For all the people in the comments trying to say I said the characters weren't bad and then they were. No. The opinion of if they look bad or not is subjective meaning it's personal opinion. Some of these characters look great. Some of them look like clown vomit. Writing off the entire game and not learning from what did and did not work would be a mistake. Always investigate things and always brush past the general "everything is bad and that's a fact" takes. All that happens when you parrot along is you miss out on learning something new.
I think the reason a lot of people think you said they’re not bad, and then described the ways that you thought some characters were bad, is because you made some general statements that were true for many of the characters, but not all of them, such as the comment about color choice and composition, which you did cite a counter example or two for. I think there’s massive respect for your wisdom on a lot of topics from a majority of your audience, and I think that translates into a lot of people treating your opinions as facts, or more specifically, claims that are either to be agreed with objectively or disagreed with objectively. So the idea that your claims are subjective and personal is lost as a result of that mindset. Modern social media has trained that into a lot of us in different ways that I don’t know how to describe. It’s hard to get out of that mindset.
another thing that really discouraged people from buying this game is the fact that the characters were given pronouns, which has absolutely 0 gameplay relevance or bearing
Fun story: In the time when concord launched, i was on vacation without internet. I have been gone for just two weeks and when i returned concord was already dead, so i missed The WHOLE lifespan of a game that i didnt even know had been released, failed miserably and dissapeared before i came home
The game didn't even last the average lifespan of a housefly apparently, so if any bugs got into your house during vacation they probably had a more fulfilling lifespan than Concord ever would have.
Can’t remember who said it but someone pointed out that the sort of vibe for the aliens is “humans in makeup”. Which is fine for movies, they benefit from that tactile nature. but with the limitless potential of animation why would you make it look like people playing dress up?
Could be the original scope of the game vs. development hell. Someone said they re-used a lot of motion capture animation with drastically different character proportions as well. I've also heard that humanoid aliens could have been an older design intention where they were trying to emulate older sci-fi art and film.
I tried to burger shop called Conburg, where the burgers cost $35. The bun is green, the meat is purple, and the cheese is grey. The fries will be teal and cost $5. No seasoning will be added to any of the food, as everything must be very bland. We tried to compete with other established burger chains, but unfortunately, we had to shut down our store we worked very hard on. It's your fault as consumers we failed, not our decisions along the way. You all are talentless food critics that don't understand modern food design. This is the story of Conburg.
Thor started saying "Well the characters aren't ugly" then later realized "They're unattractive". Yes, they are ugly, they are not pleasing to look at. Combination of mediocre gameplay, bad maps, bad color choices, bad character designs, and slap $40 on top. It was a perfect recipe for failure.
From what I heard the gameplay is fairly good but not nearly good enough to overcome the other deficiencies of the game. It also looks like they just took various things from other games in the hopes of making something new and interesting. I.E. one of the characters plays like a warlock in Destiny 2.
I found Thor's perspective with the Clashing Colors was interesting. They were Trying to make the character designs "Unique" With colors that clash. Which can make them ugly to look at. I'm curious if it's possible to make some of Concord's characters design better or good just by changing the colors.
Overwatch did it, the difference is it looked ab-so-lutely dope on release and the betas were insane. Also I think the launch price was like $20? Like depending on the amount of cosmetics it would cost either $20 for no cosmetics or $40 for more cosnemtics.
Pretty much. A lot of veteran concept artists have analyzed and studied each character and you can see all the flaws in their study.. not only they look like average NPCs in an average story driven game, they tell nothing about their role in the game. Giving a flank/assassin character a bloated, bright, easily spottable red coat was not the best choice, just to name one.
basically this all the characters have no character or at least none that you can identify at first glance. Compare this to overwatch where at first glance you are actually get at least the impression of a theme. What also helps is that overwatch heavily leans on established "cultural" themes or archetypes, the western gunslinger, the japanese cyber ninja and so on which brings a bit more flavor. Concord just dosn't have that.
It was literally in every single ad break for EVO this year...the biggest fighting game tournament with the highest overall viewership. If that's not advertising, I don't know what is.
@@michaelfagan1575 Seems like it was advertised but only to outside markets. Personally never saw like a twitch/youtube ad for it, only heard about it from other people. It'd be like if the next Blues Clues was coming out but they blew their ad budget for a superbowl spot. A ton of views, but not necessarily your target audience.
Yup, Thor spoke without understanding how much the game sucked ass. He just presumed after that first visual impression that it was just another run-of-the-mill hero shooter that was simply late to the trend and presented nothing new. Did he do zero research before speaking with such confidence? At least be a little skeptical if you're still learning about the thing. I nearly lost all respect for Thor now.
@@ethanfreeman1106 oh come on, he said the game must have had issues with the gameplay mechanics, he just hadn't played it so didn't know what they are but he was assuming they existed.
@@garethdewhurst1499fair point. Guess I just tried to dismiss his subjective opinion in the same way be initially dismissed that random chatter. I felt that was rather unfair, so I was compelled to try doing the same thing. Thanks for calling me out. With that said, would Thor thank us for calling him out? Because I feel like that's what most of the people who have this same sort of reaction to his take this time are trying to do, in all honesty. I'm no exception.
I'm of the opinion concord's characters look like a bunch of middle age parents were going to a guardians of the galaxy themed costume party and there was a like $20 limit on how expensive your costume could be. So they went and slapped together whatever they had lying around at home and used left over paint to colour it.
