The basic design of Rimworld can be traced directly to Dwarf Fortress's interpretation of "Top-down depiction of interactable colony" - so much so it's almost genealogical. Tynan said as much on his kickstarter page. Again, my words are not claiming plagiarism, but instead just poor adoption of previous designs..
I would like to highlight this quote from the Rimworld Kickstarter circa 2013:
I've always thought the best part of games like Dwarf Fortress and The Sims was the stories that come out of them. That's why RimWorld is designed as a story generator. It's not about winning and losing - it's about the drama, tragedy, and comedy that goes on in your colony.
The game was designed to produced stories, hence the selectable AI 'storytellers' each with their own attitudes. While this storyteller system worked fairly well (perhaps only due to the opaque nature of it's inner workings) I am thoroughly convinced that the actual gameplay of vanilla Rimworld failed to transcend the storytelling magic that is DF, due to a number of design choices that actively hindered the player's ability to guide or adapt the story. These choices were likely made due to Tynan's incorrect assessment of what made Dwarf Fortress so compelling, as can be evidenced by his wholesale adoption of a number of game mechanics without acknowledgment of context or purpose. He failed to see the forest for the trees, and so he created a violence simulator with sporadic suggestions of pop psychology that a player might occasionally misconstrue as character.
Character traits are a one-way street - you cannot have a subtle cannibal or a reformed misogynist. Growth is limited to skill gain and physical malady, aka scarring and addiction, and thus these pawns have literally no personality. The limited trait pool does not help things. Negative traits are simple
annoying and nothing interesting can really be gain from their presence. Finally,
a edgy backstory written by some random kickstarter backer DOES NOT make for good narrative. in fact, it detracts when I have to cringe internally at what I'm reading. Art is randomly generated, poorly - perhaps Tynan thinks all artists are acid-heads, but it takes away all significance when the events generated are not associated with the history visible to the player. I believe Rimworld artists can depict events that have occurred in the colony, but more often than not you are given a meaningless statue of (3 cannibal porpoises fucking a 7-toed leopard while a megaspider gleefully watches) some random alpha-numerical hodgepodge that does little to convince me of the reality of this world. At least in DF there is the notion of artist preference and historical events that might inspire the artwork. This relates to the notion that complete randomness is extremely uninteresting, since at that point the generated item merely denotes the system that generated it.
Other systems that DF obviously inspired:
Worldgen: Rivers, terrain, but the civilizations are cookie-cutter and so the whole map ends up feeling sterile
Highly-Specific Damage: Losing individual bits and bobs, resulting in poor performance of related jobs
Stress Reactions: going insane, berserk, at the drop of a hat.
These two games really are two peas in a pod, right? You dig, chop, farm, and process all your raw goods at workshops inside rooms constructed by individuals who you passively direct as an overseer. Occasionally you are threatened by bad actors, or mismanage your supply of food and suffer from that.
However, if you imagine a large tree as a metaphor for all the possible stories generated by a system, then the tree representing Rimworld stories would have only a few branches, with most ending in the same two leaves - 'we established a killbox, and went on to boring success, or we didn't and thus we died'.
The most compelling elements of Rimworld's design seem like half-hazard implementations of the much more interesting systems found in DF. The ever-rising threat of raids is no more compelling a mechanic than, say, the increasing difficulty found in successive Space Invader levels. Thus I find myself torn between wanting to design a colony around the imagined desires of the colonists, vs. knowing that there is a particular formation of walls that promotes easy cleanup of invaders. This same conflict arises when I play DF, however Rimworld tilts the argument heavily towards the sterile, arcade metagame in that the pawns are conglomerations of cheesy tropes and irreconcilable traits that provide no stepping off point for creative thought. There are only so many stories to be told about the Pyromaniacal Cannibals of the Galactic Rim. So, for me, Rimworld is very much a 'shut brain off, violence simulator' while DF can still provoke consideration of a huge variety of topics. This is why you cannot just tell me to play Rimworld with raids turned off - the colony management is waaaay too shallow to be interesting without conflict. Or modification..
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Topic: RimWorld - basically the sci-fi Dwarf Fortress (Read 813348 times)