Concord characters were designed by committee says the dev

Neversummer

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27 Jun 2023
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Using committee to create a hero shooter where character design decides the faith of the game is a brain dead move. Should’ve hired street fighter/overwatch/apex concept artist to make iconic heroes
 

quest4441

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Oh now that the ship is sinking they fling shit at each other, not 10 days ago these same people had a congratulations circlejerk at launch about how proud they were of the game.

I would have more respect if they stood by their crappy product
 

KvallyX

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Your Mom
no one wanted to make porn of it
Jason Bateman No GIF by Emmys
 

ethomaz

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ethomaz
I feel so bad to everybody involved.
Maybe it was not the best game ever for most but it was not the trash level like most guys post here or in others social networks.

The game is an absolute joy to play... when you start to see how each character is and works you started to see how much love they put in the game.
It is high quality... I mean graphics, gameplay, music, etc are all top level.

I still felt something off how people treated that game as the biggest failure ever even before launch when talk good things about games like Hellblade 2, Ryse, Starfield, Redfall, The Order, etc etc etc.

Not kidding here... there are several worst games than Concord that didn't get all that hate it did... it feels unfair.
Like we can't have different games in the industry and that bring questions to where it will go... because without give chance to different games we will not masterpiece like we used to have in the past.

Even if I love the game I understand legit and honest complains... but the level of complains reached a point that is unbeliaveable.

Man you can look at the recent releases this year... Hellblade 2 is way worst game than Concord and one got praise and other trashed to to ridiculous level... you can even compare it with Starfield... man Starfield plays like a joke compared with Concord.
I can't really understand...

Others games with 60-70 metascores never received that much hate like Concord did.
Everybody talks about characters... but I mean look at the others games characters... most are below average.... only some games really shines (and that is not all characters... some shines others are weak designed).
 
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Entropi

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I want to know who was on that committee (of course, it was leadership) and hope they move on from making video games.
 
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anonpuffs

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It's not because the character design lended itself to that. That was my whole point.
K

But a lot of games gain initial success off of social media vitality
Having attractive characters (not just in the conventional sense) is one vector for that

You can look at any Asian mobile game, they make tens of millions of dollars a month, sometimes hundreds, for years on end all off the back of taking that logic to the extreme.
 

Yurinka

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Since Sony acquired the studio, they should lay off the leadership with no severance packages and let the actual devs to retool the game into f2p for a relaunch.

Images says all.


Well, in AAA games characters aren't just simply designed by a single specific person. Games are collaborative works with a lot of people involved for any thing, particularly in AAA games. In case of character design:

There are the inputs from people from marketing telling what works and doesn't in that specific market, or what target user / niche spot are they focusing. And from a catalog/editorial team who also tells the team to try to don't overlap and differentiate enough with this or that other somewhat similar project they have in the works.

Plus also a game design team (leaded by the creative director) + writers who also provide indications of what type of personality, faction/alien race/lore/personal story/etc., high level look it should have (maybe this character should be very slim and tall, or super musculated, etc), which kind of gameplay it has, that maybe has to be reflected on their looks, etc.

Then there's a character design team, with an art director above them setting the guidelines and artstyle, and game director over all the devs directing them, and the producer who makes sure the teams reaches the milestones within the assigned budget, time and quality expected.

In recent times there are the woke DEI censors too, and DEI censorship guidelines.

As usual in any group of people, there are people there with different tastes, opinions and interests. Rarely everybody agrees. So depending on their rank/position, they negotiate and normally their opinion is the one mostly taken for their area of responsability / expertise, often always leaving a portion to the other ones involved, hearing the others and adapting a bit.

Gamesdev is also an iterative process, so there are different rounds where stuff gets done, tested/evaluated both internally and externally by expert devs of each area but working in other teams of the company, PR people who did work reviewing games at top places, feedback from Q&A team, player tests and player research done with the players of the target user, etc. There's people dedicated to these things. With that feedback the game gets iterated and "improved" as the people in charge of each area (listed in the previous paragraphs considers).
 
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ToTTenTranz

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I call bullshit.


We've seen some of the people working on the character designs and they absolutely put their ideology in front of the game for everyone to see.


We know why there are no white people in the roster. It's because their character designers firmly believe in shit like this:


https://thatparkplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Weisnewski.png



So no, you don't get to put the blame on the suits this time, sorry.
 

mibu no ookami

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21 Feb 2024
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People always want to blame leadership as if leadership is handling every single decision. As a leader you get criticized if you micromanage and you get criticized if you give people the reigns.

People want to work in collaborative spaces, but then say decisions are made by committee...

It's not truthful.

The team made decisions and didn't think those decisions could have financial consequences up until the day they launched. You should always consider these decisions when making a product or service weighing the benefits and the risks.

They took the ire of alt-right gaming and left wing gaming had no interest in stepping to saving them, because no one buys games for ideology, they'll not buy a game for ideology because there are plenty of games to buy. They were vocal in social media when they should have been silent. They didn't take feedback and doubled down.

These are recipes for failure.

I thought at one point that Sony could make the most of Firewalk even if Concord failed, but I think the prudent business decision is to close the studio. They're just not worth the bad buzz and impact they have on PlayStation studios as a whole.

That's why they pulled the game before Astro Bot released. They didn't want it to be a distraction.

At best the Firewalk team could be absorbed into Bungie or at least the elements worth saving, but any game that comes out with the Firewalk brand will now face an uphill battle.

I feel for the employees who talented and worked hard on this game, their coworkers set them up for failure because they prioritized the wrong things above creating a successful product.
 

Hatefield

I am the law
18 Jun 2024
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If the committee was at fault, there would be more issues, like aggressive microtransaction and pay to win. You can't blame them for the designs the art team presented and approved. The art team has to prove this by showing original concept that got canned.
 

Danja

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If the committee was at fault, there would be more issues, like aggressive microtransaction and pay to win. You can't blame them for the designs the art team presented and approved. The art team has to prove this by showing original concept that got canned.
I agree with this POV