Also thor saying "tHeRe'S LiTtLe aDvErTiSeMeNt" when in reality, a fkton of gaming news websites was literally shoving this game on people's mouth for like 2 weeks. IGN, Kotaku, PCGamer, etc, they all kept tweeting and writing articles about Concord about how great it is and ranked it above average. Even the "gaming" journalists themselves kept tweeting how good the gameplay was and how they kept playing it lmao.
I love this channel but idk if he does his own art assets. Character design is hard, but also there are some short sighted mistakes made like inoffensive silhouettes etc. It's bad because it's very bland.
You know you've failed when even the Rule34 artists stay away from your characters. They couldn't even make characters interestingly ugly. I mean half of the races in World of Warcraft are ugly as hell but they at least look scary or dangerous. Most of the characters in Concord look like they were rejects from a Steven Universe fanfic.
To be fair the races in WoW, some might be ugly but they got their quirks and little details which make them great or sometimes even cute tbh. Trolls for example, if they got these big ass teeth on their side of the mouth sticking out it looks kinda cute now if an orc has that it looks kinda menacing just by the shape of their head and their overall looks. (Troll small elongated head kinda shaped.) (Orc bulky more roundish appearance and head shape) These small details make a really big difference when designing characters. But apparently Sony just thought wuhuu let's just make SOMETHING Edit: okay I forgot about orc babies and that they kinda look cute but overall orc = menacing, and, trolls = kinda cute but still menacing if u get what I mean
Because even if the WoW races are ugly in a conventional way, they still appealed to people. Rule 34 hit Warcraft orcs too, after all. It's all about knowing what appeals to different groups of people. Orcs appeal to people who want to play a huge, menacing monster of a man. They ALSO appeal to people who like looking at exaggerated hyper-masculinity, because let's face it, they're giant walls of muscle with deep voices and brutish appearances. That's going to appeal to some people. Concord designs don't seem to be targeted at many people. Some of them seem to be targeted at certain political extremists who don't play video games, but that's not exactly going to help with sales. Not all of the designs are bad, but I don't think they're as effective at appealing to different groups of people like Warcraft designs have always been.
@@Grakor456 Yeah, they definitely had a target audience in mind, but it's one that doesn't actually play competitive shooters. To spend 200 million without considering your actual audience is insane.
Pirate: The character design is subjective. Pirate a few minutes later: The Characters are too colorful. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but if all who behold it says it isn't beautiful, at what point does one accept it's ugly?
The characters in Concord look like they've never held a gun in their entire lives. Pristine armor with no scuffs, no visible scars on the characters, all rounded corners, that LIFE PRESERVER... it was all so cringe.
the answer is still never. its irrelevant how many people agree with something, its still subjective matter, both opinions can coexist, i can recognize something as subjective while also sharing the popular opinion. for me the character designs werent necessarily bad if they were presented in like a show setting, for a game context they are boring, i feel the same way for stuff like apex legends. having that said the character design really wasnt the nail in the coffin for the game, it was in fact that its not bringing anything new to an already saturated genre that in itself is fairly "niche" in the sense that who plays these games already has found their comfortable corner, and it charged 40 bucks upfront, probably with intent on still charging players for stuff like skins and alternate in game currencies as all these games do. not to mention the piss poor marketing, i didint even know about this game until the last trailer that came out wich was when? last summer fest? cant remember. not saying it never counts, cause ofc it does, but in this context character desing was the least of this game problem.
did you miss the half dozen times in his conclusion to the character designs where he used the phrases “to me”, “i feel”, and “in my opinion”? stating the color composition is merely him using reasoning to support *his opinion*, not to make an objective statement
1:14 - designers specifically pointed out exactly why the designs were bad, they screwed up many things. The characters are ugly, even if it's "subjective" yet over 90% of people agree
The characters in Concord look like they've never held a gun in their entire lives. Pristine armor with no scuffs, no visible scars on the characters, all rounded corners, that LIFE PRESERVER... it was all so cringe.
Well I think its also the fact that in "woke" space culture they are more likely to encourage whatever they are all doing so as to appear "non-judgemental" which also means that there is an extreme lack of useful criticism. The character designs really emphasize that, it seems like the result of shoulder patting rather than critique.
On a fundamental artistic level the characters were terrible designs. Color, shapes, silhouettes, contrast, role portrayal, etc. This isn't even touching preference or characterization. A couple are borderline ok but the rest are just objectively bad. Common Thor you say its preference when you see Madam Tupperware and NPC rocket lady?
And none with any art experience or basic colour knowledge will like it. i still cant believe they had actual designers. cause the values are wrong, and the colour combinations are completely off. Maybe the design leader was the equalent of tonedeaf for colours and ruined em all. its the only logical explanation i can think of
@GoalOrientedLifting they are just propagandized to the point their brains are mush... they adhere to the Judeo-American Empire regime lies so much that they actually believe the lie. It's an act of Faith to deny reality... so them denying reality demonstrates their religious fervor for Transhumanist Liberal Capitalism.
Fun fact; I had the opposite effect with Concord. I knew about it since early this year, because I saw it fuckin' *everywhere* on the PS Store. I saw it so much, so often, I genuinely got sick of seeing it every single time I looked in the store on my Playstation. Not surprised it failed. A small, spiteful part of me is glad I won't see it anymore.
Same. I couldn't get away and instead of forgetting how much it didn't appeal to me, I was forced to see it multiple times a day every day for a month.
It was like the original Destiny marketing IMO. When destiny was first announced, but without actual story elements, it was all just photos of the traveler but with the coming soon, or destiny awaits tagline. Everywhere I looked I saw mini ads for Concord too, but just with like the logo and a charlies angels pose of two characters.
