Hmm a lot of "Toady needs to hire some people to do some of the work" suggestions lately.
To admit I always like seeing them. It tells me people think this game has serious potential.
Of course, best reply is "If Toady hires people, that means he needs to probably double his donations for every person he hires, plus all the other time wasting stuff that he needs to do to get them working properly, plus his donations have to be secure (i.e., making sure we have people definitely donating at least X amount per month and not Xx12 per year), and all that means the game will take longer to make, will be less efficient about the time (longer times per release, per bug fix, etc), and won't be as good."
Since my last post [1], I ended up writing another 15 pages of review for the game. None of which I will post here.
I kind of half-expected someone to make a post in that thread that said something along the lines of
"Look, asshole, this utility here <Insert.Link.Com> fixes all of your problems, now please shut the fuck up."
which would have probably prompted me to donate $50 to Toady right then and there for ever questioning him or the community.
I mostly expected my review to get picked apart to hell, like crows over an above-ground farm plot. Especially since I barely put in 40% of what I actually wanted to say. After which, I would be forced to go back into the thread and clarify my statements.
At the very least, I expected people to continue asking questions and continue the Noob Guide I left behind.
Frankly, I was quite surprised that none of that happened, and the conversation was simply shoved into a corner like the personal belongings of so many dwarves when you activate a water-based hall flooder.
I was somewhat surprised to find out, after lurking the forums for a bit, that those concerns that I brought up, as well as the ones that I didn't mention in my review were not only present in the thoughts of the community, but widespread.
With each post that I read, I'm becoming increasingly disillusioned at Toady and Dwarf Fortress in general. It seems that he's known about these problems for years, but hasn't done nearly enough to address them, and he knows that he hasn't done enough. He presses onward with new content without ever really fixing the problems in it, as noted by Miko19 [2]. Yes, he spends alot of time fixing bugs, but I'm sure that as most of the remaining users that haven't ragequitted will attest to, Toady seems to almost-but-not-quite fix the issues caused by the new features he implements. Out of the ungodly number of major problems in the game, I'll only note a few of the minor ones:
The military system is complete torture to manage. The PRI/Assignments doesn't even show you what the particular dwarf you've selected is actually wearing. You have to exit the menu, go into the Units menu, scroll through the non-alphabetized list and find the name of the dwarf you were just looking at two seconds ago, select them, then view their inventory. If the highlighted item in the PRI/Assignments list isn't in the dwarf's inventory yet, you THEN have to find out how to coerce the dwarf into acquiring the piece of equipment. Sometimes this means just waiting until they go to the requisite stockpile and pick up the item, but other times it means that the dwarf has put on their armor in the wrong order or has been determined by the hidden equipment algorithm that they've equipped too much equipment.
Nearly every single thing that you do in the game is a workaround of some sort. For example, in order to get your dwarves to reprioritize their activities and do something you want them to do, like feed a starving prisoner, or to stop stepping over the immobile and injured body of one of their comrades and take him to the hospital, you have to completely reassign practically every assignable parameter in order to make him stop being a narcissistic asshole and help his dying kinsman out. First, you have to pause the game and forbid whatever he's hauling, disable every single job he has except for Carry Wounded, assign him a burrow whose definition includes only the wounded dwarf and a direct pathway to the hospital, then after resuming the game, you'll have to ensure that the dwarf takes up the job of Carry Wounded. I have on more than one occasion had to have dwarves strip naked, have their pets killed, forbid and burrow OTHER dwarves, disassemble buildings, and do a whole host of other things just to get one dwarf to do a single task.
