The issue is people just deciding things based on gut feeling. DF might be ASCII, but that doesn’t mean it has to look like to does out of the box. There are tons of packs that change the characters (as in letters and symbols) into tiles. The old ASCII graphics with a replacer pack don’t look that different from the modern tiles. The biggest difference is the tiles can display more information. Dwarves can show their clothing, skin color, beards, etc now, where before it would just be a default dwarf picture.
A lot of people who think graphics are that important never actually gave games a try that didn’t look like what they expect/want. They may have loved them if they got over the looks. That is the biggest hurdle, that some people think looking nice effects how good the game is to play, which just isn’t the case.
I mean the big part of why I want the steam version is the mouse control (also waiting for adventurer mode, which is something I did actually play with original ascii DF with tilesets later down the road), yes yes I know its slower but when you are learning a new game sometimes its just easier to take it slow like that. Yes typically ascii games do have tilesets with them at least the ones I know of CDDA, DF, and ADOM, its just people want things to be “good” out of the box. They don’t want to faff about for 2 or 3 hours to get the “optimal” experience.
Have you seen Aurora 4x? It is probably one of the deepest 4x space games on the market to this day. The problem is it looks like a spreadsheet and I’m sorry but when people are focused on gameplay only style games, one of the things that get dropped off by the wayside is the user experience and the UX. It is fucking efficient as fuck once you have it down but when you are trying to learn the system, its a bit of a cliff to overcome and if you don’t have a ton of time to game that can be quite the burden on someone. Seriously for newcomers it can seem a bit counterintuitive that capslock/shift dramatically change what actions you can take (talking from personal experience was very thrown off by capslock actually have an effect on what you are doing since shift + key is pretty normal for rts/stuff).
For DF, the classic version does have some mouse controls with DF hack. Just download the Lazy Noob Starter Pack (I think that’s the name) and you’ll be started in less than 10m with a character pack and plug-ins.
Yes, I’ve played Aurora4x. It’s a wild game. I think the worst thing isn’t just that it looks like a spreadsheet, it’s that it is just spreadsheets with a game using it as inputs. It also doesn’t tell you anything about how things function or what to do to get anything done. It’s similar to DF in some of those ways, except DF you can still play some without fully understanding it. A4X really requires a pretty good grasp of most components of the game before you can even start.