Interesting. I saw more about Deadlock online while it was under an NDA than I did anything about Concord. I wonder if they tried to use an algorithm to heavily market to a select group and the algorithm just wasn't broad enough. Do you play a lot of shooters/have a heavy time investment in one specific shooter?
Laura Fryer put up a video called "Culture Killed Concord" that explains how a toxic work environment probably caused the people with the insight to identify and correct these problems to leave the team, or if they couldn't leave, to shut down and quietly do what was asked of them.
@myuzu_ yeah, watched it the other day. Really informative. Especially since it reminded her of the live service game the studio she worked with created a while back. Good vid.🙂👍🏾
After digging up tweets from the senior staff, you can clearly see who killed that game. The arrogant twat who called himself "The professor" is probably to blame a lot in this, I've never seen someone this obnoxious. Of course it was a magical pronouns person and he probably made all the dissident voices shut down or leave. There's always a pattern of delusion with these "talentless freaks".
I wonder if it's like that in most AAA game studios. I'm interested to work in the industry, but I don't think I could comply with terrible directions that I know in my heart are bad artistic choices. Maybe AA studios or indie are the best bet going forward.
The $40 cost was the final nail in the coffin all the biggest hero shooters are free. Valorant,Ow2,and paladins all of which have long time players and are on all platforms so this game had 0 qualities to pull players looking 4 hero shooters away from these and to them.
It was 8 years in development, back when it started this type of game was very popular but now yeah it's weird how it seems they didn't even do a research to see if people were interested and willing to pay for it, besides the fact that the character design is odd, the game doesn't bring anything to the table that OW or any other already do.
I disagree with this. Good hero shooters are very hard to make well. Concord had Good concepts, but failed to actualize them. Plenty of people payed for OW one. But the feel, look, and execution of Concord was terrible. Concord also came out when You only have 3 other major competitors, and 3 other minor competitors. Concord was released in the perfect spot to maximize profit, right before Marvel Rivals come out but people are more interested in Deadlock but getting access to deadlock is iffy. OW was the only really hard hero shooter that is a direct competitor because Apex and Valorent are all very try hardy. The other competitors were just the standard soldier shooter with gimmicks, IE; Furry shooter, Blackops, and Battlefield, and their past and better versions that people are probably burnt out on. Concord was in the near perfect spot to max profit with only a few things holding it down, IF it was any good. It just wasn't that interesting.
I do wonder if they released before OW went f2p, that more people may have been more open to trying it Sounds like it was definitely a timing issue (or that the price point was too high)
Gameplay: clunky Weapons: unsatisfying Character designs: offensive to those they were meant to represent Advertising: abysmal Map design: actually good.
It died because: A) £50 for 6 game modes and no campaign is stupid. B) They had next to 0 advertising. C) They made a game for an already saturated market. D) The characters were not memorable. E) Sony already fucked their reputation as a producer with HD2. F) They expected people to make PSN accounts.
You really don't need much advertising these days. Get working copies into streamers hands before release, "content creators" will do the advertising job for you. Traditional advertising still matters but it's a much smaller piece than it used to be. Agree on all points though, didn't see anyone trying this or excited for it before release.
If they had good advertising, released this as a free game, released this game 8 years ago so the market wasn't saturated, Sony had a better reputation, and made no PSN requirement the game still would have failed because of the terrible character design and trying to cram DEI into games.
Helldivers debunks the notion that the pricetag had anything to do with the failure. It was the crap game design + forced woke politics. I know it, you know it, everyone knows it.
Just because he agrees with the opinion that the design was ugly it does not mean it must be true for everyone and that is exactly what he said. I think he downplayed it a bit too much but it is still not a contradiction to say what he said.
@@Mytelefe I'm sorry, but these characters are objectively ugly. Beauty isn't 100% subjective, there's a reason why there's "ideal" bodyshapes in movies, TV and games, etc. These characters look way too much like liberal urban college attendees and no one wants to get that close to the ugly side of real life many have to contend with.
@@Mytelefe oh well, I'm sure this thoughtprocess will make many a more game like Concord, since everyone is even more unhinged than Thor is in the western video game market, NO one can just "say it", they all have to play emperor's new clothing.
@@keithfilibeck2390 It's hard for people to admit the game was ugly through and through, full of woke garbage that is unappealing to most. It was made for those people, and they didn't even buy it themselves.
Another problem I have with Concord designs: A lot of them don't tell me anything about the character I look at Reinhardt from Overwatch and I instantly know what he is big, tanky and hard hitting with his hammer I look at Scout from Team fortress 2 and I instantly know what he is fast, nimble and attacks at short range with his scattergun 6:10 Designs like this don't tell me anything
@@maxparece4155And it isn't even a handgun, lol. It is a crossbow and slingshot combination type thing. That's how badly they convey information through their designs.
The main things that killed Concord are: The boring and generally bad character design. The fact a Hero team Shooter cost $40 despite not seemingly doing anything different And the Terrible PR by the developers on twitter.
Well his first argument was right, it's all subjective. He then realized he agrees with the popular opinion of "these characters are pretty ugly" and went on to explain why that may be. His first point still stands, there's probably an audience these characters are appealing to, it's just nowhere near big enough to carry such a big game.
Also the "it wasn't marketed very well" is hilarious. This thing was marketed to the edges of the Earth and back. It's just no one cared. Why is Thor coping?
@@shykorustotora To be fair, I never heard of it before it launched. I frequent various social media, RUclips and so on. Not a single ad or banner seen for this thing. And if I did, it was not memorable at all.
@@shykorustotora Yeah I very clearly remember seeing the trailer for this game in showcase stream with many other game trailers. And even back then the trailer didnt impress me and chat seemed to have the same opnion too.
