What makes Dwarf Fortress different?
I was talking to a friend who hadn’t played DF yet, and this is the story I told to demonstrate the differences between Dwarf Fortress and, well, every other game that exists.
A common problem in Dwarf Fortress is pet overpopulation. Dwarves, it seems, are not keen to follow Bob Barker’s advice. I had a fortress that was going quite well, my dwarves happily churning out food, drink, and tradable goods all while hollowing out a masterwork of a sunken lair, including a ludicrously tall pit extending from the first level of the fortress down hundreds of feet where I could throw all my unwanted kobold junk; the only rub was that the game was chugging along at only a few frames per second. After a few moments of investigation I pinpointed the problem: literally hundreds of dogs and cats prowling about my fortress. Luckily, pets aren’t eating their dwarven masters’ food stores in the current version.
How do you solve a pet overpopulation problem? Like most problems in Dwarf Fortress, there are a number of possible solutions. The easiest, and most expedient for my fortress, was to throw all the dogs down the large pit I had constructed. My dwarves obliged with little resistance, of course. At least one hundred dogs and puppies met their grisly deaths at the bottom of that pit.
Chucking a bunch of unwanted pets into a nearly never-ending pit, while certainly cruel, is also pretty fun. And it’s something few games let you do. (Other options for pet removal include butchering, drowning, and flooding with magma). But the interesting part of Dwarf Fortress is that it remembers what happens, or rather your dwarves remember the events that transpire around them.
A good dwarven year later (maybe two), one of my dwarves became a master crafter. After going a bit loony and becoming obssessed with the idea of making a scepter out of rock, he constructed the scepter and engraved something very interesting on it: a picture of a dog. The dog was falling.
After telling him this, my friend let out what I can only describe as a squeal of surprise. For someone less knowledgeable about the boundaries of gaming, this sort of story may not come as a big surprise. But what other games do things like this? DF is ably done but I suspect it’s no technical marvel - if John Carmack wanted to figure out a way to program NPCs who make contextual, representative art I’m sure he could. It’s not the technical prowess, but rather the strength of imagination that sets DF apart.
