Factions Skill Art = Yuck

Don't know if this has been discussed before...I tried searching but found nothing.

I just got Factions a few days ago. The in-game art, scenery, and graphics looks great as Guild Wars always does, but I personally don't like a lot of the icon graphics for the new skills. It's nothing big, but just a gripe.

I'll just link this page for example..., you can see the Factions skills are blurry, abstract looking messes. To me, the Assassin skills pretty much look like purple blobs with red lines and look too similar to each other.

How does this look like a fox fang? It looks more like an insect leg. Whereas Backfire and Fragility have great detail and you can recognize them pretty easily.

Anyone else notice this or feel the same way? Am I just crazy?

dude - for fox fangs, i think it's supposed to be a hand holding a really curvy knife. I could be wrong though.

Oh and yeah - quality is much worse than prophecies quality.

ye you're kinda right, they looks a lot more blurry than the old ones, but you know, anet has 2 teams, one that made prophecy and one that made factions so the last team probably went for another graphic style

who cares?

Apparently he does... which does give him the right to post it up here. Not sure if this might go in the Sardelac Sanitarium though.

The icons seem a bit rushed... like they were constructed in MS Paint. Maybe they can get the guy who added the blades to Shiro to take care of this project. And let the rest of the dev team keep plugging away at the "oooops its broken, tweaky, or hey the community really wants this" stuff.

It is not so much a suggestion as it is a rant.

While there is nothing serious about the icon graphics, I must say now I find it harder to recognize the skill identity based solely on the appearance of the new icons alone.

Good call, I normally look at most rants as suggestions though.

Uh... i HOPE TO GOD that you're not making this assumption on the icons on guildwiki because those are just shitty images... I find most the factions icons look great.

I agree, the new icons are too similar and bland compared to many from Proph.

Yep, I agree as well

Take a look at Famine and Equinox, hardly any difference.
The style they used also seems to be a bit blurred, not as clean cut as the prophecies skill icons.

It's nothing too major though, I can live with it.

The Factions skills look worse on GuildWiki because they are shots from ingame, whereas the Prophecies skills are official art released on the main site--not screenshots.

to emphasize what the OP means


just yuck, definenly done in ms paint


perhaps one of the devs looks like this


another dev


yet another dev with a goate, or is it the same dev


sigh


whats a lady got to do with energy


way of the empty face



buahahahahahh wtf

After further consideration and taking a closer look at how many devs are on icons I changed my opinion. The icons are ugly And all of the ritualist urn spell icons are various screenshots of in game characters blurred over with teal :S

No, I'm not making the assumption on Guild Wiki's images however badly compressed JPEGs they are. It's an observance I got when I made an Assassin in Factions and saw the skill icons in the game and also when I was picking some new skills for my Ranger from Prophecies. I found those at GWiki the easiest to link at the time, so I linked them as an example.

I think some of the new ones do look good with that "style" (Ritual ones that I've seen come to mind) but others are just too muddy/blurry for my liking.

And no, it's not a big deal (like I said in the OP)...I know which skills I'm using since I picked which slot they went into. And I'm sure ANet has better things to work on and improve than skill icons. It's just that I found some skills just look too similar to each other or OMG Incom prehensible.

That's all.

I think they look ok , agree thats some of the skills can look similar when I look at them quickly setting skills. Main reason you would here me cry about having the wrong stance in group is because of that. But, I'm still learning the attributes of each skill.
Another thing, I try to keep the skills relitively in the same place on my bar depending on there function, so really I just press 2 1 3 6 4 etc.

I'd do a comparison but I don't think you would laugh as hard as I did with Snikerz post =D

I like them, especially the new Necromancer and Mesmer skills where it looks like the manipulated real photographs of people

Some of the ritualist ones (Like recuperation) look amazingly dangerous, when they're really beneficial. It would have been nice if they'd made effects you want on you look noticably different from some of the hexes that exist. (Honestly, I think I'm about to die when I see recuperation pop up on my effects bar)

I personally like Soothing more tha Recup...Rit art is very interesting.

Uh... they are all screen caps. There is next to no difference between what you see in game and what the skill icons on the GuildWiki are. Care to explain what you mean?