Honestly, I was interested in it from the reveal trailer, up until they revealed what kind of game it was. Interest went from "This looks kinda neat, could be fun" to "oh... meh" instantly.
@RealityRogue It all looks really "flat", everything stands out, which in return, nothing really does. I'm not really an artist but what I remember in design, it's really important for a design to have some focal point, which should catch your eye, but as I said earlier, nothing does.
"Some" that like those character designs number in the couple thousand tops. Otherwise this game would've succeeded. Thor can say whatever about liking the characters being subjective but when your game doesn't even make enough to stay alive more than 2 weeks and one of the biggest criticism heard everywhere is that your characters are ugly, I think you found the limit to that "subjectivity" cope.
*criticizes chat for saying character designs are ugly by saying that’s just an opinion* *immediately explains his opinion that the characters are ugly*
I will speak for myself here... The reason why I didn't touch Concord, was because the character designs were bland. If a game doesn't look attractive to me, I don't care how well it plays. I'm not going to get into it. Shallow as that may come off. If it doesn't look kick ass, then it's a pass. Too much competition out there for a 40 dollar game with lousy design elements.
Have you tried Project Zomboid? Genuine question. For me it's the best zombie survival game I've played. Maybe not for you cause it looks "bland" I guess, but damn is the gameplay good.
I gotta disagree on some points, I do think that the character design (regardless of color) has something to do with it. Just look at some of em, like Daw (is his name) for example. He looks like a plumber in ski-gear for some reason, but then has bright orange latex cleaning gloves??? It just make no sense. The tank (forgot her name) looks like she's wearing a rugby outfit with the most heinous color combination that has ever assaulted my retina's or the rocket lady, who is the exact opposite where it's literally all muted beige color all over with no defining features bar from the golfball helmet. Combine that with all the weird color choices that don't match with eachother, in an over-saturated market at a $40 price point
@@Snxgur nailed it. Characters designed by nothing but Woke Ideology. As a professional it's very hard to accidentally make such repulsive characters. They intentionally made them ugly to fit woke perspectives. Issue is, people who scream for woke inclusion dont actually play games.
The character designs look exactly like the worst design by committee slop where some out-of-touch executive kept demanding they design for some sort of caricature dubbed a "modern audience." Then everyone found out that it's a $40 game in an over-saturated genre where the standard marketing model is F2P.
The character designs looks like something you'd find out of a urban liberal college campus' students and professor staff. Beyond ugly, and completely out of touch with the world outside.
"Out of touch" is the most apt term to describe it. Just like how I'd describe Thor after watching this clip. I probably should shut up and go away instead of ranting like a madman and making a fool of myself, but man, I'm rather disappointed in this pirate dev guy. Devastated, even. He was supposed to save gaming... How dare he come out with such an L take when it matters most 😂
You can all admit that this has nothing to do with video games. It's okay. Nobody will be surprised. If you were actually worried about the game, you would be talking about the gameplay instead of signaling your political beliefs over the character designs and the ways they are presented. Of the work that was put into this game, 1% of it was spent on pandering character design. But here you are, making sure everyone knows that the reason the game was bad was because it was woke. "Virtue signaling" used to be the buzzword, and all you know how to do is signal your virtues in response. It was never really about video games for you. Just be honest that you're fighting for your political worldview to be the dominant one in a rapidly changing society, and video games just happen to be the setting that you're doing it in. You're not fooling anybody into believing this is about saving your hobby, and you aren't going to undo societal changes by crying when they're reflected in a piece of media.
@@ethanfreeman1106 What exactly is his "L take"? He didn't say it was "because the designs were woke" or anything, he criticized the character designs in nearly everything *but* that political jargon. His main point was "the color theory is completely off", something based in pretty solid facts, some of the models in the game could look pretty cool if they got a new coat of paint
@@amystarnes5977 The gameplay could be some of the best out there, but if nobody picks it up because the character designs suck then the gameplay is irrelevant. The character designs were an obvious attempt at marketing towards "modern audiences" that don't actually exist in cost effective numbers. The films that pander to "modern audiences" fail, and as we've just seen with Concord, a huge part of the reason it also failed was this obsession with creating characters for a "modern audience".
Yeah, he's quite wrong here. There are objective standards of beauty and Concord fails at most of them. Fat, ugly freakshows will not make people want to play the characters.
Yea bro spent solid minutes pointing out how every opinion is subjective before stating his opinion which is actually the same. Basically he just wanted to point out something obvious like "opinions are subjective" which is completely pointless. He also got hyper focused on the color theory like that's the only thing wrong with the character designs, and as if the character designs were the only thing wrong with the game. I like Thor for many of his calm and collected insights but dude is just way out of the loop this time. He would've been a lot better off not talking about concord at all. 🤐
Yeah he really missed hard with his take on this game. It was just pure ass, plain and simple. He's talented enough to recognize that, even if he's trying to be nice to fellow devs. No reason to sugar coat this one.
@@pixelman2626that's exactly what's happening here. He's afraid of being called racist or bigoted. That comes from a place of ego and narcissism. Unfortunately things like this are sort of a test for peoples' intellectual honesty. Lots of creators whose content I enjoy are failing that test currently and essentially selling out to modern leftist ideology.
@@HaplessOne Oh yeah, all 30,000 of those players So successful Blizzard isn't going to be around for much longer and Microsoft just laid over like 2,000 of the worthless drones at that trash company
It is subjective, but some rules in art exist for a reason. They're not objective but when 90% of people find something unappealing the difference doesn't matter much.
