Recent reviews by C

I've played DF for years via the freely available version. It's the most user-hostile game (in terms of UI) that I've ever played by far, but its depth, storytelling, level of customization via mods, etc are what keep me coming back.

This version of the game is a HUGE leap forward in terms of cleaning up the user interface, fixing long-standing bugs that made the free version objectively worse (looking at you, stockpiles with barrels in them), and in general reworking concepts to be more consistent. An example of where this is an improvement IMHO is in making more stuff a "zone" -- for example, in the free version, to make a bedroom, you have to click on a built bed, and then bedroom options are available from there. In the Steam version, you just designate a bedroom zone and as long as there's a bed in it, it'll work.

However, the UI has now swung too far in the direction of being mouse driven, in a bad way. EVERYTHING is driven from the mouse, and keyboard shortcuts are a secondary option in just the main UI menus and nothing more. This would be OK except that concepts that have been a part of the mouse-driven UI for literally decades, like clicking and dragging to select multiple items in a list, or ctrl/shift-clicking to do the same, are completely missing. In addition, any dialogs that have a search field do not focus the text field by default. So, if I want to add a new job from the work orders dialog, I click the work orders button or press 'o', and then HAVE TO CLICK AGAIN on the search field to start searching. This is asinine.

Another example: when adding dwarves to a burrow, I literally have to click on each dwarf individually to check a box. There isn't even a "select all" button. With 25 dwarves, this an an annoyance. With 200, I end up saying to myself "oh well, I guess I'll let the beast that's about to murder everyone just have its way with my fort and I can start over."

I don't regret buying this game as I feel the developers deserve my money after working so tirelessly on this game, but they are clearly not UI experts, and I would urge them to get more programming/design help on the UI, to allow them to focus on the main systems of the game. Anyone buying this game should be aware that their hand will get tired quickly :)