Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mabbo 1294 days ago
Dwarf fortress should be in the UX hall of fame as an example of how an incredible product can be made completely inaccessible to 95% of it's target audience purely through bad UX.

And I say that as one of the 5% who still played and loved it.

1 comments

Same, I was a big fan of character-based roguelikes (and at the time, in the late 2000s, that was the format of most roguelikes), and while I was unfazed at the time by the character-based interface, the inconsistent menus and micronamanagement tired me out of Dwarf Fortress.

It needed various external tools to alleviate the painstaking manual labor that went into managing the colony, like macro generators for floor plans and the memory hacking of Dwarf Therapist to have high-level management of the colony, and all that with wacky menus.