Still, I wouldn't call it tragedy.
It wasn't my intention when I wrote this thread to start bashing DF. I've been driven to that by a combination of watching the game I was enjoying and excited about dwindle into pointlessness, and people in this thread acting like DF is above criticism even in a suggestions forum.
For a proceduraly generated game it beats others like No Man's Buy on the market and it costs nothing.
No Man's Sky's problems were obvious before it came out. I'm not sure what the hype was about. The key problem with No Man's Sky is that it had no compelling pillar of gameplay. Open ended sandbox games depend on players being able to define and implement their own goals of play. But No Man's Sky had no way to persist the player's activities, meaning that the players were unable to define or implement their own goals. Everything that a player does in a game is strictly speaking meaningless. But in No Man's Sky it not only was meaningless, but it feels meaningless. And if a game feels meaningless, why play it? No Man's Sky is supposed to be an exploration game, but exploration as a pillar of gameplay is about finding the surprising depths - which is going to happen in a PnP game with a fiercely intellectual and creative gamemaster or in something like Skyrim with its creativity poured into the setting by an army of developers - but isn't going to happen in a procedural game.
For a procedurally generated game, I can think of almost no game where the generated world is more meaningless to the game play than Dwarf Fortress. Sure, you can explore it in Adventure mode, but ultimately its not Adventure mode that made DF so interesting. If DF only had Adventure mode, it would just be another Rogue-like with massive meaningless scale that lacked any of the tight well thought out intense gameplay of say NetHack. NetHack has this well earned reputation of 'the developers have thought of everything'. Oddly, DF never feels that way for me.
It's interesting how decent the procedurally generated world is and how many things it tries to keep track of, but the vast majority of that generated content is meaningless to the gameplay. And, it's also as shallow as a puddle, which becomes obvious whenever the game tries to link gameplay to the procedurally generated content, and you get spammed with 100's of meaningless names performing the same meaningless actions - The Blah of Blah became refugees. The Blah of Blah became refugees. Blah blah blah. It's not a narrative, and its not adding to the gameplay.
Ironically, DF is a game that doesn't even really know why it is successful. It's not because of the procedurally generated content, save to the extent that that creates a mystique around the game. The reason DF is successful is that quite the opposite of No Man's Sky, Dwarf Fortress makes the choices the players make feel meaningful, and provides the player tons of opportunities to set their own goals and implement plans. Whether its having a throne room made of solid gold, or having a whole unit of legendary axe dwarfs in adamantium, or its making that 100 z magma safe pump stack to bring a magma reservoir up to near the surface, DF provides lots of gameplay around setting your own goals and implementing them. NMS provides practically none.
The great tragedy of No Man's Sky is that scale provides almost no gameplay in and of itself. In fact, I'd bet the scale ultimately got in the way of implementing a good game. That was obvious for 6-8 months before the game out even to someone who had only a casual knowledge of the game.
An example might be Megabeast behavior in legends, while in fort mode they are nothing but berserk bullets coming your way.
Or how the game gives you few dozen types of trees but no way of actually *planting one*.
Eh. I'm thinking more about things like it spends all this time generating a civilization, but the last names of the dwarfs are completely random so that none of these connections between dwarfs are really evident or apparent. I would think that having some sort of naming scheme would be priority #1 in a game like this. And because the immigration is random, none of those connections ever really impact your gameplay. Dwarfs don't immigrate in families. Family reunions don't take place. There is this stuff in the legendarium, but it is not only mere repetition but has no meaningful impact on play.
Some dwarf in your fortress apparently cares that some human was struck down by a sasquatch in 156 because he carved it on your walls, but why should you?
And sometimes abandoned mechanics intersect with the lack of gameplay focus, as in not only do dwarves never throw parties anymore, but typical of the game's shallow design, parties when they did exist served solely as random artificial source of game difficulty that added nothing to the core gameplay (much like nobles mandates). Dwarves get married without ceremony, they give birth without ceremony, they die without ceremony, they invest new nobles without ceremony. This is a hugely lost opportunity to tell story, or at least give the illusion of story which is what DF does well. Who gives a frack about the procedural generation. If this game is supposed to be a massive story generation engine, give us story.
Or the fact that it implements dozens of types of trees, but for the most part none of it has anything to do with gameplay. Or the fact that it implements hundreds of sorts of animals, but makes you play within a 100 acre wood where the game engine basically only brings one animal type at a time per layer procedurally one after the other as you kill off the prior one as if the animals were being queued up off screen. And, why should we give a frack about the procedural generation. Does it really do anything for the game? It's a great example of DF making the same sort of mistake as NMS, in thinking that scale is the same as depth.
Or the fact that it implements 100's of food sources, but makes farms so insanely productive with such minimal effort and dwarf food requirements so low (owing to its distorted time scales), that food scarcity is almost never an issue of any sort and the real problem with food very quickly comes to be that you are tracking 1000's or 10000's of thousands of pointless food items that are eating up CPU time and thus actually detracting from game play rather than adding to it. I'm exporting 1000's of food items now, not because I need anything, but just to keep my food production from burying my already painfully slow frame rate. So why do we have food again?
Or the fact that the combat engine is supposed to provide for all sorts of detail, and yet so much of it is, "Blah Blah grab's Blah Blah by its left third finger, bruising the fat. Blah Blah breaks the grip of Blah Blah on on its left third finger." Not only is much of the combat often unintentionally(?) comical in its pettiness or in the bizarre nature of its outcomes, but the combat engine gives little in the way of score or direction to the fight. I'm not suggesting bringing hit points into the game, and I'm actually really into a cRPG finally experimenting with non-hit point based mechanics PnP RPGs have long experimented in, but one thing that is missing that hit points do provide is a way for the observer to 'keep score' and thus become dramatically invested in the fight. So much of DF's combat devolves down to uninteresting 'death spirals' where its just a matter of how long it will take the loser to finally succumb fully, and really there is almost never any give and take to a fight. It never sways back and forth with the outcome in the balance, or at least it does it so rarely that when it did it would be remarked on.
A really good example of how shallow the game is can be found by inspecting the engravings on the wall and how rarely they meaningful record anything that you'd call a narrative event. Dwarves don't really interact with each other, and to the extent that they do, they don't remember doing so. The record of the settlement mostly revolves around artifacts being constructed, but the artifacts themselves aren't a narrative event. Feanor creating the Silmarils isn't important. What's important is how this act impacts the characters in the story and sets the stage for their actions. Instead we get 1000 carvings of cheese, which is a good example of why I say that its the bugs that are more important to the emergent gameplay than the intention. We member that fondly, because of the unintentional incongruity of it. With so much important to say, the game engine didn't intentionally spam carvings of cheese out of irony. It spammed out carvings of cheese because it had no ability to say anything interesting.
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Topic: How Immigration Ruins the Game (Read 9099 times)