Graphics like these have been around for many years, and I'd presume it's still possible to play in ASCII using the Steam version ... having a tileset as default setting is only so the screenshots on the steam page doesn't make uninitiated people close said page immediately. I have played with and without tileset, both work just fine - graphics aren't what this game is about. It COULD be visually spectacular, mind you, these moundainsides, rivers and caverns rendered in state-of-the-art 3D ... but that's not the focus of DF, which is a good thing.
Perkel is spot on in his description of the UI, that's the main thing holding the game back, imo, and the main thing keeping a much larger audience from playing it.
The controls aren't terrible and you CAN learn to operate the game reasonably well, especially if you use the quality of life 3rd party tools, but it's still a mess.
I once pointed at the original Rollercoaster Tycoon UI in another DF discussion - that game's UI would be a perfect fit. It has all the difficult stuff, like height levels and underground, covered.
The saddest part is, Toady probably wouldn't even have to do the UI himself, he could just expose everything with an API and some soul would go through the trouble and do all the work.
Though now that it's a commercial project, I wonder what this will do to the spirit of the community that produces all those tools and addons for the game. Otoh, I think it's written somewhere the game itself will remain free - still, money is on the table now...
The other problem the game has is that it's not friggin going anywhere. I guess you could say this IS DF, less of a game and more of an ongoing live performance style programming effort. In my very first job, almost 20 years ago, I occasionally played around with DF at work, there were brakes where there was just nothing to do and the ASCII window didn't immediately alarm anyone looking at the screen from a distance. Heh.
Anyway, the DF I played back then, two decades ago, was actually more fun to play than current DF is. It didn't have height levels yet, you just dug further and further into a mountain, and that was also your progression through the game. DF was more of a game back then than it is now - though it's quality as a simulation has been massively improved upon since.
Height levels were a huge step (you can see that most similar games, like Rimworld or Prison Architect, shy away from those), but as a game, DF has never recovered. You now have civilizations which have histories, with all that worldgen simulation stuff going on, you have fascinating subsystems, like how detailed combat is modeled, how everything has all those individual bodyparts, fantastic beasts with crazy cominations of stuff, religious stuff, poetry, ... the list goes on and on. Yet doing trivial, mundane stuff, building up your defenses, making a military, building production chains ... and having a gameplay loop of sorts which isn't completely random, these parts are in a miserable condition.
And they are never improved on, because when Toady sets out to improve the way suqads are handed, he makes an intricate squad subsystem, with schedules and seperate workout clothing and ... sweat. Yes, how about a sweat subsystem. And also the smell of sweat. This should cause unhappyness, right? But you should be able to get rid of the smell by proper ventilation. Ventilation, yes, this isn't modeled in depth yet, let's add a system for that...