There is also the matter of not being able to play the game unless you've gotten at least a Master's degree in Dwarf Fortress. It also helps if you've got a minor in Accounting. No, that last part wasn't a joke. You really do fucking need a background in either accounting or at least a background in some office job in order to play the game efficiently [3]. I've increased my total efficiency by at least 20% by using Excel to organize my dwarves. That's not the efficiency change from just menu scrolling. That's my OVERALL efficiency, and that includes the time needed to make the spreadsheets. Generally speaking, if opening up MS Office and doing some paper-pushing and Excel spreadsheets enables you to SAVE time while playing a game, there's obviously something wrong with the game. If the game had a Multiplayer RTS mode, I'd probably win most of the battles due to my in-battle use of Excel spreadsheets. After about 50 dwarves, the game becomes little more than a menial, repetitive office job due to the extreme micromanagement you have to do just to keep your fortress running properly and smoothly. Of course, whenever I have the time, I love doing menial, repetitive office work in order to reach a goal. But then again, I'm probably a reclusive nutcase that gains an unusual amount enjoyment in doing menial, repetitive office work.
That isn't to say that the whole game is a clusterfuck. The game's great as great can be. The fact that the storyline is procedurally generated, as well as the entire backstory of your world is just jaw-droppingly awesome. What game developer wouldn't want to not have to hire a team of writers in order to make a decent storyline for their game? Any player could spend hours in the library without ever getting bored of the stories that were generated. They could also do the same by reading the information screens of each individual dwarf. The wholly procedural nature of Dwarf Fortress is one of the major reasons its fans love it so much. Having a new and fresh adventure every time you play and replay the game is the ultimate goal of most game makers, and this game has achieved that goal with flying colors.
The various intricacies of the game's mechanics are also something to be awed at. Each and every dwarf has enough skills and xp levels to make JC Denton look as customizable as the Fighter from Final Fantasy 1. Each dwarf's individual personality significantly affects what they will or will not do, and the various factors affecting how they go about doing it, a feat of coding that you'd expect to be available only for the main protagonists of Skyrim or some equally big-name RPG. The combat system even looks like it was originally made for Fallout 3, with each body part having its own health and status effects based on what kind of damage is done to it.
The economy of the game is definitely something worthy of praise. The complexity of coding the various workshops and how they interact with one another in a manner that seems to work, and work well, must have been daunting. Whenever I think about making a fort, it's always entertaining to plan out the various industries that you can engage in, and it's always nice to be able to make it work and become highly profitable simply due to good planning and foresight.
Unfortunately, with every reason for praise, there is reason for criticism.
After so many years of development, all of the three quarters-baked code and partially realized ideas have taken their toll on the game. There's so much there, and yet there is so much that isn't. I came to this game after a quest to find the ultimate game for me: RTS, RPG, management, intricate attention to gameplay elements, and maybe even a decent storyline on the side. My search will end here, but it's not done yet. The game's not done yet, and as I read these forums, it looks more and more like the game's not only not going to get finished, but it's not even going to feel like a finished product any time soon. And more disturbing yet, the more I read Toady's own posts, I'm not sure that the game will ever feel like a finished product.
If this game were a car, we'd be test driving it right now, and what we'd be test driving would be a pile of twisted and rusty scrap metal with three empty axles and one wheel sticking off the side. Of course, the thing would get 3L/100km, be able to turn 360 degrees in a 4m wide circle, reach a maximum speed of 350kmph, and would fly. IT WOULD FLY. WITH THE ONE WHEEL. Its control scheme and handling would consist of being able to only make left turns, the steering wheel being replaced with a series of buttons, levers, dials, switches, and every single non-steering wheel control you've ever seen in your life. In order to use the acceleration or brake, you'd have to activate the windshield wipers and radio in a precise manner, and to make it fly, you'd have to perform over 325 steps in an exact order. Most of of couldn't care less that the thing looks like a piece of shit. Alot of us, however, care about the fact that we have to listen to that piece of shit Mexican Salsa Gospel Choir Rap every time we want to make the thing go forward.
