In terms of usability, I still just find Dwarf Fortress to be a decade behind Rimworld. The fact that we had to use Dwarf Therapist for years... Rimworld just has it all on the screen within four clicks, with clear indications on how to resolve issues like mood modifiers.
Dwarf Fortress in all its complexity, embraces fuzziness in how things work, and focuses on a bit of a higher-level focus (fortresses reach many more dwarves than a Rimworld colony). However, this complexity makes the game a lot less accessible too. I hope the UI changes help bring ease of use and clarity!
For me Dwarf Fortress demonstrates why good and accessible UI / UX is required and is an art of itself.
I repeatedly tried DF and despite having spent hours in similar games, this one eluded me to this day due to it's borderline unusable UI (for me at least) and art style.
I'll be happy to give it another go since the mechanics seem to be supremely refined.
Dwarf fortress should be in the UX hall of fame as an example of how an incredible product can be made completely inaccessible to 95% of it's target audience purely through bad UX.
And I say that as one of the 5% who still played and loved it.
Same, I was a big fan of character-based roguelikes (and at the time, in the late 2000s, that was the format of most roguelikes), and while I was unfazed at the time by the character-based interface, the inconsistent menus and micronamanagement tired me out of Dwarf Fortress.
It needed various external tools to alleviate the painstaking manual labor that went into managing the colony, like macro generators for floor plans and the memory hacking of Dwarf Therapist to have high-level management of the colony, and all that with wacky menus.
I've tried Rimworld a couple times and it always came off as just bland, flat, and uninteresting compared to Dwarf Fortress. Once you played it a bit you could see "through" the game and into the random number generation beneath it. Also I didn't like the sci-fi aspect personally as I like fantasy more.
Perhaps it's gotten better in the few intervening years since I last tried it.
RimWorld has tons of interesting features, it's a game I really want to love. But their much-hyped "story generator" is really just a very basic random event system, without even much variety to pad it out. The only "AI" thing it does is take into account the status of your colony (wealth, etc).
It's frustrating because it's the system which really drives the whole game, and it's so simple, and so arbitrary. Without Dwarf Fortress' depth of simulation, it needs some stronger glue to tie the game together.
Yes you did a much better job of describing my feelings on the game. The systems are very simple and show it leaves nothing more than randomness and an almost complete lack of emergent behavior that happens in Dwarf Fortress.
I love fantasy too! Do you know if any games that are like RimWorld but fantasy? I saw Amazing Cultivation Simulation but you need a master's degree to play that, at least that's how it felt to me...
Rhadamant shows a ton of different Rimworld scenarios in his Youtube channel, and does marathon Twitch streams of the game as well. Many of them heavily modded to do all sorts of fantasy and sci-fi scenarios. You can get many ideas for your own scenarios from them.
To bring it back slightly on-topic, I strongly suspect that while Dwarf Fortress influenced Rimworld, Rimworld had some influence on the Steam version of DF in terms of the graphical user interface.
I've actually played with mods and Zetrith's multiplayer mod is a must! No honestly, stop what you're doing and go check it out. Especially if you have at least one friend! I manage to even make it work with many many mods.
It's been a couple of years since I last played using this mod, so it's probably even better now. The only down side at the time was that it would desync sometimes, so you'd have to wait a bit a resync, but it's still so worth it because the experience is just so amazing! I would probably pay the price of the game again just to have an official version of multiplayer.
This is co-op multiplayer, at least how I played it.
Highly recommended to anyone who likes RimWorld and has at least one friend!
There are DF overhaul mods that make it scifi. I think the big one is called The Long Night or something like that. DF has steam workshop integration so you might see it there soon
The problem is/was the learning curve. And of course the UI. I really hope the Steam version is done well and not just one of those graphics packs that you can install on Dwarf Fortress.
It's a proper UI and it includes in game tutorials and help pages to explain the basics of the game as well as making the game much prettier than any existing tilesets IMO.
DF is also not as 'hard' as most people think, if you start your fort in an easy location you can quickly build a self sufficient colony inside a hill or underground and make it inaccessible to most threats once you understand the basics of production in the game. And with the UI upgrades managing your dwarfs' moods is a lot easier too.
The only thing that has been preventing me from being an annoying df evangelist for years has been the horrible UI :D
I won't let myself play until this weekend, but I hear that the new UI actually incorporates some elements of Dwarf Therapist, making e.g. assigning jobs an order of magnitude easier.
IMO there’s a spectrum that has Dwarf Fortress on one end, and, I dunno, like Factorio or Mindustry or other automation games on the other. Rimworld would be somewhere in the middle. On the Factorio side, most of the enjoyment comes from working out a really optimal base and looking at every detail.
In Dwarf Fortress, there are just too many details to look at them all, and the reward isn’t so great anyway. IMO it is much more enjoyable to just embrace the fact that there will always be too many details and, as you say, it is better to just focus on the higher level. The details aren’t really there to look at all of them or play with all of them, they are there to interact with each other and with the things you do, to result in emergent phenomena that (within the limitations of the simulation) “make sense.”
Or at least when you are picking over the rubble of your base, after one of those phenomena really emerged all over the place, you can piece together where it all went wrong.
Rimworld in my limited play time, seemed like I’d really want to optimize everything fairly well, and like that was actually do-able. So it while the games are pretty similar mechanically, the actual feel of playing is pretty different, and I can’t really compare them.
I wish the enemies would be able to destroy walls in DF like they do in Rimworld.
I really love DF but at some point, I know that I can surrender my fortress with walls and only let a small entrance with a labyrinth of traps that the pathfinding will lead enemies to.
In Rimworld such strategy is not very effective since some enemies will dig into your base walls.
Rimworld has multiple different raids that defeat that defense, though. Drop pods, sieges, sappers, and breachers - most all in both human & mech variants.
The open-door killbox is still super strong, but you can't survive with only that defense.
They experimented with tunneling enemies a while ago (it was before my time, and I started playing about a decade ago). But for walls and moats, enemies do try and scale up/swim through them now.
Dwarf Fortress in all its complexity, embraces fuzziness in how things work, and focuses on a bit of a higher-level focus (fortresses reach many more dwarves than a Rimworld colony). However, this complexity makes the game a lot less accessible too. I hope the UI changes help bring ease of use and clarity!