

Dwarf Fortress, the Great Ancestor - Zarkonnen
http://zarkonnen.com/dwarf_fortress_the_great_ancestor

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TillE
The handful of games inspired by Dwarf Fortress are cool, but I really hope
somebody is working on a proper successor. A game that's even more ambitious
with its simulation, with the software appropriately designed so it can be
multithreaded and optimized.

Dwarf Fortress is amazing. It's quite possibly my favorite game of all time.
But at the same time, it's really only scratching the surface of what's
possible with this kind of simulation. There's a whole genre of incredibly
deep RPGs just waiting to be created.

~~~
falcolas
That may be hard, since DF is under constant development.

Being more ambitious in the sim department will be excruciatingly hard, since
DF already has an almost silly level of simulation:

[http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/23/5926447/dwarf-fortress-
will...](http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/23/5926447/dwarf-fortress-will-crush-
your-cpu-because-creating-history-is-hard)

That said, yeah, it's a cool genre which could use some real love.

~~~
bryondowd
I think it would be interesting to see something DF-inspired at an MMO scale.
I'd like to imagine what a larger team could do, with access to lots of
parallel CPU power. DF does a lot of work abstracting things that are off-
site, since a typical PC can't simulate the entire world in realtime. But if
you had enough servers sharing the work, I expect you could do much more.
Throw in a bunch of players all giving some direction to their own little
autonomous civilisations, and I think it would be fascinating to watch.

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FranOntanaya
DF is one of the top games at creating emergent scenarios, and yet not very
good at it. Many parts are tedious, broken or not very fledged.

I really wish more games opened their AI, including conversation. Using them
for little Turing experiments is a lot more fun than item mods.

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lowboy
Just a heads up that the majority of the page took around 15 seconds to load,
and that was after a few refreshes.

[http://i.imgur.com/wzJAp3Y.png](http://i.imgur.com/wzJAp3Y.png)

~~~
Zarkonnen
Huh, that's rather unfortunate. Thank you for pointing that out, I'll see that
I can fix things!

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IsTom
The author writes about balancing difficulty of DF. I've seen many people
saying that DF is too easy once you figure it out. It's true that it isn't a
difficult game, but I think it's missing the point. The point of DF is
simulation, not being a difficult game. There's a lot of beauty in it. If you
want to be challenged there are better games for that. If you want to explore
virtual worlds or excercise creativity you've got a deal.

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juliangamble
This NYT story about the guys that wrote Dwarf Fortress is amazing. One of
them was a Phd candidate, but now they survive on the money from DF fans -
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-
of...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of-dwarf-
fortress.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

~~~
Natsu
The guys who make it are really cool and accessible. There have been lots of
crazy fan projects doing research they hope for them to incorporate in the
game somehow (e.g. material properties research, tree research,
[http://imgur.com/EPtgt](http://imgur.com/EPtgt) ...)

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fsiefken
For another vast 2D game experience check Distant Worlds, 4x space strategy
with tens of thousands of planets and asteroids
[http://www.spacesector.com/blog/2011/10/distant-worlds-
retur...](http://www.spacesector.com/blog/2011/10/distant-worlds-return-of-
the-shakturi-review/)

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hurin
>. But at this point, DF has a relationship to modern games much like a
literary classic does to other books: it will help you understand where a lot
of stuff is coming from.

According to wikipedia DF came out in 2006? Where does the classic book
analogy come from.

~~~
falcolas
They are stating that just as concepts and themes from classic books resurface
in more modern books, gameplay concepts and themes from DF can be found in
modern videogames.

That isn't to say DF does not contain themes from previous videogames, or that
it is the progenitor for modern games; just an influence.

~~~
hurin
The article is quite explicitly calling it a classic it doesn't actually
mention any predecessors that it inherits from (I haven't played
DwarfFortress, but reading about it suggests to me, games such as Ultima,
Moria, Angband).

~~~
falcolas
We consider many of Shakespeare's works to be classics, but he pulled a lot of
his themes and ideologies from the Bible, the Illiad and the Odyssey.

One does not need to be first to be a classic.

~~~
hurin
Actually Shakespeare also pulled many of his themes from other writers very
much closer to him in history (and he was criticized for it in his time
actually), but as it remains those writers i.e. Christopher Marlowe are not
well known and Shakespeare is (but it is essential to this that merely
reusing-retelling-retheming of classical aspects is not enough for this, many
others besides Shakespeare did this in those days, as many films, and tv-
series do it now).

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nether
dwarf fortress is the war & peace of games.

