How Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld tell radically different stories
Dwarf Fortress is a game so influential that it’s created a genre of games in its wake: the colony sim. In games like these, you’re asked to take care of a handful of autonomous characters in a hostile setting, gradually building them up into a working society. Of these games, probably the most successful is Rimworld, so much so that a few uninformed Steam users called Dwarf Fortress a “Rimworld rip off” upon its release on the platform.
If you’ve played either game, the visual similarities are immediately obvious. In both games, the first thing you do is create a new, procedurally-generated world from scratch. From then on out, you’re giving orders to a bunch of little guys that you don’t control directly. The player lays out blueprints and orders the creation of certain objects. Then the settlers that you’ve collected will allocate themselves to tasks according to their skill levels and what you’ve allowed each character to work on. You’re not exactly looking at them from the perspective of god—it is literally a top down perspective—but you can’t control everything. You are still ultimately in charge of everything that happens in your fort.
As games, Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress have extremely different tones though. Part of that has to do with how they both tell stories.
In Rimworld, the game has what it calls AI Storytellers. These are essentially game modes that determine how frequently predetermined events will occur. “Cassandra Classic” will always send a wild animal after your fort in the early days, while “Phoebe Chillax” will always send you an extra character. “Randy Random” is not truly random, but is engineered toward giving the player unexpected challenges and breaking up the rhythm of gameplay, sending
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