Yeah. I like the idea of this game.
But I'd love the idea if I could romp around in it with a friend or 15.
But multiplayer is hard baked in from the start. This game will never happen.
So someone else will copy what they've done and add multiplayer and get that bag.
Dwarf Fortress is basically uncopyable. Lots of games have tried: RimWorld is a good example. But they end up feeling like shallow imitations, because Dwarf Fortress has been continuously upgraded for 16 years. It's the game that every first year game dev dreams of making, with incredibly deep simulation and a myriad of mechanics to play with, before they realize that it would take decades to build.
The Toady One is just the madman who actually did it.
While Dwarf Fortress is incredibly deep simulation, it is also filled with bugs and UI misdesigns, that makes playing it much more frustrating than playing e.g. Rimworld. Also, the simulation is very uneven, some parts are very deep, some very shallow and some completely broken.
I never successfully got into Dwarf Fortress before because the ASCII interface was just too hard to learn. I have had some fun with the new release.
I do agree though, whilst it’s made the game, for me, playable, there are lots of smaller annoyances that really add up once you’re a few hours into a fort. The UI is inconsistent in many areas. Sometimes you can view dwarf details, sometimes you can’t. Sometimes right click closes one level, sometimes it’s all of them, then for the squad menu you dismiss by the squad button/hot key again… Search is useful but not available everywhere.
I hope some of these annoyances will get resolved, but certainly it’s not a perfectly polished game either. It is still fun - yes - but I can’t help but be a little sad because it could absolutely be better.
So someone else will copy what they've done and add multiplayer and get that bag.