Mass Effect Box Art

CptStern

CptStern

suckmonkey
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MassEffectBox.jpg


kinda like a cheesy 80's sci-fi B movie poster:

last_starfighter.jpg



oh btw it was also recently announced that Mass Effect will have episodic content ..it's a shoe in for a pc port as xbox marketplace will be avialable on Vista
 
Still deciding what to get the game for. PC or 360. Box art could be better.
 
the pc version will probably be released much later than the 360 version
 
Honestly, for a game like this they could make such a cool bit of boxart. Looks like it was done in Photoshop in about 5 minutes by some lazy, fat "graphic artist."

I think the best thing would actually be something hand-drawn or painted. And it should be a bit more minimal.

But hey, what do I know? I'm just a consumer. Though shitty boxart does make me less inclined to buy a game, since it would look like shit on my shelf.
 
meh I couldnt care less if it's was two stick figures holding banana shaped ray guns drawn by a 2 year old ..I just thought it worth noting that it looks like 80's cheese sci-fi art
 
Least theres some colour in the box art, and in the game too in some places. Beats all the brown thats around at the moment :p
 
I was hoping it would have a more grand-scale universe on the front, given the scope of the game. Oh well--should have no impact on the game itself anyway.

Interseting point though Stern: cheesy art for a game that is anything but (hopefully). Betcha its to get the attention of their largest demographic: the Halo fanobys. Halo fanboys will eat this stuff up and be more than a little surprised (read: disappointed) when they boot up!
 
I dont know ...halo fanboys tend to have short attention spans ..they'll give up as soon as they see the first dialogue tree

"where's the freaking warthog? stoopid Massive Affects game is teh crappy!!!111 ...who wants to play Halo?"
 
'Oh im not going to buy HL2 Episode 2 because its just a black box'
 
is there any confirmation that this will eventually be ported to pc, or is it all based on bioware's history of porting everything? i'm REALLY close to buying a 360 (finally), mostly to play this ASAP.
 
Wait, is that the "next-crap" game? You know, the one aimed at kiddies that can't focus during a branching dialogue? Where advanced, branching dialogues were replaced with choices of whether to not go through an alternate route to the main target and shoot shit and marketed as next-generation gaming?

"Mass Effect: Game With Unbelievably Dumbed Down Potential To Appeal To 8 Year Olds!"
 
huh? it doesnt look dumbed down at all (in comparison to what exactly?) ...in fact it looks like it's at the same level as Kotor only with real time combat
 
Well, a statement from the X06 gameplay video from E3 speaks for itself.

Mass Effect is a true next-gen game - rather than force you to read through tons of text, we want to put you in the moment. Now this may look like a cutscene, but this entire sequence is real-time gameplay.
Click to expand...

...and the level of character interaction.
Click to expand...

They are marketing 'dumbing down' as 'next generation'. Hey, if they are removing the 'tons of text' that make up for something as ancient and mysterious as advanced branching dialogue trees while marketing it as next-gen, then they uniwllingly paint bullshit all over their hype and PR.

Plus, what's so next gen about a game where you are shooting monsters and robots? All of those effects have been already seen in other games (biomods - Deus Ex, different ammuunition - Deus Ex and Jagged Alliance 2, squad control - pretty much any game with active pause, including KOTORs).
 
what's wrong with real time conversations? HL2 has it and no one seemed to complain .. I dont see how stopping time, ripping the player right out of the world just so that they have more text options makes a game more immersive ... having text on screen does nothing to make it sophisticated it just means more text

but by all means pass judgement after the game has been released and you've actually played it ..until then we're both speculating
 
More text means more information can be provided. Less text means less information, less knowledge about the world and in the end less immerssion.

Hey, we're not animating a low-level grunt, but a captain for god's sake, a guy with enough brains to speak coherent sentences, not burp out one-liners.

It's a universe-spanning game, and it would be nice to have some possibility to interact with characters beyond one-liners or shooting them.
 
I haven't looked much into it. I'm sure it will be fun. That box art is absolutely cack though.
 
Reading posts, I don't think anyone was. People were just commenting on the horrible box art. Half-life 2 has a crappy box (Hi Vivendi), along with the likes of Halo 2. Though perhaps not as bad as this gem.
 
The game doesn't seem gritty enough to me, and the box art reflects that. When I watched the video and heard the theme music for this game, I got really excited. It reminded me of the roar of the strider-like creatures in War of the Worlds movie just before the techno beat kicks in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLOJ-hE527Q

I'm also disappointed in the voices of the 3 main characters.

The female character tends to shout every line of dialogue with too much enthusiasm. I know Elizabeth Daily is capable of doing so much better.

The voice of that "Gariss" fellow or whatever his name is (the one with the skull face) is too generic for my liking. It looks like they just hired random guy to supply the voice and then added the computer voice effect over top of it. How can a character who looks so cool have a voice that bland? Why?

The main character at least doesn't appear to be following the hero stereotype with large muscles, battle scars or a deep voice.


Maybe I'm looking too far into this. The game does have a great concept.
 