@@TheGeekFactor i think they brought it up because early in the video someone says that the character design it ugly and he says "no, you think the character design is ugly. you didn't like it for you" *and then* thor explains why he thinks it's ugly. so it kinda sounds like thor is shitting on that guy for having that opinion and then thor goes and has that same opinion. its kinda funny.
"subjective" Sure art is subjective, just like music, games or movies, but you are lying if you say there isn't a standard, a good designer/director (be it game designer, quest designer, character designer, etc) knows what will appeal to the major audience. And whoever throws colour theory around being the biggest problem with character design is trying their hardest to ignore the elephant in the room, tho there's definitely some really bad colour choices for sure.
Art is subjective and everybody has their own way of doing things. HOWEVER! In order to break the rules, one must first learn the rules before breaking them. The character designers clearly didn't.
I'm on the same page. A hot girl in an ugly dress is still a hot girl. This game had ugly girls in ugly dresses... edit, maybe not ugly, but they really didn't try...
People who can be cancelled for having the wrong thoughts can't address that elephant. Thor would've been better off just not talking about this game at all. Complicit in their woke games.
God save me from youtube commenters that are completely unable to recognize or use nuance. Let me simplify this for you. Thor said "art is subjective". This does not, in any way or form, imply "art is subjective therefore any opinion on the art is invalid." For god's sake get off of twitter and learn how to interact with people without drawing erroneous conclusions!
They presented this to the customer base early on and their entire potential customer base said "This looks terrible, we don't want this". They responsed with "You're a bigot, istaphobe, etc." and they marched forward. They showed it later and the people with the money said the same thing. "we don't want this". The dev response was unchanged. They did a paid beta for preorders followed by a free beta. The free beta had less players than the paid one (likely meaning a ton of refunds). The game came out and failed because of the exact reasons the customer base stated. Studio goes surprised Pikachu. It's clearly the bigots. They made a game for a customer that doesn't exist and blamed the people they had been shunning all along for its failure. The "modern audience" doesn't exist and the devs can't understand that they are part of an extremely loud extremely small minority with no money to spend on games. They actually came out after the game exploded on the launch pad and announced that one of the characters was actually transgender because they thought that was going to bring in a wave of sales. Some projects fail because they deserve to.
There is a big difference between saying "these characters look bad" and "these characters look bad because they're LGBT/minorities/fat". The first is fine, the second is bigoted and is unfortunately a lot of what people who never even touched the game are complaining about. One of the characters was trans from the get-go but Sony did marketing that felt like pandering rather than genuine inclusivity (Catalyst in Apex Legends for example).
Correction Devs do not make these decisions. Producers do. Devs produce the game that producers tell them to make. Designers draw the skins producers tell them to draw. Animators animate the models producers tell them to animate. It is the producers that tanked this game, not the devs. Blaming devs for a bad production is like blaming the cook for a restaurant's decor.
@@scofrona Don't get it twisted. Not wanting obese alphabet people of color on the screen is a completely legitimate opinion, held by the majority of the market, that stakeholders in this and other industries ignore at their (sometimes catastrophic) financial peril.
@@scofrona I think the big problem is that most people can't really tell why they don't like something when they don't, so they latch onto the obvious things. Like, they don't like the fat dude that looks kinda feminine in the face, so they latch onto that - fat and not masculine. Meanwhile, Roadhog in OW has (as far as I know) never really gotten criticism for being fat.
I think it was pretty dead on arrival because it was like what, a 40 dollar game? And the majority of the games in that genre, the overwatch type of stuff, are usually free to play. I think that’s a factor.
I was in a focus group back in the early eighties, when I was a young buck, where they brought a bunch of us kids into an elementary school gym to have us try both atari's ET and the A-Team game that they were making for the 2600. The overwhelming consensus was the A-Team game was fun and E.T. was confusing as all heck.
you know what the concord character designs remind me of? the meme "that moment when my character apears in the cutscene" and you have picture of pimp vader. thats the energy i get from most of these. its goofy but not the "im laughing my ass off" kinda goofy but more the "stares puzzled at the character for 10 minutes to try and figure out what exactly you are looking at" kinda goofy. and for me it lies 95% in the colors. also concord really tries to be like guardians of the galaxy but "we have guardians of the galaxy at home" edition.
Yeah the thing is that whether the character looks good or not is subjective, but there are certain objective qualities to character design. In a game like this, characters are meant to visually convey information about what they do so that you can better understand their abilities and make the game more intuitive. If you go through and try to guess what most of these characters actually do, they utterly fail to convey that in that regard. Like that purple and gold lady? She builds walls and does area denial. It’s bonkers.
@@bipolarminddroppingshe talks about some very obvious stuff using some big boy words. Big deal. He still doesn't get why people react so negatively to the game. His knowledge is only surface level but you'll still worship him like the nordic god he is. Which is fair, actually.
@@bipolarminddroppings My guy. The "color and composition" are not the main problem here. It's like pretending the problem with the monocycle you've entered to the nascar race is the paintjob. The problem is that all these character designs follow the far left woke guide book that dictate that nobody can be attractive (unless its homoherotic), everyone has to check has many "diversity" check boxes as possible (which mean non-white, non-male, non-attractive) and everything has to drown in "millennial writing" that induce reflexive cringe from anyone looking at the result. THIS is the problem, it's okay, you can admit it.
1:07 - "Character design was very ugly? .. No you THINK the character design is ugly" then proceeds to criticize the visual design for several minutes.
The problem was they got feedback. People made comments that were arguably fair. I heard during the beta there were no gamechanger like ults, TTK was abysmal, and your character moved like they were wearing one of those heavy sumo suits. What I then heard from the devs in response: it’s bigotry. If you use that as a response to legitimate criticism, you will fail 100% of the time.
