Thursday, 24th March 2011, 10:36 by zasvid
I too think that there is a lot of beauty in nice ASCII and Crawl has it very nice.
However, I'm not sure why would square LoS be ugly. You spend most of the game in square rooms and their squareness isn't a blight upon the eyes. There was also a mention of leaving a black wall of "fog of war" with square LoS, which is relevant in open spaces, but if you travel in an orthogonal direction, you get the same effect. Of course, maybe it looks weird in practice, but in theory I don't see why.
I fear Euclidean movement, after years of playing roguelikes the traditional way I might not be able to adjust to it (for example, I can't adjust to Brogue's "no cutting corners" rule, but at least there I don't get punished for trying it). However, it might lead to more intuitive gameplay for new players.
All in all, I think that debate might only be brought closer to resolution with an experiment that pitches euclidean vs chebyshev in a real roguelike (that is, people with strong opinions might only be convinced when they see that there's nothing wrong with the opposing proposition - or that there's something wrong with their).