Thanks for the responses guys.
Gnomoria is in no way as good and complex a game as DF, but what draws a lot of people to give it a try rather than DF, in my humble opinion, is the graphics.
When I suggest to friends that they should give DF a go, and explain about the graphics or lack thereof, they immediately abandon the idea.
DF is such a fantastic, rich and great game, and the only downside in my opinion is the graphics.
Gnomoria is nice and fun but it's no dwarf fortress despite graphics :-)
I strongly disagree. Part of my love for DF is the graphics and I hope it never changes. Maybe for people who never played other rogue-likes it means nothing, but they all have their own random craziness, and it is even more weird and surreal because of the ASCII graphics.
There are a ton of tilesets you can get that some people like. To me they look confusing and ugly. I have seen some I liked but when I tried them out they were just too busy. The best part is those tilesets are opt in and I can keep my nice ASCII graphics.
I recently stopped playing Elder Scrolls Online. I was dealing with high end, incredible graphics. But the dev decisions were one poor choice after the other and a potentially good game just ended up being generic and disappointing. I will take low end graphics and meaningful, robust play any day of the week. Also, while the playerbase was more tolerable than MMOs like EQ, it still had its nasty element. This community is, from my experience, fairly awesome.
The kind of people that play for graphics would honestly not be happy with a low end 3d DF anyway. It wouldn't pull in that much more of an audience. Most people either want top end graphics (and deal with the sacrifice in gameplay and content) or just don't care about graphics or like low end ones. I realize ASCII is extra step down, but the tilesets nullify that step,