress posts[0]. Emphasize on trying to, as they're not exactly great at sticking to plans, though that certainly improved with the Kitfox partnership.
[0]: https://bay12games.com/dwarves/
I’ve been tinkering with a game engine where magic is made of first principles for a very long time. Cannot wait to see the gameplay and mechanics here!
i've been doing something similar and decided to stick with godot.
have you found yourself constrained with engine boilerplate or do you feel like you are making good progress on the magic system?
Only working on the magic system itself, unfortunately making the game around the mechanics is not something I enjoy, so I have been implementing different approaches with some minimal debugging UI. Did not reach the need for an actual game engine
What ive generally heard is that this is more of a refactor and base functionality improvement, rather than building out all the actual magic systems to start with.
2-10 updates in the future will have much more fleshed out magic
OPs post made me curious about jumping in, how often do they release updates? If I'm going to wait for this and the next one.
Historically, they did a big update every year or two. Since the Steam release, they've sped up significantly, with medium sized updates every 2-3 months.
this game will be updated until the creators die, its a passion project and is a genre defining masterpiece if you are into procedurally generated narrative driven world sims.
Does any other game have true procedural generated magic systems like DF talks about? I have always been curious how and if they'll pull it off and if it will just end up being all pretty much the same
yes, there are several games exploring this idea on steam.
Could you name a few of the best ones?
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It's so exciting, I've heard about them doing magic for a decade, and now it is actually approaching.
same, I'm going to break the hell out of this update
The only game I've I've supported where I ended up buying licenses for friends and family. Lot of respect for them and their game.