Dwarf Fortress is one of the best games of the past few years, but it’s perfectly okay if you don’t like it.

In Dwarf Fortress, you take the reins of a new settlement of dwarves. You direct them to dig a settlement out of the mountain. From there, you can do almost anything.

Set up livestock processing factory chains. Make soap from rendered fat. Carve rock mugs. Channel magma to a workshop and set up a smelting plant. Set cage traps for invaders. Build elaborate execution towers for captives. Draft an army and set them on patrols. Breed an army of war dogs and link their cage traps to pressure plates to set them upon unsuspecting thieves. Build roads for traders. Set the trade depot to flood with water by throwing a switch and steal all their stuff. Fend off the ensuing siege by a pissed-off neighboring civilization that just lost a trade prince.

This is a fraction of the things you can do in Dwarf Fortress.

You think you know about emergent gameplay? Next to Dwarf Fortress, Spore might as well be as linear as Super Mario Bros. Take a look, for example, at the story of Boatmurdered. And this is an old version of the game. Ever since it introduced z-axis levels, there’s a whole new dimension to work with.

The problem is that the learning curve for the game is more like a cliff face.

For starters, the game looks like this.

That’s right, it’s all ASCII characters. Comprehending what’s happening in Dwarf Fortress isn’t far from those guys in The Matrix reading the descending green symbols in real time.

On top of that, all those things you can do are accessible from menus with varying degrees of UI consistency. In one menu, the up and down keys will scroll through your options. In another, you might have to use the plus and minus keys. Some area selections are made by defining the corners, like a regular mouse drag. Some have to be made by expanding a rectangle with the UMKH keys. Get the picture?

This is why it’s perfectly okay if you don’t like Dwarf Fortress. It’s incredibly difficult to play, and the creator knows it. In interviews, he’s apologetic about the state of the interface. In his defense, he says the current graphics are just a placeholder while he fleshes out the rest of the game. Currently “fleshing out the rest of the game” involves making a world-generation scheme that lets civilizations go to war with each other and generating a complete historical record, all of which happens before you actually start playing the game.

It’s his project, but I can’t help but think that if he spent a little time making the game’s interface more mod-friendly, there’s plenty of people who would put in the hours to improve it. In fact, I live with one of them. A more accessible game means more players, and more players means more donations, which are currently paying his expenses.

In the meantime, we can enjoy anecdotes like this one from Adams’s Gamasutra interview.

Some people will purposely open a water reservoir that is more than one deep. The water shoots out fast because the entire second layer suddenly searches for an opening. You can get super fast flooding that way. Somebody had a goblin trap where they’d drop water on the gobs, and it happened to be outside in the arctic so it would immediately freeze and the gobs would die.

Seriously, how awesome is that?

Popularity: 8% [?]