Dwarf Fortress > DF General Discussion

What will happen when Dwarf fortress becomes user friendly? Let's make plans.

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Novel:
Idly dreaming about VR as you do, i began thinking about something on a similar time scale: Dwarf Fortress having good UI. This, surprisingly (a little, for ye new people such as myself), was a worrying thought. It's been widely agreed that one of the things that make Dwarf Fortress what it is, chiefly in it's community, is it's perilous barrier of entry. Without it, i worry what this forum, one of the best I've ever been glad to be a (newly-fledged) part of, would become. I am not averse to the forum growing, after all, I'm an recently escaped lunatic, but I'd rather not have its community turn into what many popular games do either. Thankfully, this is rather far down the line, but nevertheless what do you think would happen? And how to counter it?

 In my opinion, even with a better UI dwarf fortress would be an complex and difficult game to learn, but whether it would be enough so is a different question. A random thought that occurred to me was to turn up the realism dials to maximum, and as such deter large swathes of trolls who couldn't be bothered to think about it. I still doubt its effectiveness though. I welcome your musings.

smakemupagus:
i actually like the main concept of the DF ui, where you type commands basically with syntax (verb, general noun, specific noun).  Sure, it needs refinement, yeah the military screen and the manager could improve.  But big picture, I wish I could interact with people so efficiently.

As for the other stuff, good games tend to have a good community :)  A lot of forum nastyness comes around when people have a sense of entitlement, whether they rightfully feel entitled because they paid a lot of money, or otherwise.

i2amroy:
The year XXYY: DF has user friendly graphics.
The year XXYY+1: Civilization crumbles
The year XXYY+2: The sun goes supernova ;D

Alternatively I figure that by the point that DF actually has a user friendly UI the game will be such an in-depth simulation that it will still be an incredibly complex task to learn how to play, or at least survive for any short amount of time. When you need to worry about torches for lighting your caves, the 12 different new randomized night creatures and how to find them all, along with the simple things like food, booze, and surviving against the wild beasts and ravenous hordes of undead, I think it will still weed out a significant portion of new players.

GoombaGeek:
The game's difficulty is much worse than the UI. Really. The UI is pretty simple as soon as you work out the -/+ scrolling, but actually playing the game is hard. So I'm not worried about a bumrush of idiots who start regularly using these forums for some reason.

DVNO:
If Dwarf Fortress became so smooth it became user friendly, TodayOne would com to the conclusion his game is no longer a tongue in cheek ironic homage to rougelikes. He would hit 'delete' on the source code, and start from scratch.

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