Comments on: Ultima VII Odyssey: The Wall. https://scientificgamer.com/ultima-vii-odyssey-the-wall/ Science, gaming, and all things in between. Wed, 01 Jul 2026 22:05:15 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=3.7.36 By: hentzau https://scientificgamer.com/ultima-vii-odyssey-the-wall/#comment-30 Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:19:43 +0000 http://scientificgamer.wordpress.com/?p=113#comment-30 Dwarf Fortress is a special case. The UI is bad. There’s no getting around that. But DF’s UI merely exacerbates the real issue with the game, which is that DF is possibly the most complex game ever made in terms of mechanics but it chooses to deal with the vast amount of information this complexity generates in pretty much the worst way imaginable. If you remade DF with a decent, mouse-driven UI and lots of pretty drop-down menus it’d still be nigh-unplayable for anyone unwilling to scale the Matterhorn-like learning curve involved in processing all this information, and it’d remain that way until somebody replaced the ASCII characters with some actual art and added an absolute *shitload* of tooltips to remind the player just what on earth is going on.

(I’m aware there’s custom tilesets for the game that add actual graphics, but the game isn’t really designed to cope with them. It’d need to be redesigned from the ground up to accommodate a true graphical interface.)

]]> By: Josh https://scientificgamer.com/ultima-vii-odyssey-the-wall/#comment-29 Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:08:01 +0000 http://scientificgamer.wordpress.com/?p=113#comment-29 Did you ever play Dwarf Fortress?

I ask because it is the single game that has inspired the most, and fiercest, debate over UI issues. It’s a bloated mess of a game now, of course, as as such has very few defenders, but there is still a divide between those who once thought it great and those who could never get past its Rogue-on-steroids interface.

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