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Slaves to Armok God of Blood 2: Dwarf Fortress
Bay12Games
Game details:
Release Date: TBA
Genre: Fantasy Simulator
ESRB: TBA
Platforms: PC only
As opposed to the first game I've ever reviewed, namely Audiosurf, which I stated would be a game anyone would like, this is nothing near that. Players of Dwarf Fortress (or DF) are almost part of an elite, and are in nowhere near a large number. A reason for this is probably the ASCII graphics reminiscent of Rogue, hence the name Rogue-like for the genre, but more often than not, what ultimately turns a player down from the game is the incredibly steep learning curve. Dwarf Fortress might not be inherently hard as it is, but the fact that it's hard to learn how to control the game really has it's effect on how much you would like it.
Dwarf Fortress is the brainchild of two brothers, namely Tarn Adams and his brother Zach (ToadyOne and Threetoe respectively as they are known over the internet). Tarn has a Ph. D. in Math and Zach is a history buff, so you should figure what the combination of these skills would do. Toady is the programming half of Bay12Games, and he manages all modifications to the game and the general development of it, while Threetoe provides ideas and stories which Toady tries to implement in the game, making all the mechanics in the game work in order to make them possible. Toady is now working body and soul for the game, which has been in development for 6 years now, having quit his job to work on it fulltime. As such, you should expect daily updates on the progress made, as well as frequent version updates. The version previewed now is 0.27.176.38c, and each number symbolizes one thing, so you should notice how big this game really is (having in mind there is 6 years of progress into it. Tarn's work on the game is a labour of love, but he will take suggestions from players if they are good, so keep this in mind and go at the Bay12 forums and drop a line if you want to. This preview is gonna be big, so bear with me.
About the game
The game is quite hard to classify, seeing as it is not a definite genre and it also is a combination of many of them as well. There are two modes you can play, but not before you run through the intricate process of generating a world in which you play. You can change parameters if you like, mostly because the standard world is damn large, but it will still take a long time to create a world, even if you have a strong computer. It will create a landscape using fractals and if it is balanced enough, it will pass, if not, it will be rejected. You can see how the game generates the terrain, as well as how rivers are flown into the landscape, all in the glorious ASCII style of the game. After the terrain is generated, you then see how the world evolves into the known history, from year 1 to 1050, the time in which you can begin playing. In that meantime, you will see different settlements pop up, each belonging to one of the major races. It does not really matter for now, yet the next release makes the different races wage war against each other. For now, these will provide places in which to fight or get quests. Also in this time, the superpowers get a mainstay in the world, and you will get to fight them in the fortress mode or get a quest to kill them in adventure (dwarf) mode, but more to that later. Everything that is generated in this time will remain there while you play, and everything you do is persistent as well, so if you kill all the goblins in a tower, they will remain dead, and their objects will be around all around the place as well.
The two modes are what are the bread and butter of the game, respectively. Why I say respectively, it is because the fortress mode makes up the bread of the game, because when you ultimately lose the fortress due to something, and you will lose it some time or another, it will make place for the butter, which is the exploring of the remnants of the fortress after it is abandoned. While the fortress mode is a very well made fortress simulator, complete with real-time strategy elements and The Sims kind of gamplay, with a little of a touch of Dungeon Keeper, adventure mode is pure Rogue-like RPG, in my opinion better than most hack and slash RPGs on the market, but with its fair share of defects and errors. Seeing as Tarn has primarily worked on the Fortress mode, the Adventure mode is clearly lacking, as you don't have many things to do in it anyway. This is about to change however, and I bet that when the game is finished, the Adventure mode will keep you on the game for a long time.
Gameplay and how to make your dwarves work - Fortress Mode
The gameplay of the game is harsh in the least. It is there, and it shines, but it is very hard to see it shining. You start the Fortress Mode with a selection of seven dwarves, no fewer, no less. It is not an impressive number, nor is it meant to be, but you will soon see how hard it is to control them anyway. You must choose where you wish to embark, and you can see this pretty much as a difficulty choice. You can choose to embark everywhere in the world, from the sands of the hot deserts, to the waters of the ocean (not a good idea, since dwarves will very likely drown), with anything in between. While choosing to settle in the location of a nice brook, with mountains on the side and trees around would be the easiest difficulty, settling in a very arid location, be it in a dessert or glacier, or on the top of the mountain, with the addition of a haunted area trait would be the hardest.
