'Dwarf Fortress' Is Abandoning Its Text-Based Graphics, but Not Its Soul

'Dwarf Fortress' Is Abandoning Its Text-Based Graphics, but Not Its Soul

5 years ago
Anonymous $Dftgs0JzgE

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pan94n/dwarf-fortress-is-abandoning-its-text-based-graphics-but-not-its-soul

Dwarf Fortress is a hard game to classify. It’s part simulation, part RPG, and part rogue-like. It generates a 2D world and tasks the player with managing a fortress and helping its dwarves survive. There are goblins, gods, mysteries, quests, geese, drinking, cats, and more, and all these elements can interact in unpredictable ways. After one update, players began to notice cats padding around drunk and vomiting. The update had added taverns for the dwarves, which led to spilled beer, which cats walked through. Later, when the cats clean themselves, they imbibed the alcohol and got drunk. That’s how deep the simulation gets.

But players had to imagine the cat vomit because Dwarf Fortress is rendered entirely in ASCII—a vast fantasy world created with less graphical fidelity than you'll find in a Word Document. There’s nothing that looks or plays quite like it. Now, that's changing.

'Dwarf Fortress' Is Abandoning Its Text-Based Graphics, but Not Its Soul

Mar 25, 2019, 1:00pm UTC
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pan94n/dwarf-fortress-is-abandoning-its-text-based-graphics-but-not-its-soul > Dwarf Fortress is a hard game to classify. It’s part simulation, part RPG, and part rogue-like. It generates a 2D world and tasks the player with managing a fortress and helping its dwarves survive. There are goblins, gods, mysteries, quests, geese, drinking, cats, and more, and all these elements can interact in unpredictable ways. After one update, players began to notice cats padding around drunk and vomiting. The update had added taverns for the dwarves, which led to spilled beer, which cats walked through. Later, when the cats clean themselves, they imbibed the alcohol and got drunk. That’s how deep the simulation gets. > But players had to imagine the cat vomit because Dwarf Fortress is rendered entirely in ASCII—a vast fantasy world created with less graphical fidelity than you'll find in a Word Document. There’s nothing that looks or plays quite like it. Now, that's changing.