Don't get me wrong. I don't know shit about how adding uniques affects the game code-wise... I just love them because of that special feeling they add to the game and that's why I think there should be more of them. Not necessarily "each race must have at least one" more, mind you.
[bitching]So Medusa is
"stealing from Nethack" and not
"Nethack stealing from ancient Greek mythology"? I don't get it. We have a bunch of uniques that are far from unique
species-wise (all the Orcish ones, Erolcha (ogre), Sonja (kobold), Nessos (centaur), etc), that have been used in many RPGs before. Do we have to get them removed so that the game can be pure original content?
I guess all I'm saying is, you don't have to present extraordinarily alien material to win a gamer's heart, it's the way in which you do it that matters. And the way has been awesome so far, I think. Because to me what makes DC:SS great is a bunch of stuff other than playable races/backgrounds. It's stuff like:
How easy it is to the newbie roguelike player to understand how to play DC:SS, with tutorials and the hints mode (think of Dwarf Fortress as the antipode - I still can't convince myself to sit down and learn how to play that game). I expect more to be done for the game to widen the player base, with more newbie-friendly interfaces (like being able to change settings from within the game itself).
Beautiful and innovative vaults and branches. I guess that's because I'm playing Tiles only.
P.S: The new snake pit tiles are awesome!
Flavourful unique monsters that fit well within the environment (like in Shoals you can get Kirke and her hog squad, or Polyphemus the Cyclops, two figures from Homer's Odyssey, they both resided islands, although different ones
). Same goes for unrandarts.
The monster descriptions, although sometimes being there for pure retarded fun, are most of the times great reads. I know of Grimm's plight with the DC:SS T.I.T (incoming sexual comments because the I looks like a penis with the two dots on the sides or just because it says tit) and I think it's a great move.
I guess for me it's mostly the small stuff that makes games great.
[/bitching]