Hacker News Reader

And I would argue that Dwarf Fortress is no exception at all. In all of my time with the game I've enjoyed the idea of the game more than I actually enjoyed playing it. This is the player side of the simulation siren song. The more time you spend with it, the more you understand how it works, the more you realize how incredibly unbalanced it is.

The game's legendary difficulty is entirely due to the impenetrability of its user interface and systems. When you actually finish getting through all the tutorials needed to learn how to play the game it falls flat on its face. It is quite trivial then to get a fortress up and running and produce far more food, drinks, and goods than you ever need and grow your wealth rapidly. And then when the enemy comes knocking it's quite trivial to pull up your drawbridges and line the entry halls with traps and generally grind them into a smooth red paste.

Dwarf Fortress may be a fine simulation and an interesting study in systems and a great conversation piece but it is not a very good game. It is like the Great Salt Lake of games: a hundred miles wide and a few feet deep.

But the stories it generates though.

> It is quite trivial then to get a fortress up and running and produce far more food, drinks, and goods than you ever need and grow your wealth rapidly. And then when the enemy comes knocking it's quite trivial to pull up your drawbridges and line the entry halls with traps and generally grind them into a smooth red paste.

I'd say that the point of this kind of open-ended simulation game without a clear goal is not to "win" since there is nothing to win, but to create your own challenges.

I've played a lot of these games and from Civilization II to Dwarf Fortress, just winning by using the game weaknesses has always been very uninteresting, but building a world-class city-state on an island or an above-ground wooden fortress without digging, for example, are challenges that you can create for yourself and that make these games interesting to play.

Since they are single-player, I find just "mastering the game" to maximise end-game score to be quite pointless, but that's just how I feel of course.

A sandbox by itself is uninteresting but a sandbox plus imagination is unlimited fun.

> but it is not a very good game

You can not like a game without saying that the game in general isn't good. It's been around for more than 10 years, and seems to be getting more and more popular, not less. The community grows, and development continues. Countless of people do find it fun, which is the most important part of a game, otherwise you won't play it.

By most metrics, Dwarf Fortress is a good game, despite its impenetrable UI and UX.

We'll also see how well received the game will be by mainstream gamers once they're done with the new UI, as it'll attract a bunch of new players then.

Dwarf fortress has gone from its niche to sort of cult appeal.

In the process the ability for more familiar players to emphasize “losing is fun” is lost.

It has always been trivially easy to close all the entrances and build a safe fort.

The fun aspect is always from willingly tolerating discomfort and engaging with what the system throws on you.

Fundamentally, DF doesn’t have a win condition. By defining one as having a running a fort, the experience will be less than what the game offers.

For what it’s worth, I feel the same about Eve Online. You hear these amazing, rich stories of political intrigue and massive battles but I’ve found it incredibly tedious any time I’ve tried to get into it. I do think there’s something powerful in these engines of story creation, and maybe this is some of Twitch’s appeal, but a lot of these games aren’t for me. I guess the Odyssey would have been a bunch of walking about if you were there.

The concept of Second Degree Fun applies here, although I think it should be called second order fun. Semantics aside, first order fun is something that you enjoy while you’re doing it. Second order fun is something that may be unpleasant or boring while you’re doing it but turns out to be enjoyable to recall or tell others about after the fact. A lot of life falls into the latter category.

> It is quite trivial then to get a fortress up and running and produce far more food, drinks, and goods than you ever need and grow your wealth rapidly.

At that point it turns into a big-system management game with a variety of mechanisms to trip you up, starting with the raids and megabeasts attracted by wealth, vampire infiltration, cranky nobility, and other ways that your system turns self-destructive.

That doesn't make it a great game — it can be incredibly tedious — but, it sounds like you played until you reached prosperity, and just declared the first 1/3-of-the-game-tops as too easy.

You should really try Rimworld. He took the concept of Dwarf Fortress and perfected it. The systems are incredibly well balanced, and there is less of an emphasis on "industrialization", and more of an emphasis on scheduling of tasks for your workers. So that even once you have a fully functional colony running that is able to overproduce food and fend off any attackers, you then have to deal with the interpersonal and personal emotional issues between your workers to keep things stable.

I really think those two games are in different genres. DF isn’t about perfecting some kind of dwarf version of a factory. It’s computer assisted world building. The point is to create interesting history, locations and items which you then recount as stories or you explore in adventure mode. I’d like to see DF grow further with more interaction with the world. It would be amazing to eventually have something capable of building an entire fantasy world with that you could then explore.

Sounds like the problem is that you basically cheated your way into boredom by reading all the tutorials and player guides first. The most fun I ever had with DF was just going in blind and thrashing about trying to discover how everything works which generally resulted in spectacular failure. The fun of a complex system is in learning how all that complexity works. Once you know everything about it it loses its appeal.

Every game is going have some aspect that is out of balance, and if you leverage it enough then sure it’s going to be easy. I remember might and magic 3 you could work your initial party to an old age, then fire them all and keep their earnings, then pimp out your new party with platemail and magic swords. It made the game super easy and boring, but that was my fault for playing that way.

If you’ve found a way to play the game that isn’t fun for you, just don’t play that way. Add a restriction for yourself to make it more interesting.

>The game's legendary difficulty is entirely due to the impenetrability of its user interface and systems.

It's also a cultural legacy left over from early versions that were more challenging but less open ended simulations.

In particular, farming required setting up an irrigation system, which required exposing your fortress to a river that occasionally spawned hostile creatures which would disrupt farming. Coupled with winters where farms went fallow, it was much easier to lose a fortress for want of basics.

Additionally, there was a progression involved where access to better metals meant digging deeper and exposing yourself to additional hazards generated from fratures deeper inside the mountain.

