It especially hurts when enshittification comes close to home.

There are some spaces I consider safe. Even when not playing these “niche” games, it feels good knowing they exist and continue on their path. I already felt really bad for all that happened to Dwarf Fortress. More recently I felt bad for Songs of Syx, which in some ways did things better than Dwarf Fortress itself. I helped a bit popularizing it, because it was a really good game… again only to see it destroy most of its (already problematic, but functional) art style and UI.

But this is especially hurtful because I contributed a little bit, and was there from the beginning. It really felt nice knowing it was a thing that kept going, for ten years. Creating a legacy just like the ever going Angband or Nethack. Switching hands but always moving on and improving, while staying close to the original vision and ambition.

We’re really moving into an age where things simply end.

Angband and Nethack have their own fairly limited graphic support, but they always existed as an optional feature. Even more modern projects like DCSS keep offering the game in tile or console mode. Because the medium is fundamental, and branching away from these roots is not a way to “improve” a game. It goes beyond a game design decision, it’s a derail of the mission that has been part of the game all along.

So I was really sad to see that after a routine update of my local install of Cataclysm I found that in-game menus now have been replaced by ImGui panels, that badly clash with the rest of grid-based UI (not only because of style but because the rendering of truetype fonts isn’t suitable to an environment built around bitmap fonts). Right now it’s usable, but devs somehow decided this is an ongoing effort to replace the whole UI. That’s how it is, and it’s not an option anymore.

“Why would we maintain two entirely separate instances of the game UI?”

Well, we used to care.

Old VS New