Even at its peak, DF's stories will be poor. Probably not worse than the majority of computer games, but I really fail to see dialogue being done well, for instance.
[Toady's devlog]
I'm assuming this isn't the peak of the game, and that was a great story.
Considering the limitations of the medium, I agree. Without those, I disagree. A guy has a few major life events, but there's not really any description of them, no personality to the character, no real significance. Those characterize stories more than grand, sweeping events do; otherwise I could say that this story was the most dramatic and emotional story ever:
"Urist McEvilmuffin tries to destroy the universe. The Great Hero Urist Lollygaggens saves it. The previous two sentences repeat 20 million times."
It contains everything you can think of, because it contains the universe, right? And the maximum drama is wrung out because it happens again and again? I hope the answer is no. None of it is fleshed out.
Dialogue is a very important part of that, and it is something that computers are extremely bad at creating (check out chatbots). That's mainly because it contains a number of rules that we can't explain easily ourselves, but we notice when something's off. Even if it did perfectly did create dialogue, there's still body language and photorealistic graphics that DF won't have the advantage of to help its characters communicate.
What DF is focusing towards is nonlinear stories, ones that you can interact with at your discretion. This is... well, not completely unprecedented (because pretty much any game that you have any choice in makes for a technically different story) but the degree of difference between the potential stories is unprecedented, and very hard to reduce into the separate, prewritten threads that are currently called nonlinearity in today's games. This doesn't mean that the individual stories possible will stand up toe-to-toe with The Lord of the Rings or the Brothers Karamazov, but it does mean that you can actually influence the story as it is being written.
Hmm... let's see. I am fairly happy with the game and how it's proceeding, but I'll ratchet up the pessimism because the thread calls for it. Devil's advocate, here we come.
Since there's a lot of concern here, I'll do what I can to try and alleviate some of it.
I'm not very concerned, actually. I agree that most of my complaints will eventually be fixed, and I am happy with the rate that Toady's working on it. The thread called for downsides which are currently present, however, and I'll share my view of those. Consider what I don't comment on to be saying that you're right.
The interface is lacking and fairly unintuitive.
This is true, but it will be fixed later in the dev cycle. There's no real point fixing it early, because things would just break. Thus, for now, working is enough.
Agreed mostly, though improving the interface even as a placeholder would probably get a few more fans. But, that is a tradeoff, and I'm not too worried personally about it.
It can be very random with artifacts, which can be a problem.
I do not see how this could be a problem, nor have I heard of it being a problem. Unless you count Planepacked, which was a glitch.
Getting an assortment of bone cups, microcline cabinets and wooden toy anvil artifacts can suck when someone wants their adamantine sword. I've seen that complaint made, at least. I'd vaguely like a more balanced distibution of artifacts between useful and not useful, but can't see a system that it would be worth Toady's time coding.
Both the trading interface and asking the merchants for stuff next time are repetitive and should be streamlined.
I disagree. I think that it's a good thing that these interfaces allow more control.
Control's good. Forcing you to micromanage is not. An interface can be measured by the effort it takes to do something in it (though it's worth giving it a break if lets you do a lot of stuff.)
Spending a few minutes requesting the exact same trade goods as last year five years in a row is a waste, for example. It also is a royal pain to get your trader there to trade before the merchants leave frequently, and in reselecting all the goods that you want to trade (and in redesignating the list of items to trade if you don't have enough at the depot and realize that halfway through selecting the items you want.)
Even at its peak, DF's stories will be poor. Probably not worse than the majority of computer games, but I really fail to see dialogue being done well, for instance.
I disagree. Dialogue may not be a strong point of the game, but it will approve massively when we get more than just a placeholder. I could even see this as being one of the things Toady would be willing to accept outside content for.
Because Toady wants to have so much of the game procedurally generated, good, natural-sounding dialog will be extremely hard to implement without being either repetitive or simple. This is a limitation with computers writing dialog, not with Dwarf Fortress's abilities. I might point out that no computer has passed the Turing test yet; with the range of activities available in Dwarf Fortress, poor dialogue is going to be more apparent in it than in any other game.
You can't see much information about a dwarf without individually examining him; you can't, for example, simply glance at several dwarves to see what they're wearing, what's hurt, or what they look like. (Toady still did a pretty good job with hurt, thirsty or unhappy being displayed.)
In addition to what you mentioned, he did a good job at showing what they do for a living. I don't know why you'd need more info than that available at a glance.You also can't see much about items unless you individually examine each one.
You can see what they are. Again, I don't know why you'd need more.
You don't need it, but it can be convenient. And it can add to the ambience of the scene. This is something that other games have over Dwarf Fortress. Graphics can show a lot more information quickly than a simple ASCII symbol, and it's even sometimes used for more than eye candy.
You can only see one creature/object in a tile at a time.
How could this possibly b e done different? The only thing I can think of would be transparancies, and literally stack then on top of each other, but that would just be an ugly clusterfuck.
Or make them of different resolutions and subdivide the tiles. Or have enough of an engine to show more than one in the tile, as most games could with characters in about the same area (like squeezing past eachother or somesuch.) I assume that this is a basic limitation of the game graphics engine, though, and it's probably not worth reworking the game for. But it's a drawback that other games have dealt with.
Civilizations aren't that distinct from eachother, and the differences that do exist aren't apparent until after you pick them.
There's a lot planned to make civs better. It'll come in time. Everything about a civ can be seen in legends, so I don't know what your issue there is.
Currently, it's poor, and the legends screen isn't very convenient to read. That's basically my issue.
Bauxite is far more valuable than any gem.
No it's not. It's more useful, perhaps, if you are limited in your creativity but like magma. However, you can still do a lot with just pumps and single-use floodgates. This is something that will likely be dealt with in the upcoming update, to some extent, but I haven't actually heard anything definite about it.
I think Toady mentioned something about making mechanisms out of metal in the new version, so that should be solved. But, as it is currently, bauxite adds a several ways to deal with magma that are easier than the other methods. Gems increase your wealth, which doesn't do a lot atm. Unless you're in a magma-free map, I don't quite see how you can defend it.
The value of items is often either unimportant or a penalty (when migrants come to feast on all of your foodstocks.)
This is not true
You're usually granted enough free iron drops from the goblins to buy out any caravan you encounter; if not, then prepared food or crafts are usually enough. Engravings rocket up the value of any room you have to the maximum level. Happiness of dwarves past the first year or so is usually ecstatic. The value of an item is frequently irrelevant.
This is a balancing issue, not something more basic than that that needs essential reworking, btw. There are already plenty of tools that can be used to relatively balance out values to reasonable levels.
Behold my mad nitpicking skills. Outside of the interface and story quality complaints, none of these are too substantial. And the story quality is basically unavoidable without greatly changing the design of the game. The balance ones are easy to fix with an active developer, and we've got one.
Even the complaints you deem substantial and unavoidable are likely to be dealt with eventually.
The interface one is likely to, the story one is not unless either Toady drops his dreams of a procedurally generated game and goes with a more static approach (and then we'll have major issues, not just these nitpicks
) or wondrous new algorithms are discovered that reflect human actions with a minimum of CPU cost.
The limitations of procedural generation in stories is something he's acknowledged himself in interviews. It's not something I expect to be solved.
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Topic: Downsides (Read 2504 times)