Most of these dangers went away in the newer system, and what other dangers were added can often be avoided more easily.

With that said, the older versions also had a lot less replayability. Once you knew what you were doing, each fortress mostly played out the same, but it did make for better progression for someone new looking for a challenge.

The best simulation games are those that have done a good job at giving your systems a purpose that requires using what you have built. One such game is Factorio. It's a logistics and manufacturing simluation at it's core, but they gave a half decent attempt at making a story and antagonist that makes your factory have a purpose outside of just building the factory.

Another great example is Stormworks: Search and Rescue. There's no shortage of lego-like vehicle building games, but Stormworks gives you the purpose of completing various search and rescue missions with your vehicles. From that, you suddenly have practical reasons to build things certain ways. I can build a boat in a few different games, but only in Stormworks would I need to build a boat that can extract a piece of mining equipment from the sea floor and have provisions for delivering it onto a wharf.

>because play-testers felt the game was unfair and that the A.I. was cheating

the F.E.A.R ai is still amazing to me after all these years. I'm surprised by the play tester reaction because even without the broadcasting of intent I think the AI felt very organic. Honestly still one of the most convincing ones to this day in shooters.

https://youtu.be/KQN3yKYkFmE

I think they just had the AI shout what they were doing right? They didn’t modify the actual behavior.

Of course, shouting ‘Grenade!’ at your enemy gives them plenty of time to get away.

In essence, yes, "the AI" as one whole just shouts out what it is doing. What's sort of neat is that since all AI characters share one mind, they can have one character give orders to another, which then appears to comply – even though it was effectively the character that was going to do the thing that decided to do the thing in the first place. In other words, the "order" is just "the AI" telling itself what it's doing – but it looks to the player as though one AI character instructs another on what to do, and the other obeys.

Haha, yeah, I wonder if they at least designated a ‘squad leader’ that was the designated ‘order giver’, or whether it was always a random nearby soldier.

I guess it doesn’t matter from a game perspective since I never noticed, but from a technical perspective it seems more elegant to me.

It wasn't just about the play tester reaction. Other benefits of broadcasting:

- Sometimes AI characters can't act on their knowledge in a way that is obvious to the player, so they might seem more dumb than they are. The fact that they can vocalise their knowledge even if they can't act on it makes it clear that they are more intelligent than they appear.

- By vocalising their knowledge about the situation, fortuitous incidents will more easily appear like consequences of AI direction, even though they were not actually related. (Narrative bias in the human.)

- Since the AI actually works with a shared mind, it can seem unnatural that each AI character knows what all the others are doing without any voice communication.

> Since the AI actually works with a shared mind, it can seem unnatural that each AI character knows what all the others are doing without any voice communication.

Isn't that an argument for simulation of the type citybound is doing, rather against it? Even the dumbest most "gamified" AIs can have that fault. E.g. think about the enemy AI in Far Cry.

Not every game has to be fun in the common sense of the word. Flight simulations are another example where you spend dozens of hours to understand how to fly a plane correctly which is much more like work.

There are just different kind of people who like different kind of experiences.

On that same note, they tend to underestimate the time it takes to develop a good complex simulation, like DF, when it has taken like 10 to 15 years to get to the level of detail DF has. One developer isn’t usually going to be able to develop that much complexity in a few years or something, it’s gonna take a while.

> heuristics with some calls to random() thrown in

I've come to see one aspect of game design as "shaping randomness into more interesting and artistic forms". Just a plain rand() call is sort of interesting, you never know exactly what you're going to get, but with some art and careful shaping it can be made much more interesting.

Also consider that random will give you random. A lot of things can be better if they follow different distributions (e.g. gaussian or a bounded random walk)

The Football (nee Championship) Manager series is one of my all time favourites, and is effectively just a bunch of spreadsheets about football players and teams. It has the advantage that the numbers underlying the simulation are also interesting enough to form the majority of the UI. In some ways it proves your rule though - for a long time there was no actual visual match engine so you couldn’t watch your team play, and it was every bit as addictive back then.

I agree about the siren song aspect, and how full system simulation is very non correlated to fun, but I think it’s one of those things where we haven’t seen the full potential yet - we’re still maybe a few computational leaps away from it.

Kind of like ray tracing, or voxel worlds; for the latter, Minecraft was a great example of a first game meeting that “computation required” vs “fun” slope intercept; Teardown is a more recent game that uses its voxel engine to enable novel gameplay that would be totally infeasible without it.

> In practice, high-quality simulations seem to be interesting but not all that fun.

I think a great deal about good games is the communication of their black box of rules and mechanics. In a simulation this is especially hard, as much to communicate, and they are usually created by more techno-orientated people, which simply suck at these things. So the player is confronted with a highly complex world where things happen, but for the player it's not always obvious why something happened, which impact their actions have, and sometimes they don't even get that something happened. Thus, giving players a way to explore the rules of the simulation, and understand the state of the world they are playing, is far more important in a simulation because of it's complexity.

Wait till the Spiffing Brit get's his hands on it.

Forcibly coding heuristics is how you get suburbia simulators like cities skylines. The heuristics reward car centric designs because you need to build dedicated pedestrian pathways for the AI heuristics to pick up the intended change. Your city will get to look very ugly.

I think that bots are a uniquely bad fit for in depth simulation. A city builder is more like dwarf fortress.

How “advanced” would you say _Designing Games_ is? I’m a layman with an amateur interest in game development.

It's very accessible. If you can grok the first 30 minutes of this talk you can grok the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdqhHKjepiE

Strong recommend, if only to understand how RimWorld was designed and built.

Thanks! Appreciate the insight