Since Dwarf Fortress still is an alpha shows that there is still a lot the two developers, Tarn and Zach Adams, want to work on. The premise of Dwarf Fortress seems simple enough: take 7 drunken idiots, put them in the middle of a field/desert/jungle/haunted marshland, feed them, clothe them and brew their booze and if you're lucky they won't get eaten by Zombie Raccoons. When you start a game, Dwarf Fortress procedurally generates a world for you, with rivers, towns and mountain ranges, all rendered in ASCII graphics. You are then given the opportunity to choose the skills, equipment and animals your Dwarves take with them or you can just choose the default loadout.
It's here that the game really starts and begins to open up. This is also where the Rookie player can get most overwhelmed. The Learning Curve of Dwarf Fortress is more like a learning cliff and a newbie player WILL get the "Your Fortress has crumbled to its end" message before the end of winter. Starting off, the Fortress has no buildings or even any basic shelter and it is up to your miners to carve it out of the mountainside or the very earth beneath their feet. Individual dwarves are moved about by the player in DF, instead you have to designate an area to be mined or a workshop to be built and wait while the drunken fools do those tasks. This can be further than you get on your first go because there is no tutorial and first timers are left without any clue of what to do.
Even if you do get that far, feeding your Dwarves is a whole other problem. Setting up a farm is hard to do without flooding your fortress and it is not even apparent how one would set up a farm, except from the fact that you need muddied, freshly irrigated, land. If things get too bad, you can always slaughter any animal under your control as well as hunt for other creatures on the map, a favourite for the forum is to slaughter kittens (for nutritional and computer performance reasons). After that, your Dwarves drink booze, which needs the same vegetables as that the dwarves eat, Plump Helmets, so you need to make sure you produce enough crops and enough barrels to keep them from nasty rats and other pests. Oh, you've ran out of barrels to keep booze in? You won't be able to brew then and now your Dwarves are not working because they aren't motivated by booze. Now the farms are going untended. This means there aren't enough vegetables to go around and your Dwarves have to make do with water instead of beer. A dwarf starves, his friends mourn his loss by throwing a tantrum and killing another dwarf and his friends do the same thing. This is a 'Tantrum Spiral', a series of events that causes the death of fortresses more than anything else.
The learning cliff and ASCII graphics can be discouraging to a newbie player but once they over come it and reach the plateau of Knowing How To Play Dwarf Fortress they can enjoy one of the best indie games on the internet, whats more, there is still a lot to be added to the game and the close knit community are an endless source of modding and merriment.
Get the game and read more about Dwarf Fortress at www.bay12games.com/dwarves
Will Creed
No comments:
Post a Comment