As a Rimworld lover who couldn't quite get past the ASCII in Dwarf Fortress, I'm super excited for the upcoming release! Rimworld has been a blast and I've heard the two games have many similarities (with Rimworld maybe being a slightly more approachable game that's a bit shallower).
If you can stomach the adjustment period for ASCII I'd really recommend it. I think it does something a lot of modern games miss out on - it encourages imagination first. The information given to the player is extremely dense and easy to parse once you've adjusted and you're giving your brain a chance to try and play inside your own head. I've built a glorious six floor tavern (slowly) with engravings on every surface - even those not reachable by pathing, why? because I had an image of a tavern floor full of rowdy miners with opera boxes circling the room above them for dwarves of a more refined taste... in the end it's just a box you need to floor scroll to see on the screen but the carved pillars in the middle of the room - the enclaves for dwarves to, in hushed voices, discuss just how beautiful gold is - and the grand skylight in the middle of the ceiling casting a rainbow of different colored light on the ground below... that's awesome.
Dwarf fortress is the first thing since MUDing that's really scratched the imagination itch in quite that way and, as someone who has worked in game development themselves, I think it's something that is only possible if you keep to the lowest tech. If you use words or abstract symbols then each player will fill in the details themselves, usually in their head but sometimes in artwork (see Kruggsmash as an approachable example here[1]) which can be extremely fulfilling.
I hope to see the non-ASCII version work as a gateway drug to get more people into the imagination of what they're building. And I hope this didn't come off as ranty or judgemental - each person enjoys games in different ways... but low detail art has a way of really spurring the imagination on!
My favorite thing about the engravings (and statues and similar art) is that not only is it based on real dwarves, gods, etc. from the current game world, but you can commission pieces about specific dwarves and the artisans will commemorate battles or other milestone events that involved them.
In one of the last times I played, some invader had broken through my defenses and killed a couple of highly respected dwarves (one of whom was a skilled fighter), but finally came face to face with a young girl dwarf who confronted him in one of the dining halls and, though she lost a leg, managed to kill him (eventually recovering to grow up to be a skilled craftsdwarf). I had a some statues made of her, and most of them came out depicting the heroic deed in different levels of detail (so of course the best one was put up in that dining hall).
There's also a sort-of-exploit related to this, where if there's a stranger in your fortress whom you suspect of having a nefarious background, you can commission artwork of them and sometimes it will reveal malicious traits about them if you examine it. The artists always seem to have perfect knowledge of their subjects.
This is the key for me - DF is like Sim City or other building games (including Minecraft) - you have to be able to create your own goals. Sure, you can keep trying more and more difficult embark locations, but after awhile you'll have DF down well enough that you can survive 'indefinitely' on underground farms behind impenetrable walls.
So you begin to do other things, mega projects are a common one.
This is also one of the reasons I enjoy playing older games. 2D RPGs such as Baldur's Gate to me aren't detailed enough to fully depict the game world, therefore my imagination fills in the gaps. This leads to a significant part of the game being played in my head which I think can create more immersion sometimes than more photorealistics games would, though I'm not saying this is a general rule.
I played Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead in ASCII long before I even looked at screenshots of the tiles. Worse than getting stuck with Ben Affleck in the movie of a book you loved. The Jabberwocky was in the screen shot I saw, the description gave such a spooky mental image, but now all I see in my head is the 8-bit swamp monster thingy, like something from the original Castlevania.
Clearly we need to feed DF generated descriptions to AI and generate tilesets for that /s
ASCII version will get the new UI Soon™
Personally I don't think the new look they're going with will be problem with imagination for me - the new look adds just enough detail that you can spot dwarf by their look alone but there is still plenty of space to imagine how exactly the described things look
I agree with the "encourages imagination" argument, and also that ASCII modes might be more practical. I have played Nethack in ASCII mode and tried a few graphical variants, and always returned to the ASCII version because it's easier to tell the enemies apart and easier to see what's going on.
I love ribworld as well! It's my most played game by far at this point. The mod ecosystem is simply outstanding. That being said, it doesn't even attempt to be the simulation engine that Dwarf Fortress does. It feels like DF is a simulation engine first, with emergent game play almost as a side effect. As much as I like DF, that simulation first development process can be felt during almost every interaction in the game. It's not so bad once you've committed everything to muscle memory, but the learning curve is no joke.
if you like these games you might also like Oxygen Not Included. It's side-on view instead of top down, but is another excellent little ant farm to sink a couple thousand hours into. Sort of a Rimworld meets Factorio type vibe.
It's such a sleeper compared to similar games. The art and sound effects really elevate it. Klei has such a unique art style and it's really shown off. Also has a much more interesting "survival" curve than most; you'll be presented with many many hours of challenges trying to get a sustainable base, without cheap tricks like ever-escalating interruptions based on quantitative progress (looking at you, Rimworld.)
I'm eager to try it again. I went deep on DF years ago, but its more modern competition ended up winning me over but sometimes I still long for that extra crunchy simulation. I'm hoping that the Steam version supports the Steam Workshop. That has been a game changer for me with mods on Rimworld.
I watched about 30 hours of Kruggsmash's narrations of his Dwarf Fortress runs on Youtube, hoping it would 'sell' me on DF. What happened instead is that I played way more Rimworld and Oxygen Not Included than I had been playing.