You can embark with a default selection of stuff and skills, but it is better to carefully manage what you bring with you, as well as what your dwarves are able to do. There is a really big selection of skills you can choose from, as well as a huge number of items you can bring with you, but a good idea is to bring whatever you feel would help you on your quest early on. You should definetly bring an axe if there are trees in the location you chose to embark in, a pick or two, depending on the number of miners you use, a dozen or two of seeds, since what you reap is what you eat here, as well as some food to keep you going. You can get an anvil to work your metals if you wish, but because it is very expensive and you can use the points for better skills or more food, you can skip it. After this, press the E key and you will embark in the journey.
After a brief history of the journey to the location of the settlement you will build, you will be left with the seven dwarves and the supplies you brought with you in a cart, as well as a little statement: STRIKE THE EARTH! And indeed you shall, if you want to live through the winter. You can dig wherever you wish, as long as it is solid and minable, and if it is rock, it will yeld stones for you to use. You can use stones and other materials to make other, more useful things, like furniture, mechanisms, crafts and whatever there is to be made, you can farm underground in sand or soil, or in stone if you got it wet beforehand, in order to feed your dwarves, you can make channels to transport water or make moats, you can build traps and draw bridges, as well as many trap door mechanisms and other kinds of inventive ways to keep water or enemies out, and your dwarves well inside. You can also build up, using stones, wood or even glass, all of which provide a good way to keep something solid. If the circumstances approve, something can be undermined and then made into pieces by letting it fall a few levels down.
Your dwarves gain skills by doing what it implies, so if a dwarf mines for long enough, he will get to be a Legendary Miner, and he shall mine with the greatest of speeds through rock and sand alike. Yet when dwarves are unhappy or a normal state, sometimes they will enter a mood, most of which imply asking for some items and claiming a workshop in which they will make an artifact. They will then proceed to carry it around, be it an amulet of a heavy cabinet. Some strange moods give the dwarf an automatic legendary status to the trade they used to make the item, and it does not have to be a trade of his own, but the failure of granting the dwarf what he/she needs will make it turn insane, leaving his/her clothes all over the pavement of the fortress an ultimately dying, sometimes taking someone else with him. The artifacts will never be dropped (not even when they shower (they can't do that anyway)), unless he or she dies. The game is a micromanaging nightmare later on.
On the downside, you will be attacked by different forces, both in the natural side, like goblins, kobolds or wild animals, as well as by unnatural enemies, like undead animals which are taken apart in a great number of bones (which can then be made into bone crafts or bolts for crossbows), great powers, like hydras, titans or even fire-breathing dragons. If you dig too deep, as the dwarves of Moria did, you will find the equivalents of Balrogs deep under the earth, fireball throwing Demons and evil spirits which are very hazardous to your health no matter who you are. Almost everything you kill has a use for the fortress, be it for the bones it provides, or the carcass if leaves (work for butchers, tonight we dine meat!), but mostly what you kill has the advantage of being dead and not having the power to kill you anymore.
Adventure Mode - Get gutted with honour!
In adventure mode, you start by choosing your race and starting location. You can choose any town of the Human, Elf or Dwarf ones, and you can also choose the Human Play now to start at the location of your last abandoned fortress. In case of the other choices, you will be able to choose what skills your avatar will have, and what you choose will have an impact on the equipment it will have, so your should choose wisely. Different races are able to use different weapons as well, so while Humans can use lashes, dwarves can't, and they can't use the armour other races use. Seeing as the World Gen fortresses don't have shops and the shops in human town only sell human armour, the only way you can upgrade what you wear is by visiting older fortresses. That is if you are a dwarf, Humans are able to buy good quality stuff from towns instead. You can get quests from leaders and mayors, so you actually have a direction you can go to, and after you fulfill the objective, usually to kill a bigger guy than yourself, you get praise... that's all, praise. For the moment at least. You will also be able to see what the fact that you killed the particular guy in the legends screen.
You can equip a very large number of items, as well as carry a big number if you have a backpack, yet it is quite hard to figure out how you can actually equip weapons. The answer is quite simple. You attack with what you carry. So if you have the lower leg of a batman in your right hand, you will batter enemies with it. This makes for a lot of funny things, like beating enemies up with vomit or the heads of children. You also have a sneaking mechanic you can use, which relies more on the proximity to the enemies and overall line of sight rather than a singular line of sight, you can swim, ignite trees and plants, throw everything you want to, lick whatever you wish, eat many things, drink some as well and other things. The possibilities are endless, yet you still feel like you want to be able to do more.