And the moment that they made "bigotry" the hill that they chose to die on, everyone saw this as a slow motion train wreck in progress. Pay $40 for a foreseeable flop of a game, or pay nothing to watch it crash and burn. What are most people going to choose? 😏
Word, brothers. Preach 🙏 Thor clearly didn't understand what he was talking about. I hope he sees comments like these and realizes there's so much more that is wrong with the game than what comes up in his bare-bone, surface-level analysis of the characters' color schemes.
Another way to look at this is that constructive feedback about gameplay was drowned out by the sea of people crying about the game being woke, and being bigoted about it. I had to scroll for an unfortunately long time in these comments to find you describing actual gameplay issues. Literally everyone else is arguing about "DEI" and pronouns. If the feedback to my game looked like this comment section, I'd probably think I was being trolled by bigots too. Even this video isn't about the gameplay. No, I don't have any sympathy for sony losing hundreds of millions of dollars over a genuinely bad game that was super pandering to minorities. It just sounds like both the developers AND players are conflating gameplay issues with the "woke/anti-woke" nonsense. If you make a big deal over that stuff (Either because the devs are pandering, or because players are obsessed with crying "woke" at any given opportunity) then everyone is going to have a bad time because we're not even talking about video games anymore.
critiquing something is different to just saying "it's ugly" or "i dont like it"... Thor is literally talking about colour theory and design nuance. At no point does he call it ugly or talk about subjective stuff like that. He is talking in well established design terms about theoretical concepts, he even says the character design itself is fine, it's just a colour palette issue. Can you not see the difference?
He's saving the ass of his friends in the industry by being empathetic, or something. Any other person would just bash the designs bc we don't know the context where they were made.
@@bipolarminddroppingsare you unable to see that everything that has ever been expressed or perceived by anyone is subjective by definition? Mentioning that every single time before going into discussion is rather redundant and serves no purpose than to show how level headed you are compared to the opposition. Facts are what people generally agree upon. It's not the same as your reality. People who talk like "such and such are supposed to be an objective fact" are just appealing to the delusion of there being one universal knowledge of truth, and the assumption that if I am self-aware to that degree then I'm probably more correct than you are. In other words: big boy words equals a lot of nonsense.
@@bipolarminddroppings is he a trained character designer, concept artist, etc, or a programmer and hacker? Because you don't understand my original comment, referencing that his criticism is also in the realm of opinion, and gas lighting his own audience as he then goes in with a similar commentary.
@@bipolarminddroppings Critiques of art are subjective. No critique of art is objective because value doesn't exist independent of some perspective. Both "bad color composition" and "weird" are subjective opinions. The core difference is that he's calling it ugly in greater detail than Twitch Chat can reasonably express, especially without prior exposure to inter-subjective models of aesthetics, like color theory. He was probably being overly charitable to Concord when reacting to Twitch Chat before he saw the evidence, so he provided a meaningless dismissal, "that's subjective", which if that were a reasonable dismissal, then it would dismiss all critiques of art.
@@Scary_Balthazar The point is still legit. The game isn't even officially announced, has no known release date and it's steam page isn't even 10% finished. Somehow clocking in 150 thousand players daily already. NO MARKETING. Concord actually had a lot of marketing done, but no one cared to share the trailers with their friend because the cast is full of ugly-ass, woke, DEI-looking freakshows out of a urban liberal college campus. Both the students and the professors, because you got granny with a plastic bag on her head who escaped the asylum and more. Fat, freak-show-coloured freaks is the cast of characters in this game. No one wanted to share that with their friends.
Also thor saying "tHeRe'S LiTtLe aDvErTiSeMeNt" when in reality, a fkton of gaming news websites was literally shoving this game on people's mouth for like 2 weeks. IGN, Kotaku, PCGamer, etc, they all kept tweeting and writing articles about Concord about how great it is and ranked it above average. Even the "gaming" journalists themselves kept tweeting how good the gameplay was and how they kept playing it lmao.
A majority of people can hold the same opinion. That doesn't make it a fact. An objective fact isn't an opinion that a majority agrees on, it's something that can be proved without any opinion or bias present.
As an artist- it's not only the colors on characters, the designs seem unappealing too. So many of them at first glance look like unlikeable pricks. And I feel like hero shooters live and die by people finding their "main". If you find every single character unappealing enough that you don't even want to try how do they play it's a big issue. The second issue being that some of the characters you cannot figure out how do they play by just looking at them. Just look at OW characters, for most of them you can glance at them and figure out to some extend how do they play. Last thing is controversial and I am hesitant to mention, but I feel it has some part in it too. I feel having conventionally attractive characters that warrant flood of fanart does alot for excitement for the game. We all know what Overwatch is ACTUALLY known best for online, and I was commissioned few times to do nsfw art of them too. There is argument there about oversexualization of characters, which is valid. But it is clear that it did have alot to do with popularity of games like OW, Valorant, Street Fighter and so many more. Dedicated fans will play those either way, but appealing characters might make a good chunk of casuals play the game. Look what happened when Lady Dimitrescu was revealed in RE Village, internet was down bad for MONTHS. Absolutely the best free marketing a game could ever have
Concord has the distinction of being the first game successfully able to resist rule 34. It's currently trending as 'I can fix it' within the character designer community. Imagine creating art so objectively horrid that it spawns a sub culture committed to repairing the aesthetic damage.
* No marketing * No innovation * SONY (free space) * Saturated Market * High budget production That's a video game production failure BINGO! (edit) Notice how "dev talent" isn't on the card?
