thee lous3
Tech III Bone Cancer The WeHurt Initiative
26
|
Posted - 2015.05.31 04:02:14 -
[1] - Quote
New icons for overview and brackets is going to be probably the biggest visual change in eve for a very long time. New shader models and UI-slickening are meaningless next to the icon change.
Personally, I use icons to distinguish a few basic things.
- How many things are on grid (in space.)
- Where the things are in relation to me (in space.)
- If there are drones out and where they are congregated (in space.)
- Where warpable objects like wrecks and mobile depots are (in space.)
- On the rare occasion I'm pveing, what size the rat I'm shooting is (on overview.)
- If a wreck is empty or unchecked. (in space or on overview.)
For me, icons are more about objects in space than items on my overview. In a fleet fight or 1vx fight, picking targets based on ship class is pointless as player hulls are so vastly different even when they are from the same class size. I don't pick a target because it's a frigate, I pick a vigil over a retribution based on the ships profile. My point being, on the overview, I don't care what a ships icon looks like as long as I can tell it is a player piloted ship. After I identify that I can then make decisions based on ship hull, speed, distance etc.
With brrackets (in space icons are called brackets) however, that is different. In space I need to know based on the ships icon what size it is, so I can position myself, for example, such that I am far away from the cruiser I know is a curse, but close to the destroyer I know is a thrasher. Bracket icons matter a great deal, unlike their overview cousins.
The new icons **** with that. I've spent a good deal of time on sisi over the past two or three weeks, and it is still a gigantic cacophony of visual nonsense. I've been playing for about two and a half years, so I know I have some bais on the issue. Less so than ten year vets, and more than two month newbies, but I think my bias is well founded.
Every time I see a destroyer my instinct is to warp to it, or loot it. When I first encountered a jackdaw I righclicked it to loot because it looks exactly like a wreck.
Everything is some sort of stunted triangle. Let's play a game called "find the paldin." In this picture, the paladin is the ONLY ship on field. Play here!
Answer is here!
(Side note. Only after having uploaded and linked the picture here did I even notice there is also a bhaalgorn. Point proven I suppose.)
Drones look ridiculous. Combat drones look like ships, ewar drones look like a steaming sausage, industrial ships look like SMAs, sentry drones look like old drones, logi drones look like pulled teeth. I could go on. Here's another screenshot. In this picture there are five hostile combat drones, a hostile mega, a hostile crow and a friendly tengu.
The crow and drone icons may as well be interchangeable. They also look exactly like the current empty wreck icon. That is really ******* bad design.
Basically, CCP tried too hard, and in trying to hard they not only made each icon too detailed, but they redesigned them such that almost every icon is an amalgamated version of several other icons. In trying to create simplicity, they forced complexity. That flys in the face of the purpose of the overview and brackets.
Aside from the fact that the current icons are fine and nobody was complaining about them, if CCP really just had to redesign them they could have taken a multitude of different routes.
The four main things they should have considered when redesigning the icons are:
They should not interfere with the icons of old, which are forever engrained in the minds of every single current and past eve player.
They should clearly and effectively display the class of the object or ship, and a player can identify the specifics by checking the object or ships name / hull name.
They should be easily discernible at any ui scaling, to accommodate all users. (Very large screens, very small screens, vision impaired users and users with 90% scaling.)
They should be visually appealing and help the player feel like they are in space pewing the **** out of things that matter.
At the moment they fulfill none of these criteria. Many of them look like current icons, but have completely different meaning. Many of them look a lot alike. At 90% scaling all of them look alike. Most of them look like stringy transparent cheese, and lack the solid futuristic / semi-abstract appeal that would be ideal.
I'm not some sedimentary eve player who is unwilling to deal with change. I enjoy and embrace having new features and facets of eve to explore and enjoy, but I think very strongly that CCP should reconsider deploying the new icons until they have a clearer idea of what they should be accomplishing and how to do it.
(I think changing only the ship icons, and leaving everything else as is, would probably be the best option and would leave the most visual diversity. Lots of the new icons are actually good, but just interact with each other poorly as they all share features of the new ship icons. I think the guidelines I laid out above are absolutely achievable. To use a slightly out of the box example, the icons for frigates could literally be a large F, dessies D, cruisers C etc. You pretty much could not get any clearer than that. That meets guidelines 1-3. Guideline 4 can be met by using a space-looking font. Naming the ships with large capital letters gives much more freedom to be simplistic with the rest of the icons as it frees up the "shape-space" currently held by the little arrow shapes with flat bottoms. The point is to [i][convey information/i]) |