Also, disliking the extra icons? I thought that fewer icons dumbing the game down and making it too easy was the general consensus? Why don't they just go with KQ7's single icon interface then?
Oh come on, now. There is such a thing as over-complicating things--adding to a system that wasn't broken.
GK has literally
more than double the amount of icons that the traditional Sierra multi-icon interface uses. And every additional icon that was added covered a function that could have been performed by one of the basic icons (Walk, Look, Hand, Talk.) Instead of Talk, there are Question and Exclaim icons--there is no reason that both actions couldn't be covered by the basic Talk icon. Instead of Hand, there are Open/Close, Operate, Pick Up, and Move. All of those actions in other Sierra games are covered by the Hand icon, depending on the context. Those additional icons are completely unnecessary, and cycling through all those extra icons is a chore that bogs down the gameplay.
The difference between that and the complaints about the oversimplicity of the KQ7 interface is that the extra icons in GK don't
really add anything to the game. In KQ7, so much of the sense of interactivity is lost without being able to interact in multiple ways with everything. It's a big difference.