The damage mechanics of the game really stand out, being a game in which there is no such thing like hitpoints. You, and everyone(thing) else which is living (or not living) has different damage parts, all of which get damaged in different levels depending on how strong the hit was or what it was that hit. This gives the option of puncturing the heart of a dragon with a wellplaced crossbow bolt, one hit KOing it. Of course, this can be a one in a hundred chance, but it does happen. You can damage lots of internal organs, and damaging vital ones hard enough will make a fatal wound, thus inducing death in not so long. Everything applies to you as well, so if you get an arm cut from one of the human guards (if you get into a quarrel with them), you will bleed, and bleeding for long enough will kill you. There are no revives here, so if you die, you die. You will remain in the annals of the world, but nothing more (aside of perhaps finding your corpse and equipment where you died. If you get knocked hard enough or suffer from intense pain, you will faint, and when you wake up you will most probably be dead. You can also suffer brain damage or spine damage, and these will make you move slower, as well as vomiting from time to time. The only way to heal yourself for now is hitting T (that is, a capital t, so use shift) and traveling a block away. This will heal any wounds, even mortal ones, but they will not replace lost limbs.
You must think that you will always die anyway, if not because of a horrible blow or some kind of decapitation induced by sharp things, then because of unluck (like falling from a cliff when dodging) or boredom (in a small world, there are not many enemies). While adventure mode is cool by itself, the fact that you can travel to your stone hewn fortress is what makes it even cooler. If when you where building up your fortress you have made nice objects with inscriptions or you have engraved the walls to make the fortress nicer, you can now, with your adventurer, look at these symbols in order to get what they meant with details and dates on who and when they where done.
Controls - What was the key for save again?
You control the game mainly from the keyboard, with all the great lists on the right of the window if the case, and the alphanumeric keys will play an even larger part, as each and every one of them have a certain function assigned to it. You can ever use the capital letters to do some commands, meaning pressing the shift key with the respective key, but they aren't many for now. What is really hard to learn about this game is the different commands, yet if you play DF for a day or two and succeed into actually breaking through the steep learning curve, you will like how the game turns out, and remembering the keys will sometimes feel as an accomplishment. The good thing is that most of what you press is quite intuitive, although how you use it is not. You can also use the mouse when you designate mining locations and the such, but the occasions where you will actually take your hands off the keyboard are quite rare. If anything is particularly unclear to you, be sure to visit the wiki or read the manual by pressing ?. That is, shift /(slash).
Graphics - Is this Matrix?
The graphics of the game are all ASCII, from the opening theme to the flying of arms and legs into the air. What that means, is that the game relies on symbols to make the graphics of the game. If you have ever watched The Matrix, you will know what I am talking about. Seen the screen the guys looked at in the ship they used? That is how you will feel when you first look at the game. While it is by no means beautiful at the first sight, the ASCII graphics have a certain feel to them which makes them special. As a little boy once said, that he listened to the radio because the image was so much better than that of the TV, so will you feel when you look at the game some time after you grow accustomed to it. This will turn down many players from DF, yet if you get after it, you will have an experience of a lifetime, if you imagine what you do in the game and by making your own image from the symbols on the screen. That is why many people look at DF as a game of storytelling, one which gives a platform on which to build their own epic stories, like the now famous Boatmurdered, or Nist Akath of The Captain (search for them on Google, you will read a lot of epic adventures). It challenges you to imagine, and I see an amazing thing in it.
If you really hate the ASCII graphics so much that you wouldn't play the game if it were ASCII, there is a solution for you, namely graphics sets. Having in mind that alpha blending is not possible in DF at this time, a monster can't really be larger than a tile, so you would have a dragon the same size of a dward. Yet they do look nice, so if you really want them, you can get the entire version along with some nice graphics in this link.
The sound
Yay, lots of sounds! NOT! The game features some sounds for the amazing intro screen, and only one song made by Tarn which just loops in the background of the game indefinetly while playing Fortress mode. This actually shows you the fact that it is unfinished, so feel free to fire up your own songs in the background.
OMG my processor is running 100%
DF is a resource hog. While most will see something like WTF in this statement, you should notice the fact that simulating everything in realtime with so much detail actually SHOULD slow your processor to a crawl. And it does! While your GPU will remain unharmed, the CPU will suffer from running the game, so be sure you have a fast processor to begin with.
Wiki good, swearing bad, wiki good!
YOU NEED the wiki to play this game. You might figure out the game without it, maybe in one year or two, but the wiki will still help you. I can't stress this enough. The link to the wiki is here. Also, you can join the IRC chat for some more human help at this location.
Digging to conclusions
This game is AWESOME period. While it has a really high learning curve and a hard to learn and use interface, Dwarf Fortress is sublime simply through the fact that it is so detailed and massive in itself. All the more is the fact that it is not finished, so bear with Toady and support him for this awesome game. The preview is now really massive in size, so I'm just trying to cut it short, so you don't get bored reading it. DF is donationware, and is free, so download from the official website. Expect more when the new version comes up, until then, play on!