Monday 11 May 2009

Intuitive Icons

ICON: Computers. a picture or symbol that appears on a monitor and is used to represent a command, as a file drawer to represent filing.

If that's the case, then what on earth do all my Black Orc icons actually mean? I haven't bothered to look at other classes but I'm guessing a lot of them are the same. The icons we have are small, fairly detailed pictures.. Maybe.. I'm not sure.. They're shrunk so much and are so 'busy' that it's pretty hard to tell what they actually stand for if you don't know the class.

I'm going to have a little game here. I'll give six Black Orc icons and seven ability names. Match them up and see if you can tell what they are.



Clobber (high threat attack), Hold The Line (shield wall), Savin' me hide (toughness buff and magic supression), Shatter Enchantment (buff remover), Shut yer face (silence), Skull Thumper (damage on any crits), Tuffer n' nails (armour buff)

I'll tell you what, put your guesses (they must be guesses, if you know, don't be sneaky and answer) in the comments section. Would be interesting to actually see from an outsiders view.

--------- Highlight below to reveal answers --------
(from left to right)
Hold the Line -- Savin' me hide -- Shut yer face -- Tuffer n' nails -- Skull Thumper -- Clobber & Shatter Enchantment (yup, we have two abilities sharing the exact same icon :( )
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So as you can see, they're not exactly straight forward or all too logical. Those were picked at random and there are some icons that do look like they represent the ability (Kick to da jibblies comes straight to mind... via the nuts). For Black Orcs there's quite a few "Orc Face" icons and just as many "Orc Standing" ones, that really don't mean much. I thought an icon was meant to be a simple picture that you could tell just by looking at it what it should mean?

But this isn't just Warhammer that is bad for this, taking a quick look over the World Of Warcraft Icons shows that they have some messy ones as well, however they do look a lot simpler (there's a snake there... a hawks eye.. a water elemental) so you given a list of abilities you might find it easier to match up if you had never played WoW before.

All in all, it's an incredibly minor thing to bother about, but it does look a bit messy when you actually look at all those pictures of Orc faces on your screen and actually try to associate them with anything...