C&C: Kane on Rimworld

STRAP IN, THIS IS A LONG ONE

On last week's episode, Tom described Rimworld as "Dwarf Fortress that you can learn to play in an hour," but I think that comparison is wrong.  I think that Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld were made with such incompatible philosophies that, despite a few superficial similarities, they, and the experience of playing them, are fundamentally dissimilar.  Rather, I'd say that Rimworld is what people who haven't played Dwarf Fortress, but have read some of its famous LPs, imagine Dwarf Fortress to be.

Veerserif wrote an essay about this, but it's a bit long to read on a podcast, so I'll try to summarise why I think they're so different.  To clarify, I'm talking specifically about Dwarf Fortress's Fortress Mode, because it's the one that's superficially similar to Rimworld; Adventure Mode is a very different beast.

The two words that best describe Dwarf Fortress are "easy" and "uneventful."  Whenever I tell this to people who haven't played it, they balk--it's so unlike everything they've heard--but people who have played it (at least, since 2010) understand immediately.  With a basic understanding of the systems, it's trivially easy to build a self-sustaining fort in which nothing will ever go wrong.  A fort that will suffer no disasters, have no noteworthy events, in which everyone will work and live without conflict indefinitely, and (since the recent improvements to the Manager interface) with only rare need for player intervention.

This is because Dwarf Fortress isn't really a game.  It isn't trying to give a player a particular experience.  Dwarf Fortress will never decide "well, nothing interesting has happened lately, so the player is probably getting bored; let's make something interesting happen," and it'll never be game designed or balanced to present a challenge to the player, because it doesn't know or care whether a player, or even an observer, exists.  All it cares about is accurately simulating a fantasy world.  Much of its simulation makes the play experience actively less fun, but that's not a problem, because fun isn't the goal, realism is.  The idea that someone would "play" it as a "game" is utterly alien to it.

Rimworld's philosophy is the polar opposite of this.  Rimworld is keenly aware of the presence of the player, and wants them to have a very particular experience.  Rimworld wants you to struggle and fail and come out of that with an interesting story.  To that end, it has an AI storyteller that monitors your play experience and, when it thinks nothing interesting has happened in a while, triggers pre-written scripted events to challenge you; and it has intricately designed and balanced systems to push you toward chaos and failure, and force you to make interesting decisions.  Sylvester has been pretty open about his goals, and said numerous times that he'll never simulate anything or add a system unless it produces interesting challenges for the player to overcome.

The end result of these different philosophies is two very different games.  Rimworld is about managing chaos, and responding to randomised scripted events that try to destroy you, and it constantly produces interesting conflict, challenge, and stories.  Dwarf Fortress, on the other hand, is a piece of software in which you design an incredibly complex fortress and watch it simulate realistically, with no hand of the designer making itself felt, and no real gameplay of any kind, just a benign sandbox.

This fascinates me because Rimworld is clearly a response not to Dwarf Fortress itself, but to what fans made using Dwarf Fortress.  Sylvester looked at Dwarf Fortress and thought, "the LPs that come out of this are great, and people love them, but they're anomalies.  Most players will never experience them, because the game isn't designed to produce them.  What if I made a game that gives every player a story like Boatmurdered?"  The result is a game that's immediately identifiable as "what's great about Dwarf Fortress" to people who've never played it, but utterly unlike Dwarf Fortress in every meaningful way; a game that embodies everything people like about Dwarf Fortress LPs, but nothing that people like about Dwarf Fortress.

Regards,
Kane

PS., just in case it comes up, I want to say: yes, Dwarf Fortress is designed to produce interesting stories in the procedural worldgen, and in Adventure Mode, but there's nothing in Fortress Mode that pushes you toward any particular story.  That's why, for example, Tim Denee had to play intentionally stupidly for his PC Gamer comics.  In order to make a story happen, you have to make a story happen, by intentionally forcing your fort to fail.  This is the true meaning of the slogan, "losing is fun."  If you want to have "fun," you have to force yourself to lose.

Also, as an additional analogy, consider Eve Online.  Eve produces really interesting stories, like the Guiding Hand Social Club one, but those stories are out of reach of almost everybody who might want to play it.  Imagine if somebody made a game that's like Eve, but Nullsec didn't have a player-run economy or player-controlled corporations, it had factions full of AI characters and developer-scripted storylines that are based on the great stories that came out of Eve, so that those stories are accessible to everyone.  They'd both have spaceships in them, but Eve isn't really about spaceships, it's about what happens in player-controlled nullsec space, and removing that fundamentally changes the game.  That's what Rimworld is in comparison to Dwarf Fortress.

PPS., after I wrote this, Veer summarised everything I just wrote as "Dwarf Fortress is a world simulator, Rimworld is a Boatmurdered simulator," so if you want to save some time on-air, you can just read this post-postscript.