Old player's general impressions after playing tiles seriously for the first time.

[Blasphemous]

Hey guys.
I have finally decided to buy the steam version of ADOM, with no real plan to play the tiles since I just wanted to have the most up-to-date ADOM available.
In the past, I refused to play tiles because in my mind, it would defeat the purpose and spirit of a roguelike game - that being the chance to imagine in my head the blue D as a fearsome lightning-wielding dragon or a purple Z as that undead dwarven hero resurrected by an evil necromancer.
It was like reading a book, only the narrative was in my hands.
However, since the game downloaded and installed, I decided, what the hell, let's try it.

Boy, was that a good decision.

Let me start off by saying there are still things I would change about the way tiles currently work but none of these are easily implementable, or in fact, that relevant.
That said, I am hugely impressed by the effect.
In the past, I would play the game with some other music playing in the background, on youtube, mp3s from foobar or whatever.
While it was stuff that I liked, it was far from immersive.
With the new ADOM, not only do I get to experience that new graphic interface which for me is reminiscent of the games I played in the early nineties on Amiga 500 and mid-nineties on PC, but I also get to hear all the sounds and dungeon-crawl friendly tunes in the background. It's like playing a new game, only somehow familiar in a broad sense.
The GUI confers so much more content and it's for the most part quite intuitive.
I was about to post a question here when I noticed occasional purple "corrupted!" above my head but after I noticed how it changed in frequency when in different locations, I realized it was background corruption.
That was good. I am playing in easy mode - a candle-born elven assassin - so that I can fully take in what the new interface offers.
Herbs' ripeness status can be determined from miles away, the nature of known traps is quite obvious, shops suddenly look exciting, world map has a new depth... I could go on.

At this point, my char is level 17 and I'm about to visit the ToEF soon and probably dive to casino so there's lots of things I haven't explored yet (and probably have not had a chance to be impressed by) but already I can tell - I'm going to be playing the game more often in the immediate future, at least for a while.

So to summarize: while highly skeptical at first, I have been convinced that the tiles spell out brighter future for this great game than any other features could have.
Congrats and thanks to the dev team and to Thomas for polishing this gem and making it exciting for me (and I guess many others) once again.

PS. The biggest fun right now? Trying to figure out what monster am I facing just from its picture. So far, I've been ~95% correct, so well done to the artist(s) behind those.