That’s the spirit. Despite an always-audible low buzz of Dungeon Keeper nostalgia and a post-Dwarf Fortress vacuum open to anybody willing to build a UI, the most monolithic game publishing houses are hardly lunching on the bit to reboot the ‘90s management genre.
Lower down the money rung, though, we have indie planet colonisation sim Maia, and from Paradox both the Dungeon Keeper-ish Impire and HBO-bait A Game of Dwarves. The latter is now available for pre-order. The ale tree? You’ll see that in the video beyond the jump.
So: A pre-ordered copy of A Game of Thrones comes with the Ale Pack DLC, which “introduces dwarvenkind’s favourite drink to the game and is a must for maintaining happiness in any well-to-do underground fortress”, though I can’t imagine the game proper is teetotal without it.
The asking price is a really very reasonable $9.99, which you can pay via Steam, GamersGate, GameStop, or a variety of other online fences. Will this be the game to cut out a chunk of Dwarf Fortress manageable enough for the masses?