Open-ended games with no particular instructions remain a welcome part of the gaming landscape Minecraft comes to mind (and some clones have even cited Dwarf Fortress as an influence). But tinkering is endless instead of productive, and there are so many ways to go wrong. The more it confuses you, the more accomplished it feels. Perhaps that’s too harsh an assessment. Dwarf Fortress wants to be understood about as much as the average teenager. I'd like to think I’m not the problem here. In Dwarf Fortress, I feel like I’m trying to build a skyscraper by banging two rocks together. I went into Dwarf Fortress knowing the barrier to entry was dizzyingly high, but I consider (or considered) problem-solving, iterative experimentation, and quick learning to be among my personal strengths. This is like sitting in the middle of a grocery store and being unable to figure out how to make a sandwich. And I’m still hitting major roadblocks.ĭespite the fact that my colony is sitting in the middle of nature, where there must be virtually limitless piles of stone, I can’t uncover them or direct my dwarves to them to build a simple chair. I would never have figured out the first step-digging a mine-on my own, let alone the dozens of following steps that apparently are crucial to building an effective, or even rudimentary, fortress. What Dwarf Fortress really lacks, aside from a built-in tutorial that at least gets you started, is the ability to learn from tinkering. But with Dwarf Fortress, I've never felt so lost and powerless, still, so many hours into a game. As I said earlier, I’m not averse to a game where you more or less have to play in windowed mode so you can have a browser open with external resources telling you what to do (see: multiple years of World of Warcraft). To feel like you’re not getting a game in the beginning is standard, especially when it’s a game of the complex civilization-management type. Repeat ad nauseum and I’m soon pressing buttons with no rhyme or rhythm. If I do happen to understand an instruction or a way to accomplish a task, I don’t have a larger picture to fit it into and I almost immediately forget it. Every time I break away is an opportunity to lose interest-I’m losing interest twice a minute. But if every 30 seconds I have to break away from the game to pore through a text, it feels like I’m making no progress. I'm constantly scrolling back through the quick start guide to the place where I first did the task. The problem with this game, for me, is that obstacles like this arise about every 30 or 40 seconds. Where’s the command to build a table? Which workshop is the mason's? How do I figure that out? Should I just build another mason’s workshop because that may be faster than trying to find the right menu to identify the mason’s workshop? Will this fortress eventually be nothing but a trail of single-use mason’s workshops, a microcosm of our disposable-luxury economy? The existential woes of the misunderstood I’ve got the commands for mining down but everything else is a blur. My wait for the moment when the learning curve ceases to steepen and this game makes some intuitive sense continues.Īt this point, I’m failing to grasp the higher order ideas behind how this game works-how to examine things, check on progress, fix problems, or see how everything fits together. I’m told to set this farm to grow “plump helmets” for all four seasons. I have to build an area for a farm that is “accessible from inside my fort but not reachable from the outside.” The instructions are woefully unclear about whether I do that underground, inside my fortress, or above-ground, maybe tunneling out into some kind of pit. I create a pen for animals, a refuse pile, and a woodpile. This is my “I told you this game is unnecessarily complex to the point of stubbornness” moment.Īt this point in the quick start guide, a sidebar helpfully points out there is an external utility called “Dwarf Therapist” to “make the UI for managing dwarves easier." I wonder whether this utility would help me realize my parents never thought I was good enough or smart enough, and that's why I'm torturing myself with Dwarf Fortress. To do that, I have to track them down and select them first. I do this by selecting them, going into a skills menu, and toggling their duties on and off. I have to make sure dwarves get assigned to certain essential skills, such as wood burning, plant gathering, and metal crafting. The room on the fair right is for my "stockpile," where apparently dwarves litter their belongings like children. My fortress, with a hallway and a few rooms.
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