Customer Reviews

Art of Mass Effect, The

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Length:: 0:16 Mins

This book was published in 2007 and so I have the chance to read through a few reviews on Amazon before I bought mine. After reading the book, I'm surprised that their reaction were pretty mixed.

There are five chapters in the book. The first two chapters are on the design of characters and creatures in the game. Chapter Three: Transport is on the different vehicle and airship designs. Chapter Four looks at concept art of objects like furniture, equipments and weapons. The last chapter contains matte paintings for the environment.

This book packs a lot of full colour illustrations with a few pencil sketches. All the art shown are very polished, as in they can be shown to any director who would then give the go ahead order. There are short captions on each page.

The very few game screenshots included are used mainly to compared the final rendering with the concept art. For example, there will be 3D model renderings compared to an actual set which is rendered with texture. There are plenty of matte paintings to look through, with several 3D models to go with some.

What's missing are the individual credits for each illustration. So we'll not know who did what. However, there's a list of artists who worked on the project are at the back of the book on a page. They are:

* Derek Watts
* Matthew Rhodes
* Sung Kim
* Adrien Cho
* Fran Gaulin
* Mike Spalding
* Mike Trottier
* Michael Jeffrey
* Sasha Beliaev
* Mike Higgins

This is a nice book for concept designers, sci-fi and game artists.

(More pictures are available on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.)

This is a decent art book with a lot of nice work, but I was hoping for more rough concept sketches of characters, weapons, and armor. There's a lot of nice environmental artwork here, though.

If you're an artist, and are interested in getting this to learn more, then this isn't really good for that purpose. It's good for inspiration, but you're not going to learn much about character construction or anything like that.

I found this book by chance at the local bookstore and decided to take a chance on it. I wasn't disappointed; however, the art isn't phenomenal. It offers a nice variety of designs for settings, vehicles, gear and, of course, characters for the video game Mass Effect (which I haven't played). Most impressive, form my standpoint, were the character designs, but these were not spectacular - just nice. This is, however, a very well-produced book, and would probably be best for fans of the game, rather than someone looking for a good "Art of..." book.

Great book, especially if you love some of the more digital art style concept works. It would have been nice to see more pencil style sketches, more progress work, but otherwise it delivers exactly what it promises: an excellent visual representation of the process behind developing a game with a full and rich backstory.

Well I just wanted to say this book was amazing. I got this after Mass Effect 1 came out but after playing Mass Effect 2 you can see some of the concepts in this book they could not add in ME1 are in ME2. It is a really good book and worth the price. By far my favorite online order all year.

Just a great book showing the creative process behind one of the greatest games of all time. I strongly recommend this book to fans and artist, I find the images to be very inspirational.

Great seller and fast shipping. Came to my door packaged as safely as a package can be shipped. Thank you!

Great artwork, good price. I have no complaints with it, other than there could've been a little more on written up about the artwork itself.

The Art of Mass Effect is a solid look at the concepts behind the first game in the series. It gives you a pretty good sense of where the artists were coming from when designing the look and feel of the game. What I found to be a nice touch was a lot of the designs are grounded in reality, things we are familiar with. Much of the designs are based on animals, particularly mash-ups of different animals. Take the varren for example. They are clearly based on some kind of wild dog for the body but have very fish-like features in the face, like the jaw and the globe-like eyes.

I'm only giving the book four stars out of five because if you really want to get a better feel for the art, the bonus disc in the Platinum Hits variation of the game offers a much better look. It has all the artwork from the book (plus a little more but not 100% on that) organized into different galleries, with full voice commentary. Gives a much better insight to what the artists were striving for than the project director's little notes that dot each page of the book.

I love mass effect but this art book could be better. My biggest problem with it is that most of the images (specially the environments) are too small. Despite that fact it still is an awesome art book.