There is nothing same-y about a game where you can't hit a bogeyman with a hammer because he's too fast, but you can kick his ass with cranberry leaves because they're lighter and let you hit faster.
Or, how about the elephants roosting in trees? Or the vampirism that can take over a fortress? Of the possible were-versions of most creatures, with infections, meaning were-swallows, were-frogs, and plague-like invasions of were-spiders?
Dwarf Fortress is built to generate stories, not just monsters and treasure. Every dwarf has likes and dislikes, friendships, pets, belongings, all driven by a fairly simple AI that just takes these preferences into account when deciding whether or not the dwarf is drunk enough to actually do some work, or whether it's so depressed it wants to sit in its room and cry.
I love Dwarf Fortress, and there are some real treasures in the legends of many worlds. But even with all the possibilities, things still get redundant.
Yes, the elephants have taken to their emergent treenests, and that's beautiful. But that's a single bug (feature) that makes us say 'wow' once, after which we've seen it. The possibilities of were-spiders and were-alpacas and reanimated spleens and rains of dwarf blood are just more evidence of those sliders he mentioned. Urist likes tigermen for their stripes, and you can care about it, but Tosid likes cows for their mooing and Tovist prefers to consume purring maggot cheese and at a certain point we've seen it all.
That doesn't mean that Dwarf Fortress is flawed. It's easily the most involved story generator out there, and I'm really glad to live at a time when I get to read about it. But it's still not immune to the issues that the grandparent post raised.
I think the deeper you make it, the less dull it becomes. For example, I realize all the personalities are created by a relatively repetitive grammar, but all the same I think that it adds flavor to the game with all the little quirks.
You could say the same about movies, or literature. There are many repetitive plot choices, tropes, and cliches that are repeated, but little nuances and tweaks here and there make it interesting. In the Sims, if you think about it there's very little variation in the "sliders", pick a job, have nonsensical conversations, woohoo, and then lock everyone in a room and burn them alive, but the game draws you in because there is enough detail that the human mind can draw a narrative. You've seen the landscapes in Minecraft before, but that makes it no less fun to try and dig to the bottom to find the big caves and pits.
So yes, this game will be really dull if they do sort of a breadth first procedural generation. But if they succeed in adding features that make every interaction deep, I think it could be very absorbing. Sure, maybe it's just another variation of CrocodilePerson, but this particular one has a monogomous mate and 4 children, has scars from a fight with a WereRabbit, grew up without a father and sometimes thinks about it, is well known for his tracking abilities, ect.. I think that kind of depth really adds to the experience.
Procedural generation isn't a magic substitute for creativity, it's a tool that requires lots of time and skill. Toady has put the work into it, and it shows.
Dwarf fortress is amazing, the algorithms it must use must be pretty interesting, it would be interesting to piece it out and open source it.
Dwarf fortress also benefits from completely simplified UI. Meaning it can go really deep without worrying about how the rocks are generated. Does magnetite look like pyrite?
It already looks like the scope of No Man's Land has gotten out of hand, maybe it will offer some of the joys of dwarf fortress, but not if it's purely visual.
The author open sourced his last game, Liberal Crime Squad, and its... The work of a madman. IIRC it was one ~40kloc C++ file full of globals and switch statements 6+ levels deep.
I'm sure someone's cleaned it up some now, but it made me wonder if that (unpredictable spaghetti code) is what's required for truly dynamic behavior, the kind that you see in DF and (to a lesser extent) LCS.
This. There's a reason Toady won't open source Dwarf Fortress, and I think it is mainly because he is embarrassed. Toady has a masters in math, not CS.
Yes, Dwarf Fortress is a great example of what can be achieved. To provide some level of distinction, as in my other comment (which I will repeat here for convenience), there are at least two types of generation: generating the world layout and its rules, quests, plot devices, etc, and generating the actual visual content itself.
There is nothing same-y about a game where you can't hit a bogeyman with a hammer because he's too fast, but you can kick his ass with cranberry leaves because they're lighter and let you hit faster.
Or, how about the elephants roosting in trees? Or the vampirism that can take over a fortress? Of the possible were-versions of most creatures, with infections, meaning were-swallows, were-frogs, and plague-like invasions of were-spiders?
Dwarf Fortress is built to generate stories, not just monsters and treasure. Every dwarf has likes and dislikes, friendships, pets, belongings, all driven by a fairly simple AI that just takes these preferences into account when deciding whether or not the dwarf is drunk enough to actually do some work, or whether it's so depressed it wants to sit in its room and cry.