For those tired of shallow modern games.

I see so many posts here and on other gaming websites bemoaning the current state of the gaming industry, the constant stream of graphically dazzling but shallow titles lacking any innovation or sophistication. I can certainly associate with most of them, as I've been playing PC games for a while now, and the vast majority of the new games coming out are inferior retreads in every way other than visual of games that came out years ago, some even decades.  The best case scenario seems to be taking an old successful game, and simply repackaging it with modern graphics, ala Starcraft 2, which to me is a sad commentary on the industry. On top of that, most new games feature really shallow game mechanics and worlds, counting on other things (such as human player competition or psychology of additiction) to give the game any kind of lasting appeal. To me, this totally misses the true potential of video gaming.

So up until recently, I was pretty down on the whole gaming scene. However, recently, it seems to me that things are looking up, from a different direction. Mainstream developers and publishers are still churning out crap by the ton, and will probably continue doing so, since their behavior is determined to a large degree by their business commitments, investors, etc. But the independent gaming scene is picking up steam as of late. Eve Online and small studios like Paradox and Stardock have been successful for a while, and are busy working on new promising products (World of Darkness MMORPG, Elemental, Crusader Kings 2, etc), small studio MMOs are trying hard to succeed if not always able to do so (Mortal Online, Darkfall, Xsyon, Salem), and now we have Minecraft selling over a million copies. Some of these games could be argued to have failed, some will likely fail in the future, some will struggle, but others are doing OK, and while they  might not be everyone's cup of tea, each of them has some great innovative features, and they are pushing the envelope for themselves and others, unlike the mainstream corporate development crowd.

But then there is another game among these indies that doesn't get as much coverage as the others, and yet might easily be the greatest one of them all, one unlike any other I've seen, that I wanted to tell people about. You might have heard about it already, but once I got past its insane entry curve, I've been happily gaming for hundreds of hours now, with no end in sight yet.  The game is Dwarf Fortress. Yeah, THAT game, the one with ASCII graphics, and a learning curve like a PhD course. Now, if some of you are saying you can't play with ASCII graphics, don't worry, I couldn't either. I first heard about DF years ago, when it was first released as an alpha. I tried it then, and I tried it years later, and just couldn't do it. I am not a graphics whore, but I need at least something visual, beyond a character pallette. So for years I kept hearing great things about it, but could never play it. At some point, I learned that people made a graphical tileset for it, but the screenshots seemed kinda uninspiring, so I let it go. A few months ago, I was really bored, and decided to try it again, but this time, there were multiple graphical tilesets available, a couple of which actually looked quite good to me (not Crysis good obviously, we are still talking a 2D tileset like early 90s games, but still, not ASCII anymore). So I downloaded DF with the Phoebus tileset, downloaded a 3rd party app called Dwarf Therapist, which makes managing your dwarves much easier, and opened up one of the online walkthrough tutorials (dont even think about starting without one, unless you have strong masochistic tendencies). Btw, the game and all the tilesets/apps are free, since it's still in alpha, if you like it, feel free to donate to the developer. Between me being bored, and the way the graphical tileset made me understand what I was looking at, unlike ASCII, I was able to jump it at last. And boy am I glad I did. Because underneath those graphics and that interface is a truly amazing game, one that can be argued is (or will be at some point) the greatest ever.

What makes DF so good is how insanely ambitious that game is. In a way, it had to come from an independent developer and had to have crappy graphics, because large studios would have had a heart attack from its neverending list of features, and quality graphics would only hinder its development. DF is a fantasy world generator, meaning its end goal is something like randomly generating a Middle Earth type world on one run, and then another fantasy world on another, and so on. Every unique world it generates has its own map (random landmasses, oceans, etc), topography, geology and climates, and later on, probably its own metaphysics as well (hasn't been implemented yet). Then, that world's history is simulated and recorded for up to a thousand years, to provide a nice historical background, and also to determine which civilizations and creatures survive and where. After that's done, the player is free to play a variety of roles in that world. Right now you can start a fortress mode with a bunch of dwarves, which is similar to an insanely deep strategy game, as you manage the dwarves to build out massive fortresses/settlements and simply survive in a dangerous, realistic world. Another mode you can play now is the adventure one, which is not as far along yet as the fortress mode, but can still be fun. The latter is akin to an RPG game, in that you take control of an adventurer and travel over the generated world, seeking adventure. Later on, there are plans to make just about every other creature playable, from wizards to megabeasts. one of the things that makes DF so good, is how all these games in the same world add to its history. For example, if you carve out a mighty fortress with your dwarves, but then eventually succumb (which tends to happen at some point), that fortress (or its ruins) will still exist in that world, and its important events will be written down in the histories of that world. If your adventurer in the next game travels to that place, he can discover those ruins, and perhaps even be haunted by the ghosts of those dwarves, if they had not been properly buried.

Aside from the history angle, the game is also insanely deep, mostly in fortress mode right now , but others should follow. Just a few out of hundreds of possible examples:

- every dwarf has a full name, personality traits, likes and dislikes, relationships, and a set of skills

- combat is modeled not just to individual weapons and pieces of armor, but different kinds of strikes damaging different organs and skin/muscle tissues (mostly expressed via text, since you cant display that with ASCII or tilesets)

- if a dwarf kills some number of notable foes, he/she will get an extended name (4 words as opposed to the usual 2), if a weapon is used to kill some number of foes, it becomes an artifact with its own name and everything

- the place where you embark to start a fortress has its own climate and biome, with various kinds of plantlife,  animals and monsters present at different places

- the game has a ridiculous amount of supply chains, where you can produce just about anything you can imagine in a medieval style economy

- there are hundreds of types of rock/ore/stone/soil/gems to be mined depending on where you are

- liquids have realistic physics (maybe not 100% realistic, but close enough), so you can any number of cool things with water, magma, and various mechanisms your dwarves can produce, like simply creating a well, or an artificial waterfall, or a magma trap for goblins, or if you are really hardcore, a simple computer (some people have done this apparently, I am still stuck on wells )

While all these things and many others might sound neat, when they all combine in one game, the result is a really sophisticated and fun game for mature people. You are guaranteed to have hundreds of "Holy S___" moments where you realize just how deeply DF models some particular aspect of life. And the fun here isn't from some artificial challenge or a sense of addiction for better gear or competition, but simply from all the emergent gameplay that results from the combination of so many complex systems. Like how one time, my hardcore military dwarves issued forth from my mighty fortress, and laid waste to a besieging army of goblins and ogres, only to let one ogress slip through the unlocked doorway. She killed just enough helpless civilian dwarves inside before being put down that the survivors went depressed from seeing all those mutilated corpses and went into a tantrum spiral, dooming my once great settlement. Story #40 out of how many? Who knows...

So yeah, if you are upset with modern games, and especially if you are bored, I cannot advise you enthusiastically enough to give Dwarf Fortress a try. As someone who couldn't get into it for years, I understand if it's not for you, but you should at least try the newer graphical tilesets, if ASCII was the big issue.