If and when tile based graphics are introduced I think simplicity would be best, otherwise it risks falling into the
Uncanny Valley. The Uncanny Valley is usually applied to robotics but it can also be applied to computer graphics. If you start off with ASCII graphics and work your way up in complexity you will notice an increase in a persons familiarity, or enjoyment until you reach a certain critical point beyond which the game looks dated and only a massive investment of time and money would make it look otherwise. I think this is shown well in the existing nethack tilesets:
ASCII:
Tiles:
Pseduo-3D Graphics:
As you can see the graphical tiles neatly express the available information without overly registering as dated while the Pseduo-3D image is ironically just polished enough to look dated. It also can be seen in the design choice by Blizzard in making World of Warcraft, instead of aiming for hyper-realistic graphics they settled on a well-defined art style that was easier to render and has greatly prolonged the games longevity.
The other benefit of a simple tile based system is that it is far easier to develop and expand. Also development doesn't need to be done by Bay12, as the alternative tilesets on the wiki shows the community is more than happy to create that content. I would recommend that the graphics system be expanded so that it sources the tiles from a larger curses_800x600.bmp which also contains the color data. Once this is finished the actual development of the tiles can be left up to the community.
(Apologies if any/all of this has been suggested before)
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Topic: Tile graphics and the uncanny valley. (Read 1019 times)