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Comment by frollogaston | Hacker News Reader

Weirdly the ASCII art was what drew me in the most. Once accustomed to it, feels like The Matrix where they're reading the world.

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Love DF, havent played the steam version.

The menus and lack of native ui controls for some things (dfhack) were by far the biggest problem, not the ascii. I get that the ascii is noisy and a matter of taste - not disputing that - but there were much bigger UX problems.

Steam version is much worse than the fan UI options that were already available, sadly. Its also why I explain why DF really failed to take off after the Steam release. It's nowhere near the best, or even best looking, way to play the game.

I pretty strongly disagree. I can see some preferring some fan art style over the official one, even if I don't. But the official gui having support for rendering all the various critters, and factoring in clothing, multi-level, etc, really made the Steam version's graphics vastly better than anything else that was available at the time.

This just isn’t true. Plus, all the DFHack stuff that added UI to the game has been ported over and now integrates with the new UI perfectly well.

I'm just not gonna deal with Steam so yeah

Same, the ASCII interface is an eternal classic to me, the updated graphics try harder and achieve less (just my opinion).

I have the same feeling playing Caves of Qud.

Qud is a gem of a game, same publisher too! I get what you are saying, and it's use of ASCII plus ASCII-like graphics makes the experience a lot friendlier imo.

as someone who grew up playing ascii games I was pretty excited about the graphical update.

there is a novelty to ascii, but its a barrier to entry and major eye strain.

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