Awesome interview. DF is certainly a fascinating project. But I always felt like it is held back by it’s poor accessibility.
A newer game Rimworld takes most of the core ideas from dwarf fortress but packages it up in a nice gui with help text so you can learn to play in the game rather than with a wiki.
That is what I have been told. I have tried both and I ended up getting a lot of enjoyment out of rimworld while in DF I spent several hours studying the getting started wiki and still didn't really feel like I understood what was going on.
Would be amazing to see all this work that went in to DF exposed to a wider audience with some kind of UI improvements.
Rimworld is an accessible game and while it has a certain level of depth compared to other games, especially on the emotional side of your characters, it's shallow compared to DF.
The problem with DF is, it's hardly accessible. This is why so many people hope for the Steam version. It's often more fun to read people stories playing the game compared to playing it yourself.
DF offers you the illusion of a living world, that is writing it's own history.
Dwarfs discovering some kind of creature living on a mountain edge. They gain interest in it. Throwing stuff at it, talking about it, giving this creature a funny name. Later on your mason will carve stories on your walls in your castle and somewhere in the story, maybe, he will write about this creature.
Dwarf Fortress goes into depth to a truly magnificent, ridiculous degree. (I guess also in the non-ridiculous degree of having a 3D world instead of 2D ;)) It simulates a lot more, and thus more is possible in game and more weird and wonderful chain reactions can happen.
Are those stories written by a character in Dwarf Fortress or a dramatization of the emergent behavior? The first story I saw could’ve happened in Rimworld or even Prison Architect, given literary license to dramatize.
Both are driven by systems so they're both effectively simulations, but dwarf fortress is much, much more in depth. It's basically a "real life" simulator but set in a fantasy universe, where you control a colony of dwarves. The interplay between systems is unheard of in any other game*, the closest you get is some roguelikes.
And similarly to DF it's also getting a more accessible Steam version (Space Station 14 as well as Unitystation) to make it easier to start playing it.
In my play experience SS13 wins out in terms of funny stories and variety, mainly because the speed of development is so much faster (especially on big servers like tg), it being multiplayer and there existing many spin-off forks from the usual space station gameplay.
To be fair this is basically just a texture pack, which is already something you can use. The real problem is the highly consistent UI design, differing in things as simple as if you have to use a keyboard or mouse to navigate a list.
Toady is understandably disinterested in putting time into that element of the game, and I think he had a bad experience the last time he 'outsourced' it.
It's not just a texture pack in any way - just read the dev blog. They are also overhauling all of the UIs, adding mouse support to everything and so on.
I'm super hype on this. I've managed to play DF a bit successfully thanks to Dwarf Therapist, but I'm really excited to come back and play again with the UX overhaul.
A newer game Rimworld takes most of the core ideas from dwarf fortress but packages it up in a nice gui with help text so you can learn to play in the game rather than with a wiki.