That is some neat concept art indeed.
As someone else pointed out it makes one wonder why then so much of the promotional stuff looks like this:
Because the creation of marketing and promotional materials is waaay less flexible than development, and those depictions of a male V character were clearly decided on years ago?
That’s how marketing works, unfortunately.
Remember the giant kerfuffle when some of the ME3 advertising depicted (gasp) a female Shepard?
Wait, when was Shepard not female?
Adam Levine is looking weird these days.
FemShep BestShep.
In the advertising and, one hopes, nowhere else.
#maleShepWasFine
#ButFemShepWasAwesome
Hey, @Matt_W, thanks for that wall of text- I mean it! In the sea of online/gamergate-inspired outrage-about-outrage it was a very well-reasoned and explained point of view. It really brought a lot to the discussion.
RPS doubles down:
It makes me incredibly sad to see what’s become of that once-great place.
It’s still great.
Gaming is a mainstream medium now. You are going to get a wide variety of critique and cultural commentary around it. Games, like any other creative media, have meaning and cultural significance, both of which are going to be argued about. Rather than viewing criticism of context, framing, or social consciousness as somehow aberrant, view it as signaling that video games are pretty much on a par with movies or TV for cultural meaning now.
While I agree that gaming is definitely more mainstream now, there is a long way to go before it has anything like the cultural significance that movies or music have now.
You’d have to literally find a previously un-contacted tribe deep in the rainforests to find a human being who don’t know who Lady Gaga or the Avengers are. Even the Lannisters have better name recognition than Geralt of Rivia, or whoever.
I guess you’d have a hard time finding someone who didn’t at least know something about Mario, like he is a video game character that doesn’t like donkeys or barrels or whatever. But while financially video games are just as important as movies, I don’t think culturally they are nearly as impactful.
I’d argue that Minecraft and Fortnite and Angry Birds are at least as culturally significant as Lady Gaga.
For a certain age group, definitely. But my 98 year old grandma knows who Lady Gaga and the Avengers (my personal metric for ubiquitous cultural references are if my grandma knows them, hah) are and I guarantee you she has no idea what any of those games are.
I see your point, though. I guess I’m even at the age where I’m kind of vaguely dismissive of stuff like Fortnite outside of being fascinated by the financial aspect. I probably shouldn’t be.
Pac-Man? Mario? Mortal Kombat? Grand Theft Auto?
I’d wager most people have heard of those games for their cultural impact, if only for the mainstream news stories about them over the years.
I mean, I actually listed Mario. I knew there would be a handful of exceptions that probably most people have heard about. There are for most things.
I guess you’d need to poll a few thousand people to find out. I’m speaking only anecdotally here, but I’d be shocked if a decent sized, completely random (no age/demo bias) survey didn’t show an incredibly massive bias to the number of movies the average person could name compared to the number of games.