Coupled with winters where farms went fallow, it was much easier to lose a fortress for want of basics.Īdditionally, there was a progression involved where access to better metals meant digging deeper and exposing yourself to additional hazards generated from fratures deeper inside the mountain. In particular, farming required setting up an irrigation system, which required exposing your fortress to a river that occasionally spawned hostile creatures which would disrupt farming. It's also a cultural legacy left over from early versions that were more challenging but less open ended simulations. >The game's legendary difficulty is entirely due to the impenetrability of its user interface and systems. Since they are single-player, I find just "mastering the game" to maximise end-game score to be quite pointless, but that's just how I feel of course. I've played a lot of these games and from Civilization II to Dwarf Fortress, just winning by using the game weaknesses has always been very uninteresting, but building a world-class city-state on an island or an above-ground wooden fortress without digging, for example, are challenges that you can create for yourself and that make these games interesting to play. I'd say that the point of this kind of open-ended simulation game without a clear goal is not to "win" since there is nothing to win, but to create your own challenges. And then when the enemy comes knocking it's quite trivial to pull up your drawbridges and line the entry halls with traps and generally grind them into a smooth red paste. > It is quite trivial then to get a fortress up and running and produce far more food, drinks, and goods than you ever need and grow your wealth rapidly. It is like the Great Salt Lake of games: a hundred miles wide and a few feet deep. And then when the enemy comes knocking it's quite trivial to pull up your drawbridges and line the entry halls with traps and generally grind them into a smooth red paste.ĭwarf Fortress may be a fine simulation and an interesting study in systems and a great conversation piece but it is not a very good game. It is quite trivial then to get a fortress up and running and produce far more food, drinks, and goods than you ever need and grow your wealth rapidly.
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When you actually finish getting through all the tutorials needed to learn how to play the game it falls flat on its face. The game's legendary difficulty is entirely due to the impenetrability of its user interface and systems. The more time you spend with it, the more you understand how it works, the more you realize how incredibly unbalanced it is. This is the player side of the simulation siren song. In all of my time with the game I've enjoyed the idea of the game more than I actually enjoyed playing it. See: _Designing Games_ by Tynan Sylvester, developer of RimWorld ( ).ĭwarf Fortress, I think, is the exception which proves this rule.Īnyway, I think simulations like this are really cool to build, but hard to turn into a fun game.Īnd I would argue that Dwarf Fortress is no exception at all.
From the perspective of a player who does not know how the simulation works, the latter can _seem_ like the output of a complex system.
was cheating.Īnd it also seems like players can't really tell the difference between a sophisticated simulation and a handful of heuristics with some calls to random() thrown in. See: F.E.A.R.'s Goal-Oriented Action Planning ( ) which had to be modified to broadcast its intent to the player, because play-testers felt the game was unfair and that the A.I. In practice, high-quality simulations seem to be interesting but not all that fun.
There's this perception that an amazing simulation will be the basis for an amazing game. Highly complex, in-depth, system simulation is like a siren song for game developers and players alike.
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