Some of the artwork for the game I feel was pretty damn good....I mean the favelas setting was shadowrun to the core. I feel they also drew elves a lot better than a lot people tend to draw them in SR.....made them actually look pretty tough and diabolical....not that super good-looking sexy, giant ears look that so many elf-fetish people are rendering. Then the street sammy native american black dude with the corn rows totally embodied the feel of SR....they got that right on! The graphics for some of the magic also looked pretty damn cool, even if the spells are totally impossible by the rules of thaumaturgy in 2072....like teleportation. I even feel the troll was pretty cool looking, but looked much more like the description Runners Companion gives for Minotaur troll metavariants....but they did a good job depicting the +1 armor bonus trolls get for having calcification deposits......so many drawings of trolls I see make them just look like giant orks with horns....and that's just lame.
There's just not too many good 3d renderings of many purely SR concepts.....most of the ones I have found could be either cyberpunk or SR...i.e. human's and tech....so I feel the Xbox game does contribute in the art department quite well....they found a good esthetic that fuses machine and magic in a way that feels right...not forced like a lot of Shadowrun art i've seen.
That being said....it's basically the same as most mainstream attempts to market a complex fictional world....there's always some project manager who feels like they have their finger on the pulse of what's cool and what's not....so they feel like they have to "fix" the world so that it sells. It's like Michael Bay with Transformers. They really think that the public is too dumb to really handle too many things at once....which is totally false...the public is only dumb in that they flock to anything that is marketed well and will let things which aren't marketed well fly under the radar. The Sega Genesis and the SNES games prove how cool a faithful SR game would be and the amount of money it made would only depend on how much it was marketed assuming that the story telling was good quality.