so like dafrw frtorses has always been really cool and original as a strategy game / roguelike hybrid, and there’s a bunch of stuff it does right. the whole world being procedurally generated and the really dynamic basebuilding stuff is sick. like it’s really great how many different ways you can just go about making a fort. you can build aboveground, underground, a combination. you can build in the trees or on cliffs. in glaciers. whatever. some are gonna be harder (glaciers. haunted glaciers) but if you’re skilled then the challenge with ridiculous noncharacteristic forts is fun. and even doing a traditional dwarf thing of like “in a mountain” allows for, honestly, ridiculous freedom in how you approach it. that’s always been great.
the combat model is also sick. it’s so nice when you play a game that doesn’t give a fuck about hit points. it’s awesome to see a dwarf get in a fight and lose his leg and survive, recover, and live the rest of his crippled little life. or see a guy take a crossbow bolt to the head, go into a coma for six months while dr. dorf tries desperately to keep him alive until finally he just dies. it’s cool how they can lose eyes and not be able to see out of that half of their head. the detail is great. in some cases it’s too detailed. it’s irrelevant when someone breaks the third bone in their fourth finger on their left hand, nobody cares unless they are autistic, but to a certain level of detail the system is great.
but apparently nothing can ever be good because the game’s just been moving closer and closer into spergville and farther and farther from being good. the recent update after two years of closed development (how fucking stupid is that shit) was one step in the right direction with the material and burrough systems and twenty bajillion steps in the wrong direction. luckily i am used to being let down.
because like, apparently most of that two years was spent writing mad lib generators. dwarf profiles now look like this. this is an actual dwarf profile. i’m not fucking around.
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His hair is greasy. His very long sideburns are braided. His very long moustache is arranged in double braids. His medium-length beard is neatly combed. His very long hair is braided. He is average in size. His nose is sharply hooked. His somewhat narrow splayed out ears are somewhat short. His head is somewhat narrow. His raw umber eyes have very large irises. He has a broad chin. His somewhat short eyebrows are high. He has a low voice. His hair is chestnut. His skin is ecru. His ears are free-lobed.
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that’s an EXCERPT. the actual profile is FOUR TIMES THAT LENGTH.
none of that shit is relevant or important in any way. this is a game where you have 150 of these guys running around and you’re supposed to give a shit that jack mcfucknugget has narrow splayed out ears that are somewhat short. ugh. it reads like yaoi tolkien fanfiction.
what a complete waste of programming time. what a total way to piss away processor operations. i wouldn’t be half as pissed if the rest of the game was as thoroughly finished but it’s not. wadrf tresfsor has always been complex but it’s only good when it’s meaningful, not this aesthetic crap. there’s other stuff that needs to be made more accessible and user friendly first.
for example let’s say you want to make glass windows right. to make glass you need sand. to collect sand you need bags. problem is all your bags are always going to be filled with seeds, all the time. you can’t be like “guys, just designate five bags as sand bags and only use them for that.” your dipshit dwarves will just go collect sand once, but the bag in storage while they go eat, and some inbred farmer will go and use that bag for seeds, and suddenly we can’t get sand anymore. so the collect sand activity gets cancelled. now we don’t have sand, so the shop is like “don’t have sand can’t make glass” and now they’ve gone and cancelled the build order for glass, just gotten rid of it. so if you do get more bags you gotta go issue the sand order again, and then remember to also give the glass build order, because it’s been wiped from the queue. are you shitting me.
the game is best when it’s about macromanagement, not menial micro crap like that. it needs to be more accessible not in terms of being less complex, but in having the complexity being controllable in a logical way. ideally the game should be about setting up as solid an infrastructure as possible and then being able to forget about it so you can focus on expansion and combat, things that are actually fun. instead you have to constantly go back and reset values in your infrastructure and god help you if you forget to do anything because if any one link in the chain breaks you get 10 different assholes bitching at you about how they can’t do their job because that other guy didn’t do his.
the material system is cool, how everything is made from a material with a hardness value, a melting point, etc. that’s going to lead to great things. but why is the developer working on mad lib generators for dwarf physical appearances when we still don’t have intra-fort contact, when sieges still just show up at your door without actually coming from somewhere. why isn’t there a worldwide economic system being worked on first. why can’t we send out exploratory units or even sieges of our own. these are all things on the agenda for the game, but instead toady just spends two years writing dwarf nose generators and making blog posts about his cat.
and the part that’s really funny is people pay him to do this. people pay him and he develops the complete wrong part of the game. what’s worse, people like that. people say they’re fans of fawdr ssrerfto but then say they like the mad lib stuff and that just shows that they never understood what made the game good in the first place. it was, and still is, the ultimate sandbox game, basically the definition of what that word should mean. that’s why it’s so frustrating to see it heading down the path it is, towards meaningless autistic representations of menial details.
maybe i can never love again