The shooting scenes in this remind of the Brute Force game. Also, the main lazaaar weapon just looks/sounds horrid. Doesn't look like it packs alot of punch either, but I've only see, what, 2 weapons?

However, the open-world, going places and shizz sounds awesome. Deffo a game I'm going to consider getting.
 
A True Canadian said:
The game doesn't seem gritty enough to me, and the box art reflects that. When I watched the video and heard the theme music for this game, I got really excited. It reminded me of the roar of the strider-like creatures in War of the Worlds movie just before the techno beat kicks in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLOJ-hE527Q

I'm also disappointed in the voices of the 3 main characters.

The female character tends to shout every line of dialogue with too much enthusiasm. I know Elizabeth Daily is capable of doing so much better.

The voice of that "Gariss" fellow or whatever his name is (the one with the skull face) is too generic for my liking. It looks like they just hired random guy to supply the voice and then added the computer voice effect over top of it. How can a character who looks so cool have a voice that bland? Why?

The main character at least doesn't appear to be following the hero stereotype with large muscles, battle scars or a deep voice.


Maybe I'm looking too far into this. The game does have a great concept.
Click to expand...

Aren't the voice overs just place holders for now?

And I think the non-grittiness reflects the setting and period. The universe approaches utopia while a dystopian threat looms all around.
 
Heh, Gariss is fantastic, the scaleface has a great voiceover and character.

But the female soldier sounds like an amphetamine-driven transsexual and the protagonist sounds like he swallowed a potato and was choking on it.

Oh, and voiceovers are most often permanent, not placeholders. Doing two voice-dubbing sessions would be too expensive.
 
Mikael Grizzly said:
More text means more information can be provided. Less text means less information, less knowledge about the world and in the end less immerssion.

Hey, we're not animating a low-level grunt, but a captain for god's sake, a guy with enough brains to speak coherent sentences, not burp out one-liners.

It's a universe-spanning game, and it would be nice to have some possibility to interact with characters beyond one-liners or shooting them.
Click to expand...

There are other ways do get information across other than text. The text available conveys where you want the conversation to go--generally. It's not dumbing it down, it's removing (for some) a tedious activity. It by no means, in concept, that it will negatively effect convos with NPCs. It could, I suppose, but that doesn't mean it will.

I don't know, I haven't thought to much about this. But I will reserve judgement until I play the game.
 
Max35 said:
There are other ways do get information across other than text.
Click to expand...
Don't try to argue with him on this. Too little text = dumbed-down. Too much text = runs the risk of ruining the culture that the game has cultivated (start a discussion about Oblivion with him and see what I mean ;)).

This is one of MS's crown jewels of exculsivity--they won't let B-grade schlock out of the gate for this one....
 
Mikael Grizzly said:
More text means more information can be provided. Less text means less information, less knowledge about the world and in the end less immerssion.

Hey, we're not animating a low-level grunt, but a captain for god's sake, a guy with enough brains to speak coherent sentences, not burp out one-liners.

It's a universe-spanning game, and it would be nice to have some possibility to interact with characters beyond one-liners or shooting them.
Click to expand...
Ugh, you have no idea what you're talking about...

The "not forcing you to read through tons of dialogue" reflects the choices present in conversation before you select one. So you might be talking to someone and trying to get information, and it'll appear with multiple options like "threaten", "bribe", "sweet talk", whatever. Selecting one of these will launch the character into a longer line of dialogue. So threaten means he'll actually pull a gun on him and voice his threat in a full sentence, sweet talk might be a few lines of dialogue, etc. It's just to avoid a situation like in KotoR, where every time you're presented with a dialogue choice every option is spelled out to you exactly the way the character's going to say it. I didn't mind reading through all of it as such, but personally it seemed very pre-planned and limited to me, and like they say it takes you out of the moment, and therefore kills immersion. This game is meant to be more fast-paced and brutal, so you can make decisions on-the-fly and not have to pause the conversation every 10 seconds - it's meant to be fluid, therefore all the more immersive. You can chalk it up to "8 year old Halo kiddies" all you like (and why not, we're using that generalisation for ****ing everything these days), I think it's a change for the better.

Oh, and also the voices "may or may not be final". Yeah, I'm not sure about some of them either, but we can only hope they know what they're doing. Bioware voice work has been pretty solid in the past, so I have faith they won't screw it up, especially on their biggest endeavour to date.

[/rant]

And also, everyone needs to read this interview. It cleared up a few things I was worried about, and it's just sounding more and more awesome every time I hear about it.

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/756/756883p1.html

Edit - *cough* All that and I forgot the topic of the thread. Personally the box art looks alright to me, it's a little 80's B-movie but I think they're trying to inflect a bit of that into the style of the universe, so it fits. The one thing I don't like is that once again we see the Commander Shephard from the trailers/previews, whereas in the actual game you get to customise your own - male or female. I don't think they've really succeeded in getting this point across - and personally I was a little put off when I first saw the trailers since I really don't like the look of him :p

Oh, which reminds me of another thing. Not only do you create custom characters and shape them any way you want (even chose their own backstory, yay!), but once you've completed the game you can carry that same character over to the next games - when they're out of course. Err, it's planned as a trilogy for those who didn't know.

