A year ago, The Ancient Gaming Noob posted what I considered to be one of the most spot-on satires of LOTRO, namely pegging fun at their goofy-as-all-get-out icon art. Don’t get me wrong, I love LOTRO and DDO and all that, but Turbine’s icon art needs to be reexamined across the board.
LOTRO is kind of notorious for bad icons because they try to cram so much on them that it’s hard to make out what it is without squinting, and even then, your guess is as good as mine half the time. So in honor of the great work that AGN started, I thought I’d offer up commentary on my current set of icons for my captain:
Legend According To Numbers:
- 1 – Yodel (1-25 audio damage)
- 2 – ePeen fight
- 3 – Link’s Master Sword
- 4 – Armpit Stench (1000 crit)
- 5 – Reenact the scene between King Arthur and the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail
- 6 – Lucky Charms’ green clovers
- 7 – My sword can do better math than your sword
- 8 – Huzzah! The green plus sign will save us all!
- 0 – Indian burn
- – – Click this to die instantly
- = – Um… uh… well… really, I have no idea. Pizza slice?
- C+9 – Giant man will eat tiny little people for fun
- C+0 – Click to play “The Ballad of Frodo Baggins”
- C+- – The game will tell you your fortune
- C+= – Three-way thumb wrestling
- A+1 – Let’s make snake shadow puppets!
- S – Dental hygiene is important, even for hobbits
- A+3 – Sean Connery in an old-fashioned football helmet
- A+4 – Look up there, stupid! That’s where the game is!
- V – General Zod is trapped in the Phantom Zone
- A+6 – I have 1/6th of a sword! Hooray!
- A+7 – Put on deodorant
- A+9 – Reenact the horse head scene in the Godfather
- A+- – I am so far from my car right now
- A+= – The artist just let his 7-year-old son scribble something and it passed QA
Bio Break 
Say what you will about Fury, but it had darn good skill icons.
http://fury.wikia.com/wiki/Warden
(a random selection)
The background represents something like area of effect, the large icon tells you the ability type, and there is often a secondary icon that represents any additional effects. That’s a decent amount of information in quite clean, recognizable icons.
Joseph Hewitt, 14 year veteran of Rockstar, and the best damned icon designer in the business.
Hmm you are right. Can’t help, the Champion icons are more well done. This confirms my suspicion that all other classes were only created to support Champions in their holy mission.
OMG this made my morning. But where is Devastating Blow, noob? 😛
The best part is that three-way thumb wrestling gives everybody increased morale for half an hour.
V is quite clearly “Enrage Dennis Hopper” in my mind, which would make C+9 “Giant Dennis Hopper eating tiny people.”
C+- might be “Felicia Day dyes her hair blond and drops WoW for LOTRO.”
= Could be “And there was much rejoicing.” Always fall back to Python in a pinch.
C+5… Imitate Bill Murry with a giant fake beard at the St. Patrick’s Day parade?
The LOTRO icons are quite dreadful. They also don’t seem to feel like they have anything to do with the lore or game at all.
I appreciate the humor here haha.
This has been a constant complaint of mine. Sometimes Turbine says they’re working on some UI update, but I’ve yet to really see that affecting the icons.
They’re too small and there’s just too much going on in them. There’s a handful that I seriously had to stare at for minutes just to tell what the hell they’re trying to depict. A good one is a champ skill that apparently depicts a sword stabbing an orc in the face… or so I think?
I cannot tell you how often I’ve played this game, gotten some item added to my bags and then been totally unable to find it because of all of this. I do not have this issue in any other MMORPG.
There’s also the problem that increasing the UI size in LOTRO makes everything super fuzzy. In other MMORPGs they seem to get resampled properly (it’s not a remote concern in WOW within reason). They become completely unusable.
And finally, there doesn’t seem to be any unified approach to the things. Sometimes they look like comic book art, sometimes they’re very realistic, sometimes they just look plain weird. Not even the color backgrounds are consistent across the classes.
I wish they’d just decide on something once and for all… The cleaner, almost comic book style art for a lot of Rune-keeper skills seems best to me.