Unpacking my feelings on Rimworld v Dwarf Fortress
Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress are not games you’re meant to win. The famous motto of Dwarf Fortress is that “Losing is Fun” and Rimworld’s hardest difficulty bears the same name. Despite this, the game’s ideologies around “winning” and “losing” are very different. Because of this, I propose that the main difference between the two games is not that Rimworld builds the story around the player whereas Dwarf Fortress builds its story and the player has to deal with it, but rather in the games pace. Dwarf Fortress is a game that has no win condition. Rimworld is a game where you can win, and the game wants you to lose.
To best illustrate this, consider how the games handle combats: In Dwarf Fortress, combat is an entry-level job (as everything is) and even with a poorly trained and poorly equipped military your fort can live on, even if a few dwarves die in the process. Furthermore, it’s relatively easy to avoid violence altogether by blocking off your fort with a drawbridge or blocking off parts of terrain where dangerous foes might emerge. By contrast, Rimworld’s combat often feels like an obstacle to its storytelling rather than a factor in it. A large part of this, I find, is the all-or-nothing nature of encounters. It’s very rare that your pawns do not leave a battle in a state where they’ll either be fine in a few days or where everyone dies and the settlement’s story is effectively over.
Moreover, Dwarf Fortress succeeds over Rimworld in perhaps the most compelling part of both games: settling into monotony. Winning in Rimworld requires a great deal of research, which consists of a pawn standing at a research desk until a task is done. Crafting items is much the same, where the pawn stands at a workshop, a bar fills up, and then you have the requested item. By contrast, you can make anything you would want to make in Dwarf Fortress at any point provided you have the resources, and it takes very little time for a dwarf to craft anything. This is a large part of what gives the game it’s steep learning curve, but it also means that for an experienced player there is very little downtime before you get to whatever you want to. When it comes to monotony, one might expect that a slow process of gradual improvement to be more satisfying, but instead the quick pace of Dwarf Fortress’ progression means the player can spend more time on things like beautifying their fortress, optimizing industry, or thinking on what they want to do with their time.
I enjoy Rimworld. It’s a very accessible game where interesting stories can be told. Dwarf Fortress feels eternal. Rimworld is a game about a certain set of people, and when they are faced with odds they cannot overcome, their story is over. In Dwarf Fortress, I had a fort get attacked by a massive dragon who obliterated my military, burned down what parts of my fort were above ground, only to be barely defeated by a drunken patron of my fort’s tavern. It was a difficult call to leave the fort behind. That should say it all.