But seriously, how fuggin cool is that?
 
A True Canadian said:
The game doesn't seem gritty enough to me, and the box art reflects that. When I watched the video and heard the theme music for this game, I got really excited. It reminded me of the roar of the strider-like creatures in War of the Worlds movie just before the techno beat kicks in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLOJ-hE527Q

I'm also disappointed in the voices of the 3 main characters.

The female character tends to shout every line of dialogue with too much enthusiasm. I know Elizabeth Daily is capable of doing so much better.

The voice of that "Gariss" fellow or whatever his name is (the one with the skull face) is too generic for my liking. It looks like they just hired random guy to supply the voice and then added the computer voice effect over top of it. How can a character who looks so cool have a voice that bland? Why?

The main character at least doesn't appear to be following the hero stereotype with large muscles, battle scars or a deep voice.


Maybe I'm looking too far into this. The game does have a great concept.
Click to expand...

The voices are place holders as of now.
 
VictimOfScience said:
Don't try to argue with him on this. Too little text = dumbed-down. Too much text = runs the risk of ruining the culture that the game has cultivated (start a discussion about Oblivion with him and see what I mean ;)).

This is one of MS's crown jewels of exculsivity--they won't let B-grade schlock out of the gate for this one....
Click to expand...

Well, I like to argue. So odds are I probably will if he challenges my point. Anyway, this is Bioware, they don't schluff on the dialog and story. Text is but one way to send a message.
 
There are other ways do get information across other than text. The text available conveys where you want the conversation to go--generally. It's not dumbing it down, it's removing (for some) a tedious activity. It by no means, in concept, that it will negatively effect convos with NPCs. It could, I suppose, but that doesn't mean it will.
Click to expand...

Generally, conversations imply an exchange of information, not one-liners. Information usually consists of text. Therefore, removing text equals dumbing down.

The problem with Bioware is, they fail to properly piece together an RPG. KOTOR 1 was their exclusive work AND despite praise from reviewers, people who actually *knew* what RPGs are were dissatisfied by the game's linearity and lack of possible choice.

KOTOR 2 was the work of Obsidian, done by people who *knew* what RPGs were, and as such, they created a game that was superior to KOTOR 1 in pretty much all aspects.

Dialogues are the meat of an RPG, especially if they're well written. As an example, I'll give both KOTORs and Fallouts. Fallout and KOTOR 2 had superb writing, with memorable quotes and choices that you had to think when making. It's none of the [threaten him] crap. You had to think and choose an option appropriate to the context of the situation.

Replacing excellent writing with generic options like [threaten him], [shoot him], [sweet talk] rob the writers of opportunity to showcase their skills and the player of having to think which means what and consider choices.

I'm looking forward to Mass Effect for the simple reason of it allowing to explore a vast universe. And as such, considering Bioware's previous problems with tackling the RPG genre and dialogues, I'm kinda worried that such a good game can be ruined by a dumbed down dialogue system.

Because, face it, replacing writing with giant signs with options what to do is an insult to one's intelligence.

EDIT:

Casey Hudson: Well it's an interesting balance and I think it's a different balance than anyone has ever done before in a role-playing game. I think typically role-playing games in the past have been more about creating a completely empty vessel that you then fill up with whatever choices that you make. And that can be really cool but it also kind of leaves out a little bit of the texture of what it's like to be someone specific or to have a specific spirit to an adventure.
Click to expand...

BULL-friggin-SHIT! Fallout done it perfectly, blending in being a saviour of Vault 13 and a stranger to the wasteland and later, with simple scripting, making you recognizable in the wastes for whatever choices you have made. Heh, 'next-gen'.
 
Mikael Grizzly: developers cant make a game for the type of player you are ...it would be sheer suicide as the majority of gamers are not hardcore gamers ...you cant make it so difficult to understand that it alienates the majority of your intended audience

at this stage in the industry we cant have that level of interaction without sacrificing something ..spending millions to have the latest graphics will attract a crowd ..having sophisticated plotline and complicated but realistic control schemes wont, not when game success is measured in weeks not years as it used to be ...dont expect yesterdays level of complexity with today's graphics because that market doesnt exist anymore
 
It falls to the developer to do what they want. You can have good graphics, realistic control schemes, and sophisticated storylines, you just gotta make sure its damn good. I know a bunch of people who've played the KOTOR games, people you'd never expect to even care about that kind of stuff, who love it for its story and characters.
 
such as? if I hear one more rpg fanboy scream "dumbed down" I'm going to punch a baby (not mine, someone elses)
 
ya but we're talking hardcore rpg gamers ...Mikael has already said Kotor was rpg lite and not true rpg ...so my point still stands
 
I think he was mostly criticizing the rather simple plot KOTOR I followed while KOTOR II was vastly superior in those terms, which I would agree seeing as how BioWare oftens to take a simpler route while the people at Obsidian usually go all out and I can see his worries with Mass Effect. I wasn't too excitied about the "choose type of response" dialogue either, but the trailers look convincing. I think we could have a real winner on our hands.
 
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