Commander Shepard and Agent Coulson had a crossover. But, it’s not the good kind. See, some concept drawing for BioWare’s popular sci-fi video game saga apparently got swiped in a recent episode of the Marvel Entertainment television series. And some eagle-eyed Mass Effect fans spotted it.
As reported by Eurogamer, an exterior shot from the December 10 episode of Agents of SHIELD features an exterior shot that seems to lift structures from a piece of Mass Effect art titled “Earth Alliance”. A user named “fhweufhewiu” on BioWare’s Mass Effect forums noticed the similarity and posted a comparison shot.
As you can see, despite some major alterations to the alleged source image, the two images look very much alike. The rub here is that BioWare itself came under fire for using external images as the basis of artwork that appeared in Mass Effect 3. An image of Quarian castmember Tali without her mask on and the backdrop for the game’s ending sequences both appeared to be sourced from art produced elsewhere.
Kotaku has reached out to BioWare and Marvel for comment and will update this story if they respond.
Comments
11 responses to “That Sure Looks Like Mass Effect Art In Marvel’s Agents Of SHIELD”
“despite some major alterations”
IANAL, but that puts that in a whole new category, if you know a tiny bit about copyright law, derivative works, and perceived claims thereof.
Its a DIRECT COPY with the top half removed there are no actual alterations, just because you only plagiarize 50% of the picture instead of 100 doesn’t make it any less plagiarized.
king potato is right, somebody somewhere is going to get in trouble.
plagarism is plagarism whether it be 30%, 50% or 100% or whatever…
No, its not a DIRECT COPY there are alterations,
1) The tower on the left has been removed and replaced with the tower on the right.
2) The windows are slightly different.
3) The red strip has been altered.
4) The openings in the towers are wider
But it is distinctly very Mass Effect in design and in every other way and there should be some explaining to do.
meh… i havebt played mass effect and the similarities are pretty freaking obvious. the lines the contours and position and the colour of the building is very similar. Might not be a perfect copy, there might be some minor alterations, but it is still plagarism. Its like if i copied another persons essay and then used the “replace all” word function to change ten different words. that is still plagarism.
This is definitely plagiarism. It’s like handing in a Uni assignment, copied from a textbook and merely changing the chapter titles to suit your paragraph needs… the aesthetics may be slightly different but the body of work is exactly the same.
It’s not that bad. It’s not THIS: http://io9.com/how-a-science-fiction-book-cover-became-a-5-7-million-1497486808
I thought there was no issue with the Tali image, other than the fact that it was based on a stock photo which was freely available.
Should we point a gun at people who plagiarize?
It isn’t as bad as Sunrise ripping off music from Dark Star, a club in Mass Effect 2, for the background music during the financial segment where they show the indexes.
I can see this being an issue if that asset is used as a major part of the show or integral to the design. To me that looks like just a back ground though yeah (correct me if I am wrong)?
So in all seriousness a) Who Cares? b) Who was bored enough to look for this?
I know artists need to protect their work, but we are really talking about companies, not the guys that drew the art work (who would either think it’s cool or don’t care)
Its this kind of over analysing that stifles creativity (i mean if we came down to it, any game that has an ORC monster could be sued by Tolkein estate since he invented the modern version of them).
/end rant (edited to correct mistake)
Maybe Disney. the company that owns marvel, got permission from EA, the company that owns Bioware, to use this because Disney is letting EA use Star Wars.
By the looks of it some artist liked the shape, and sketched their stuff over the top to smash out a quick background. I cant imagine the effects budget of MAOS is *that* high and they’re trying to reproduce the quality of the Marvel cinema universe so I can understand how these sorts of things happen.
Either way I don’t see how this damages either franchise or experience. Fun fact though.