I'm sorry, but this doesn't work as the excuse. Deadlock from Valve is no different and they struggled keeping the game a secret, it's not even announced yet and is doing well. I'm seeing the exact same list you're making there for Concord. No marketing, no innovation (at a glance), Valve ('free space'? Whatever that means), saturated market, high budget production. Difference is that Concord is full of ugly-ass freakshows of characters and DEI Woke garbage and Deadlock doesn't seem to share those specific flaws. Meanwhile Deadlock, which has yet to get it's Steam page set up properly, enjoys 150k player peaks daily at the moment.
His technical analysis of business & design is quite on point. Although Thor is A)missing or B)unwilling to admit why the game actually failed. That's A)because he's too ingrained within American tech industry or B)he actually has weak, unoffensive, fance-sitting takes where it matters.
8 years ago this probably sounded like a better idea. On the other hand, it also means they had tons of games to compare to and improve on. Maybe they didn’t have the code but they knew the mechanics and what made those games fun. Instead they just made a poor copy.
@@Alacritous fairly sure Overwatch existed when they started their Overwatch clone. also, 2 years in you can do another check and go "ok, so people are actually sticking with Overwatch, what is the negative and positive things about it" and add that to your game. it's literally the same BS people said when the Epic Game Store launched and it was just bad, it missed and still missing some very basic features and they went "well, steam had so many years to improve!" yeah ok, but at what point did someone go "what is Steam doing well and what can we improve on what they aren't doing well?" the same with Concord, they for some reason did 8 years of just tunnel vision and then are surprised when their game flops.
@@Alacritous But they had the time to adjust the design over the years that had hero shooters. Even during development cycle, you can iterate on the design based on the outside inputs like how is competitor doing etc. There was TF2 when they started and the characters in there are iconic. Simple in design but you can recognize them and their color schemes wasn't hurting your eyes.
Before he reviews the character designs: *says the objectively true thing, that character design is subjective After he reviews the character designs: *tries to find some way of saying the character designs are ugly without actually saying they're ugly, because he lead the video with the objectively true statement that it's subjective
Let's not forget that the character designs weren't the only thing that didn't land. The sound design for *every* gun sounded weak. Most had less impact than a paintball gun, and the rocket launcher sounded safe to hand to an eight year old unsupervised.
I'm one of the people who played it. I loved the game and liked it even more like Valorant or Overwatch gameplaywise. The massive downers were the slow movement speed and the 40 $ entry price.
@@nims5537 I liked them well enough except for Emari's helmet, but that's just because I don't like open helmets like that without a visor of some kind.
I'm an Overwatch player. I am THE TARGET demographic and I didn't hear about the game until I heard it flopped. Major misstep by marketing. Even bad games have more preorders than this.
Marketing has little to do with it. Deadlock is in the same situation as Concord (Actually worse, they've done literally zero marketing) and already has 150k players daily without being officially announced with a release date yet, not even available for a public beta. Concord actually put out trailers and cinematics, etc, but people just didn't share them because ugly. The game is ugly, the characters are ugly, and that's why no one talked about it or got hyped for it. They marketed it, just no one cared to share the trailers with their friends, etc, because the cast of characters is the ugliest to date in any hero shooter. Also costs money, when all the competition is free. It's a woke DEI garbagefest.
@LethalOwl I don't think that this is a good comparison. Concord was made by a brand new studio, so they didn't have any brand recognition. Valve on the other hand is Valve they have a reputation of not putting something out unless it's top tier quality. This Gane failed because it was generic, expensive for the market it's in and undermarketed.
@@jenerossitea9247I didn't know about this game until the same reason as OP. However, I'm not really into team shooters like OW, Paladins, etc. so I'd imagine that's why I knew nothing about Concord until it was already gone.
1:20 The only actual arguments that talked about the game being in any way good were "its game play feels alright", that's all. Unless you want to believe the video game media outlets like Kotaku or IGN who have made themselves clear to be biased to malicious extent, this game failed on every front except *maybe* the game play feeling OK which isn't enough. There are also rules or rather trends in art that do define if something looks good or on a base line appealing to look at, if there weren't we wouldn't have art schools so the argument of subjectivity in this case is pretty poor. Theres more than enough videos and clips of artists going over why games characters look bad with great explanations.
"Looks ugly" isn't the same as "unappealing design with poor colour and design theory choices", both are opinion but one of them is opinion with some reasoning. It's still subjective over all but objective points to back it up, like "this goes against colour theory" or such, vs "It's ugly" or "It's woke" or whatever other brain rot.
@@NikiGothBunneh I mean if the game gets a peak player base of 700 and the most agreed upon take is "it's ugly" it's not really brain rot it's just common consensus. When making a product, you listen to the people you want to buy your product (obviously) but the management for this games production called any criticism of the character design both from online for the early access and QA "White noice". If 90% of people agree "this is ugly" it doesn't matter if it's an opinion or not in practice, same way as with "Rings of Power" or other corporate slop.
Something that was obvious from the beginning is the art design. Art does not appear like that, it has to go through some refinement process to appear as such. With a little bit of google searching, you can find that the old designs for concord had a lot more flair and personality, that were likely squashed and trampled over by some higher up executive. Second of all, there was a big gamble in selling narrative, and they were likely going to give us more information about the lore of the story AFTER it had released... which depended on the game being taken up... which never happened. This is nothing else than the fault of executives.
I would love to see a documentary about the internal situation of the studio as this was going on. Would be an amazing case-study, because how it went down so quickly is extremely bizarre.
