A dense, complex colony management game about surly, terminally-alcoholic dwarves struggling to survive against a hostile world and even more hostile neighbors.
This game fills me with pure awe. Generating entire worlds from scratch, reading about the world's storied history and traditions, starting a fortress, planning out logistics and layouts, building megastructures, staging bloody battles and sacrifices, watching as your fortress hilariously implodes, opening up legends mode and reading about your favorite dwarves and what they got up to after the fortress went to shit, looking at the world map and realizing holy shit, all these places actually exist in the game world and i can go into adventure mode to visit them, sack them, or sneak in, dig a hidey-hole and live off stolen food... this game, to me, is the epitome of a sandbox. You have the whole game world at your disposal, and the only constraints on what you can do are your creativity (and sadism).
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Great fun, if you've learned it once you've learned it for life. I learned back in 2011 and was able to jump right back in a couple years ago just googling hotkeys now and then.
Playing in ASCII in public makes you seem very mysterious in public, which may be a good thing
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A life consuming project which is currently under construction.
This game has already stolen thousands of hours from my life, and even more from my friends' lives. It is designed to be an all-encompassing simulation of a fantasy world down to procedurally-generated event-shaped personalities, dungeons, stories, interwoven relationships, battles, and the brutal merciless murder of elves. If there's anything that the countless hours have taught me in this game, it's that anything can happen and will happen, as well as can shape personalities. It's the potential that this game will be hailed worldwide as one of the highest works of art ever made for a computer, if it does become finished.
In order to understand how rightfully MASSIVE this game's mostly-original engine is, you must first understand how it was made: by two men, the brothers Tarn and Zach Adams. Zach mostly contributed through conceptualizations and storytelling, while Tarn programmed from 2006 to present. (12 years of Dwarf Fortress!!) Secondly, in order to understand it fully, you must experience it. There is a bunch of footage of Dwarf Fortress in action on several Youtube and Twitch pages, and many of these people who make the footage either have a tutorial or describe what to look for in the Dwarfish sea of ASCII/tiles (eugh). As well, you can actually play the game. For free.
The game is rich with potential stories to tell and in my experience will only get better.
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For sure. RimWorld is probably a harder game than DF to keep a colony going if you know what you're doing in both, if we're honest. DF isn't particularly difficult once you've got a hang of it.
Still slightly prefer DF to RimWorld, but I do think RimWorld has done a lot of things better that DF fans have trouble admitting to really. Both are like all-time top 5 games though and like amongst the absolute pinnacle of the medium in terms of ambitious game design.
Not really. "University Edition" is a bit of a slur against RimWorld, both are incredible examples of what the medium of computer gaming can be. DF is older and has more flavour, you also have a lot more colonists so they work together in a bigger way, but it also means you feel less personal with them.
RimWorld is probably actually the harder game once you know what you're doing in both tbh.
I saw someone call DF "RimWorld's great grandpa" once in that is still has a lot of "back in my day" shenanigans and weird stuff you'd expect from a 20 year old game, that aren't necessarily better or worse, just different.
They play different though in that DF has more of a sandbox feel to it and feels like you have less control over individual colonists than RimWorld. Most of DF's bigger "complexities" compared to RimWorld are just in flavour text and not really in gameplay mechanics or anything and in fact you actually tend to "play" and control less in DF than you do in RimWorld and there's a bit more watching how things play out in DF.
So they're different enough that you can play them side by side and enjoy them for different reasons. Both incredible games in any case.
To an extent. Sieges and weather disasters etc. are way less common on DF, you kind of have to go looking for it a bit, in that sense DF is way more lenient in letting you actually build a working colony. And I find it’s much more about queuing up jobs, whereas RimWorld is more about managing colonists moods.
Like I said though, both are 2 of the most artistically ambitious games of all-time. No reason they really need to be compared in quality. But the medium would be much better if the likes of DF and RimWorld were held up as the pinnacle of the medium instead of the latest action-adventure open works game for me at least
Funnily enough the only reason they ever made it paid because one of them got cancer and it’s America so there’s no state healthcare and they had to fund his cancer treatment.
Of all the people in the gaming industry who genuinely deserve the financial windfall, Tarn and Zach deserve it most, when you think of all the massive games DF has heavily influenced and they barely made much from it previously
Still slightly prefer DF to RimWorld, but I do think RimWorld has done a lot of things better that DF fans have trouble admitting to really. Both are like all-time top 5 games though and like amongst the absolute pinnacle of the medium in terms of ambitious game design.
RimWorld is probably actually the harder game once you know what you're doing in both tbh.
I saw someone call DF "RimWorld's great grandpa" once in that is still has a lot of "back in my day" shenanigans and weird stuff you'd expect from a 20 year old game, that aren't necessarily better or worse, just different.
They play different though in that DF has more of a sandbox feel to it and feels like you have less control over individual colonists than RimWorld. Most of DF's bigger "complexities" compared to RimWorld are just in flavour text and not really in gameplay mechanics or anything and in fact you actually tend to "play" and control less in DF than you do in RimWorld and there's a bit more watching how things play out in DF.
So they're different enough that you can play them side by side and enjoy them for different reasons. Both incredible games in any case.
So DF is like a "watch your colony build" vs Rimworld's "help your colony build"?
Like I said though, both are 2 of the most artistically ambitious games of all-time. No reason they really need to be compared in quality. But the medium would be much better if the likes of DF and RimWorld were held up as the pinnacle of the medium instead of the latest action-adventure open works game for me at least
Every action is an adventure in and of itself. It's raw, uncut, quadruple-distilled wonder.
Of all the people in the gaming industry who genuinely deserve the financial windfall, Tarn and Zach deserve it most, when you think of all the massive games DF has heavily influenced and they barely made much from it previously