I read everything about this game I can get my hands on. I don’t fully understand why I find dwarf fortress so intriguing. It’s such a pure passion project… that actually made it.
Watching someone else play Dwarf Fortress can be surprisingly entertaining. Just start one of his series from the start.
They are somewhat similar with Tarn, also a pure passion project that made it, with all the hand drawn pictures and down to earth approach.
DF lives in my blood, however.
http://web.archive.org/web/20080408110250/http://www.geociti...
There are lots of scams out there.
Same for Minecraft and similar. Figuring out the software and the cool way it came into existence is the problem to solve, actually playing it is (perhaps incorrectly) predictable details and so boring.
The draw for me was the steep learning curve that rewards you with logical complexity when you finally understand it. The lore that your fortress generates, as well as the random stories, is just icing on the cake. It's definitely not for everyone though since the UI requires additional programs like DF Therapist and DF Hack to be manageable still.
There are just too many dwarves to care for. Even DF Therapist doesn't (or didn't?) really help micromanaging jobs. It becomes tedious quickly.
I remember seeing something about auto-allocating jobs, but it didn't work for me.
DF is an honest attempt at simulating things thoroughly.
Therefore, DF is an honest attempt at making a thorough game.
Very few games can make such a claim
In my opinion game developers have mostly stopped trying to simulate things. The focus is on clothes, rigid crafting systems, skill trees, storyline, cutscenes, vehicles, item collection. It's sandboxes, not simulations. Does Witcher 3 have emergence? Does GTA?
Compare that to Bullfrog, a game company which made simulations almost exclusively. In the 90's "simulation" was a game genre.
It’s an honest attempt at making a thorough simulation. Most games attempt only shallow rules and simulations — nearly everything that happens in Witcher 3 is encoded precisely, with few knock-on effects (because there’s nothing underneath the immediate effect + visualization — what’s modeled is precisely what you see); leading to the lack of emergent behavior. You’re dealing with a fairly rudimentary and static system. GTA is more flexible, but ultimately nothing follows any particular logic that doesn’t revolve around the player. More notably, in both games, if the player doesn’t exist, the world can no longer reasonably operate.
Simulation is inherent to game design, but very few games actively work towards it, as you’ve seen.
The simulation games of the 90’s were in the right vein — they faltered for practical reasons. As a result, they often make for thorough simulations that are dishonest — the internal logic of the simulation is violated for reasons of hardware limitations, UX simplicity, fun, etc. Tornados happen because it’s fun. DF is honest in the sense that it is only compromised by Tarn’s inability to implement something (and practical impact — it’s not worth trying to model atoms when fluid dynamics will suffice).
I don’t mean that DF produces a “realistic” simulation (as a climate scientist might) but that he produces a uncompromisingly logically consistent one (as a fiction author might)
For what it's worth, "immersive sim" is more a sub-genre of first-person action game (games with a heavy focus on world-building, player choice, and stealth, heavily inspired by the games Thief and Deus Ex) than a descriptor. It fit better when it was first introduced in the early aughts, when those games were notably more interactive than the more static worlds of fast-paced, action-first, twitchy shooters of the era (Quake, Half-Life, Unreal, etc).