I want to say that I'm excited for the new version that will be coming out next year, but I have to be honest. I've seen what Toady's posted, heard the lastest DF Talk, and have experienced first hand his handiwork. It makes me worried. It makes me worried that he will give us the same thing that he's given this community for years. It makes me worried that he will give us what he's been giving us: hopes, dreams, promises, and unfortunately, crap. I don't actually think that the vampires, 3D, or battlefield combat will ever work right, at least not any time soon. The vampires will probably be bugged to hell, the 3D will undoubtedly lack the ability to either scroll or change your camera angle, and the battlefields will probably have the same tactical AI as regular squad orders, with your dwarves invariably breaking formation and doing such things as running in a completely out-of-formation manner towards the enemy, ignoring attack orders to pick up goods off the ground, or attempting to haul dead bodies and repeatedly cancelling the activity because somebody's stabbing them in the leg with a spear.
Toady's the rougelike player whose first course of action upon acquiring the ability to leave the starting town is to do everything EXCEPT follow the main storyline. Right now, he's level 48, slept in an Inn 9842 times, found half of the Secret Jewel Pieces, crafted 7 Secret Dungeon Keys, is on his way to the Forest of the End Times Secret Jewel Dungeon, and has yet to defeat the evil Bandit Mid-Boss that lit his house on fire in the opening FMV sequence at the beginning of the game. Also, his character's house is still on fire.
Toady seems to have made his dwarves in his own image. They don't do anything you tell them to, you have to jump through hoops in order to make them do anything, and they do whatever the hell they want to do most of the time, in spite of what they really should be doing. Toady's a Legendary +5 programmer, but he's just one man, with one agenda, and I don't think that that agenda involves making the game better any time soon. He's more interested in adding new content instead of making the game enjoyable, and I'm fairly sure that he knows exactly what he's doing to the game and to the community.
People have extreme trouble enjoying the game because of its obvious flaws, and that translates to extreme trouble getting donations. That's not to say that they don't. There are obviously plenty of users that enjoy the game and plenty of users that donate, but you have to look at the math. The most recent financial data Toady gave seems to indicate that his income is probably somewhere between 30000USD and 80000USD. It can be assumed that pretty much everyone on these forums are the remaining few, the boiled down, concentrated elite gamers that tend to stick with a game to see it through. We are the gamers that actually bother to finish games that require us to spend alot of time and energy on them, like Chrono Trigger, Fallout 2, Final Fantasy 7. The percentage of gamers that we make up is roughly 10%[4]. That means that 9 out of 10 users that play this game won't stick with it, and seeing how ridiculously difficult of a game Dwarf Fortress is to pick up, it can be safely assumed that they're the ones that absolutely won't donate. That means that if the game wasn't so damned hard to pick up and play, we could potentially get 10 times as many users, which would logically translate to an assload more donations (I would wager that that factor is at least between 3-5 due to various demographic factors). With that money, he could hire a programmer to work on the game for him and take a vacation, like Notch does.
Toady knows this. How could he not? He's a fucking math professor. He could probably calculate the probability of efficacy bell curve of my statement in his sleep. The only reason that I can think of as to why he doesn't spend the time and effort to get himself that cash is that he just doesn't care about the cash all that much, and as much as I REALLY don't want to admit this, a fact that I'd rather want to overlook, I feel that it's necessary to say that
I think he might feel the same way about us.
At least, to some SMALL extent, anyway. I'm sure he cares about us, at least somewhat, but it's obvious that he cares alot more about putting new features into his game than much else. He's probably taken the derivative of his Time Spent Programming vs. Enjoyment curve and found that he'll be happier with himself if he spends less time worrying about what the hell we common fans think and more time pumping out barely functional new features for his game.
I hope that Toady sees this. I hope that he reads this. I hope that he truly knows that his game could go far, if only he makes it right, and that he takes action to make the game as great as it could be.
Let {DF} be the idea of a great game satisfying these conditions:
1. Our Hopes
2. Our Ideals
3. Our Dreams
Then {DF} will converge into reality.
[1]
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=96173.195[2]
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=95698.0[3]
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=96173.msg2782761;topicseen#msg2782761[4]
http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/gaming.gadgets/08/17/finishing.videogames.snow/
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1169149 times)