Dwarf Fortress is a very unique game. The main reason I play it is the same reason many of my friends don't. It allows, and requires, a large amount of player creativity. I don't like being restricted to some other person's idea of what my characters look like. The little smiley face gives me just the right amount of information. I get to fill in the rest with my imagination.
Some people want the game to give them the image them a hoard of goblins rushing towards the entrance, while others want the game to give them the idea of the same event so they can fill in the rest themselves. The latter play DF.
Just talk about the nifty things happening in your fortress. I got hooked by a coworker telling stories like mining into a magma pipe and fighting off the magma men and fire imps that came crawling out. Sounded like fun, so I downloaded the game and got a taste of Toadys idea of fun (then found the wiki and was a bit more successful).
i agree a lot but in another way, its not exactly the graphics, its the general deal, i think that people with curiosity and/or imagination will enjoy this game 5 times more than those that lack it, this is not just because of the graphic but because of the idea behind it, the point of dwarf fortress itself is the gigantic range of options you have, you place in a little bit of imagination and its really similar to a kid playing with legos for example, or toy soldiers or whatever you want to choose, its because it has the same element the toys have, its not 100% response to the game, its 50% responce and 50% original from your mind and what you want to create.
i used to do the same with every strategy game, after i beated the caimpaing i would start playing custom maps and creating stories and objectives of my own, for example in warcraft 3 playing as undead and killing EVERYTHING it was kinda roleplaying even wen they game didnt quite allowed me to do it, DF brings that element to the front line and uses it to the extreme, plus by randomly generating diferent maps and situation it improves the quantity of diferent things you can create
many people get bored of this game for 3 reasons
1)the learning curve, its always the same, you start and you dont know nothing, suddently you know a lot more, then you get stuck, then you learn a lot more, and so on, but some people dont have the patience to live with that, they get frustrated and so they leave the game before they even get to enjoy it
2)the graphics and interface, basically the same as before, some people dont have the patience to learn how to do everything, and many others dont have fun doing that , i really enjoyed learning from my own mystakes, it really shows that you are making progress slowly, but you see the results, also many get sick of the graphics because of the impersonality, since they are used that the characters are defined as such and they dont have to add a personality themselves they see simply smilies, we all see dwarves, instead of read letters we see corpses, they just see red letters, imagination has a lot of deal in this
3)objective and entertainment: as i said some people like to get a task to do, and this game is not a regular videgame i insist this game is kinda like playing with legos, you need to have interest in doing "something", either it is building a gigantic town, a haunted fortress, or an epic war, its up to you, its like a child's game you create it, but some people dont like that, they want to see their objectives and get a challenge sent to them, not create that challenge themselves, again this game is made for curious and imaginative people
i do think that a good tutorial and a better layout and graphics would help A LOT but it also depends of the kind of people that plays, not everyone likes playing with legos or toys, some just want to shoot or kill something, and so on.
also i got my GF to play it, im teaching her slowly
and i got another friend of mine who loves tolkien to like it too, he just has a hard time learning it, if people have a special liking for something about what you have in Df its more likely that they will like it or at least give it a try
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Topic: How to bring people into DF (Read 4292 times)