All of these good covers have three things in common :
-They took some work and time to do. No "character model slapped with some photoshop effects."
-No awful logos and text blur everywhere on the box a la "This game gives pleasure to my balls - IGN"
-Stimulate the imagination. You look at the box and think "Holy shit, what's this, what's happening ?". Instead of "Meh".
Exactly taxalot. The good covers reflect the designer's pride and passion in their work, they respect the game and its material by not marketing in their own home (on the cover) and they appeal to gamers who want to
Discover Worlds rather than
Consume Media.
The good ones (and almost all older covers) tend to emulate book covers more. The bad ones tend to emulate movie posters. This is clearly not coincidence. Games aren't just aiming for the mechanical emulation of movies but the seemingly limitless commercialism and mainstream popularity of movies, and so decisions like how box covers are designed tend to reflect nothing but those commercial desires. Even the bizarre and quirky designs that are largely tasteless are far, far better than the design-by-numbers we get from 90% or box covers today.
Let's look at one that I think stands out in a bad way and is clearly a product of this commercial approach.
Just look at it. There's lots of things going on there but none of it means anything.
You can just imagine a marketing department writing down a checklist for this "characters from the game including the badass hero, guns, dramatic action poses, realistic art, some kind of dramatic lighting and shit" and they hand it to the artists and they say "make this for me and have it on my desk by the afternoon, kthx". The artist shrugs, puts something together, puts it on their desk, they take a look and think "Yeah this is perfect, it ticks all the boxes. There's literally no way we can improve on that. God we are awesome"
The most fundamental problem is that it screams "designed by a marketing committee" on the basis of a "realistic scene" by people who clearly don't care about the fundamentals of the art to even make it realistic. It looks OK (and generic) from a glance but if you look at it for more than a second, the entire thing falls apart. The characters have a twisted perspectives, they all look blankly at nothing in completely different directions (and they all aim at neither what they are currently looking at nor what anyone else is aiming OR looking at (seriously?). What are they shooting at? Who gives a shit, because when you play this game you won't know what you're shooting at either, you just shoot until it's dead, OK kid?
It isn't mysterious. The generic characters fill the box, and there's nothing there to wonder about. You know what you're going to get and of course, that's intentional. They've designed it by a formula that aims to grab the attention of the random shoppers who come glancing over the boxes at the store and spontaneously pick up whatever seems appropriate without having to read a word or do any research.
Still, there's far worse out there. It doesn't advertise review or metacritic scores on the cover and the game plays pretty much exactly the way you would expect it to from the cover but it has no soul. It's still trash.
They don't need to be complex or technically brilliant or highly analysed. Some pride in how the cover portrays the game, something which shows it has been chosen by someone who understands the game's subject material, and done without trying to appeal to every idiot at once is all that's needed. The
Ultima 7 box to me is probably the simplest in design of any box but probably also the one which impresses me most. The box is literally a black gate, but what exactly is a black gate? It's as ominous as it sounds but you'll have to play to find out. That black box sitting on the shelf practically drowns out all the pastel colours of all the other boxes. It's perfect.
. It doesn't mean shit.
