Elberik said:
Starke said:
Elberik said:
Andy Chalk said:
There's admittedly not much to see here and if it wasn't for the presence of the Ordinator, the Centurion Sphere and the guy in the Nord helmet, they'd be entirely indistinguishable from just about every other generic fantasy MMO/RPG on the market.
That's because Elder Scrolls is generic fantasy, just like Halo is generic SciFi and CoD is generic FPS. It's the IP, the logo, that matters. Like t-shirts: T-shirt are identical in structure & functionality, all that matters is what is printed on them.
Yeah... no.
Especially not with SciFi. You can't stick the Pillar of Autumn, the Enterprise, the Millennium Falcon, and the Litany of Fury next to one another and pretend that they're "all the same." Sci Fi involves a lot more than just a logo. And no one in their right mind can take Mass Effect, Halo, and Dead Space, look at all three games and say they're all the same with a different logo on the cover.
*had to look up what the Litany of Fury was*
I am taking about the visuals, since all we have are pictures. Those ships you listed, they are all big ships (i would never put the Millennium Falcon next to the Pillar of Autumn, maybe a Star Destroyer though). Mass Effect and Halo are different types of games, obviously. It's the visuals, you could put Issac Clarke next to Commander Shepherd & there'd be no evidence to say they were from different universes. The Normandy could buzz DS9 & no one would think it out of place unless they had previous knowledge of Mass Effect & Star Trek lore.
The Elder Scrolls is a generic fantasy setting. Medieval era tech, dragons, magic, & some humanoid and/or bestial creatures from Celtic/Gaelic/Scandinavian folklore.
Of course, where this started was about substance and structure, not just visual aesthetics. So, while you're right, you could stick the Normandy next to DS9 and say it looks the part, the underlying philosophy of the settings are incompatible, even with the Normandy basically being a reskinned Defiant.
Even the Shepard/Clarke thing sort of underlines the issue, both at a visual and a thematic level. Shepard is (usually) presented with sleek top of the line military hardware, everything has a circular aesthetic to it. It's a bit worn, but it's still high end. That aesthetic carries over into the setting as a whole.
Clarke in contrast was aesthetically designed to look like, well, power tools. That's the fundamental aesthetic, which informs most of Dead Space's visual identity. The problem is, of course, that that fundamentally goes deeper as well.
The real disparity between the settings is that Mass Effect is a world where the designated hero comes along to save you, while Dead Space is a world where everyone dies horribly. You can stick them next to one another and say "sure, they could be in the same universe", but the fundamental identities of their universes are incompatible.