Most days I preferred ONI due having to go way out of your way to commit war crimes, whereas in Rimworld it's just clicking a couple buttons.
ASCII is not a problem, since there is ton of graphics packs.
But controls, controls are ridiculous. I can't just enjoy it.
And I play very hard games, indie games, Ultima Online which you need to script own things to play properly.
But DF is another beast.
The graphics version also did MASSIVE pass on every control.
Like, instead of going "select bed, make bedroom, repeat 40 times", you can just make rooms, put beds, doors, etc, then just select whole area and it will make a bedroom out of each of those rooms.
camera controls are normal WASD now, most of the things can be done with mouse, there are tabs on panels and hyperlinks in legend browser and thousand other little things.
It will be coming eventually to free ASCII version too
Just a heads up, if you purchase on itch.io rather than Steam, the devs receive a larger share of the revenue. (Though obviously it's not integrated into Steam, if you prefer that.)
Considering I've given them a few bucks a month for a decade and a bit now which doesn't even come close to the value I've gotten that is a great idea.
A hospital/illness scare made them realize they have nothing setup for illness/insurance and need a more secure source of income.
It's probably true that if word got out that Tarn or Zack needed medical care, the donations would flow like water, but it's understandable wanting to prepare.
As I recall he had some medical issues to pay for. The other brother didnt have insurance nor a regular income... just his split of the DF donation money.
It bring up a lot of criticism of healthcare in the US which I don't quite understand. Yes, healthcare is expensive in the US, especially without insurance. It has been for a while, so dont be surprised when not having a regular income nor insurance puts you in a bad spot. It was poor planning as much as it is expensive healthcare.
It basically amounts to one day realizing "oh shit, $35,000/year and no health insurance isn't enough money. This is the fault of the United States."
Even if it is bad planning, it's still a good illustration of why it's a bad system. If I step in a pothole because I was looking at my phone, it's true that I should have been looking where I was going, but the city should also fill the pothole.
Tbh in saner countries with public healthcare, even if you do something utterly stupid & injure yourself you will still receive medical care. The point of the system is that everyone can do stupid things or injure themselves another way & we never know when that's gonna happen.
It goes along with the whole "civilisation started when one human helped bind and heal the broken femur of another human", a quote which may or may not be able to be attributed to Margaret Mead.
The only thing that's usually considered otherwise is long-term stupid decisions such as smoking, etc.
Very briefly as a counter example - these folks made a thing that thousands maybe tens of thousands of people treasure. They've worked on it as a passion project and when ill luck befell them they had to scramble to secure funds. Yes, we live in a capitalist system but supporting neat art like this and exploratory projects is a societal investment that the US has stiffly refused to make. The more we provide social safety nets the more folks will be free to do experimental and artistic work and give us gems like dwarf fortress.
This isn't the fault of the United States - the US has made a choice in how the game works and they weren't playing by the rules laid out for them to follow. The expected course was for them to work in some job that robs them of their free time to produce a work of this caliber and if they had done so they'd be just fine... and we wouldn't have dwarf fortress.
This is the business model that they have chosen. Then they found it to was untenable so they chose a different business model. As part of that, they are addressing some of the largest weaknesses in the game. The game is not getting worse, it's getting better.
Beyond that, the United States doesn't owe people who make art in exchange for donations anything extra. We can argue about the merits of different healthcare systems but the point remains that they realized their plan was poor so they changed course - the United States inflicted no damage on them.
They used to personally make a crayon drawing for each person who donated. They stopped in 2020, but I made sure to get one of the final ones before then: http://www.bay12games.com/support.html
My $10 was a small price to pay for all the hours of fun I got. (I'll surely buy the Steam version too though.)
The technical complexity got me through a really tough time where I could hide in the world, ascii only on a pavilion convertible laptop. Good times, impenetrable gameplay.
Kitfox (the publisher) did a video with dev and someone new to DF [1] playing it for first time, while it might not be "pick up and go" yet it looked massively more approachable. There is even rudimentary tutorial to set up the basics and a bunch of guides.
Also most of the DF complexity comes organically during gameplay and not all at once - if all you do is set up food source and some bedrooms you already buy yourself a lot of time to fuck around. The discoverability of systems should also be much better
Is the UI getting an overhaul as well? I could probably deal with the ASCII, but I'm picky about UI design, and what I've heard about the interface sounds like it would make me have a tantrum and smash my menacing rhyolite cave sock.
Careful what you wish for. Some of the Dwarf Fortress endorphins are a product of the horrible user interface; asking for a more intuitive interface (at times) is like asking for an easier Soulsborne boss. Ask enough times and you have Horizon Forbidden West instead of Bloodborne.
Enh... In an action-y game, there's a strong argument that mastering difficult controls can be half the fun. In a menu-based management game, I want the controls to be as streamlined and intuitive as possible, always. It should be my knowledge and planning ability being tested, not my muscle memory.
Or to put it another way, if I'm pretending to manage a fortress, losing because I was too focused on expansion and didn't stock enough food and ammunition to survive a siege can be fun. Losing because I was fully prepared but forgot how to tell my minions to raise the drawbridge and man the walls is just frustrating.
I am excited for the graphics release as I have always been fascinated by Dwarf Fortress, but do not think I have the patience to learn how to parse the ASCII visuals.
