Fans have expressed outrage at the apparent reveal that developer BioWare used a stock photo as the basis for one of Mass Effect 3‘s main characters.
Angry gamers sent a barrage of emails to Kotaku US last night with links to the stock photo and the spoilery reveal from the action-roleplaying game, which was released there yesterday (and today in Australia) for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
Warning: The photograph below contains spoilers for one of Mass Effect 3‘s characters.
The photo shows an in-game picture of Mass Effect 3 character Tali, who appeared in both previous games but has never removed the mask covering her face. Tali’s newly revealed face seems to be a modified version of a stock image by photographer Matthew Leete, which is freely available for commercial use to anybody with a Getty Images account.
“This HAS to qualify for some form of lazy art,” one gamer told us.
“Looks like more BioWare bullshit to me,” another gamer said.
BioWare is no stranger to internet hatred. A large contingent of gamers seem dedicated to attacking the development studio. They harassed BioWare writer Jennifer Hepler during an internet campaign last month. Yesterday, review aggregator Metacritic had to delete some of the user reviews on Mass Effect 3 for violating its terms of use in what appeared to be a unified effort to spam the game with low scores.
We’ve contacted BioWare and publisher EA for comment and we’ll update if we hear anything.
"BioWare is no stranger to internet hatred. A large contingent of gamers seem dedicated to attacking the development studio...."
I love this guilt by association thing. So now any criticism of the game or any future Bioware product will be lumped squarely with the "Call of Duty audience" that Bioware claimed they wanted over the Hepler disaster. What a load. Have you guys been taking hints from the Murdoch media on how to change gamer mindset and alter public opinion?
And for the record, when Metacritic started deleting user review scores, the overall score went DOWN indicating that it was mostly fake POSITIVE reviews that had been deleted, but somehow you failed to mention that little factoid.
On topic: For fans of Mass Effect lore... this is massive. To take a stock image and do literally no more than 10-20 minutes of work on it (users on 4chan and Reddit discovered the filter settings and procedures used to create "Quarians" within moments of the original posting) is a real "F U" to the fans who have continued to pump money into the series. Money that EA/Bioware feels entitled to pump back into freakin' SPACE instead of hiring a quality art and design team.
But hey, I guess i'm just a hater from 4chains with my ping pong era games, right?
A lot of Bioware fans are anger at Bioware for so much more than this and yet this is news worthy? I think we all know that a lot of gaming websites are biting down on EA's sausage at the moment.
Angry**
What nerds! It's not a big deal, it's just a photo.
Why can't they learn to keep their mouth shut and scoff down whatever scraps these "lazy" developers toss from their table.
I'm obsessed with Mass Effect, its slightly unnatural as stated by my friends, still I do not see why this is such a big deal. Frankly Tali is and always will be the masked one, the photo simply would serve to abate some curiosity.
Wipe your tears and get on with the game.
Been playing ME3 for two days on PS3. It's AWESOME, but then again, I haven't played enough to believe that it will be anything but AWESOMgiven the possibilities.
Quarians, only have two fingers....
I saw a video of the guy from Bioware responding to this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqL68fLpwYk