I don't normally disagree with you but "The Characters are ugly" is (as you say) subjective. But the criticism is "The Character were deliberately made to be ugly" which is either a fact or it isn't. No subjective opinion required.
@@Megaman231122 Sure they were. Pink-hair-side-shave-green-skin girl? That's a deliberate choice, and no person alive would think it's actually not ugly.
@@Megaman231122 every possible attempt was made to make the characters the antithesis of "traditional beauty". As a way to virtue signal for inclusion. Which backfired HARD, because they ended up with an entire roster of unlikeable, unnattractive, unrelatable characters that very few people get excited about BEING for a couple hours. I don't get excited about playing a character based on an overweight trans woman. Doesn't mean I hate trans people, doesn't mean I don't think characters like that should exist. Means I don't get excited, by inhabiting one. And there are many, many, many other people. In fact MOST of the gaming community as is evidenced here, who feel the same way. The problem with Concord is they didnt provide ANY relatable characters to their primary audience. Not even one. Tired of this comment section pretending it ain't what it is.
"Imagine Overwatch launching to 190 players peak", this actually DID happen to a game called Battleborn around the time Overwatch was released, and it was completely overshadowed and only averaged around under 1000 players after the first 3 months. History repeats itself....
"ugly" might be subjective but t concord's designs certainly weren't very distinct. I've never played Valorant or Overwatch or Genshin but even if you showed me new characters from those games they all have strong enough senses of style that I could tell you what game they're from that alone
I look at every single one of those characters and can't get a drop of personality at all. I can't even place them in the same reality whatsoever. Legitimately it looks like a placeholder.
It had little to no marketing, and the little marketing it DID have came exclusively from the people talking about how generic it was, and how boring the character designs were. It doesnt help that the developers were actively fighting their supposed customers
"calling it ugly is subjective," Proceeds to critique the color scheme of the character models calling them unappealing. So they're ugly. Glad we agree
The absolute single biggest failure in video game history "Welllll, it just didn't land right, it wasn't the character design, you say you don't like the characters but that's your opinion". Can you believe the delusion in this guy? The BIGGEST failure in video game history "it just didn't land right". Can you hear yourself?
I also found it weird that someone said the designs are ugly, and Thor said "No that's subjective." ...then proceeded to explain why every character design is ugly for 7 minutes. Like he didn't agree with it until it was 'his' idea.
@@FishAnvil if you can't see the difference between talking about colour theory and colour composition and saying "that's ugly" then you're really on the wrong channel. Hit the three little dots by the bottom of the video and select "Don't reccommend this channel"
@@Nope-uj6yh he was on the security team for wow. He wasn't a dev. If you're gonna insult someone's work history, at least get it right. Also, WoW is only the most successful game in history, and Blizzard were historically known as one of the greatest dev teams ever. You must be new here...
I played in the closed beta and what I took away from it was the game modes were not fun, the character mechanics felt clunky, the menu's weren't all that fantastic either (leaning towards confusing at times). And there was some super confusing weird mechanic with picking your roster to get certain bonusses that would then benefit your team. Before even jumping into the game I looked into some gameplay footage of what the game modes were to communicate this to my team and discuss strats: Trophy hunt mode, player deaths drop a trophy. -> quick respawn Cargo run: capture the flag / extraction -> No respawn, Team deathmatch Clashpoint: King of the hill?? -> No respawn, Team deathmatch The no respawn modes basically meant if you worked together and just focused on making kills, the objective meant nothing. You just win by wiping the other team, then worry about the objective. We were playing with a full premade team and all of us had either lots of experience in valorant or overwatch so we didn't have much resistance. The Trophy hunt felt more balanced (it wasn't), we did still play against people that had no idea what was going on most of the time, you had to actually pick up a token after you killed someone and a lot of people didn't. But at the very least the game kept going for a while rather than just wiping the other team. The characters either felt not that impactful to play or clunky. I started mostly on Roka, basically Pharah from Overwatch but with the hoverpack from Spelunky 2. How it worked is: you jump into the air, then you activate the hoverpack, locking you at your height, you couldn't gain more height once you enabled the hover. That wasn't the most clunky part though. Roka's Blast Dive ability, comparable to Doomfist's Seismic Slam: You slam into the ground from above. However with Roka, you had no control. It was a set location based on your height and looking direction. You couldn't aim it to be more below you or further away. In the Deathmatches, healing characters like Daw meant you had a much higher chance of winning. This may sound obvious but, with everyone being able to freely pick, the odds of people picking Daw were pretty low. In Trophy hunt you could switch between characters, if you started out as Daw and placed healing pads, the pads would remain if you swapped to a different character until the opponent destroyed them. Basically you could have heals without a healer. My favourite character to play was probably Kyps, as it was pretty much Sombra from Overwatch and you could carry entire lobbies. However, multiplayer games are always more fun with friends and even though the close beta was pretty short, none of us felt really compelled to keep playing after a day. I did continue a bit with solo games to try different characters and settled on Kyps but it was already clear to us that nobody would care for the game if it came out. Not sorry for the pants comment, bread for the mods. PS. The character designs had no impact on the gameplay for me. I do believe It took away a lot of the appeal to buy the game for people that didn't get a chance to play it.
I didn't know about it at all. When I heard Concord was cancelled and being refunded, I immediately was like "wait didn't the Concord jet get grounded like 10 years ago?"
I really don't think they were trully blindsided. I think upper management was aware of what everyone below them already knew, but they wanted a couple more months of pay and also as time to look for a new job before their CV was tainted by this shitshow.
It's too late for that too. Let's say they remove the eight years that they spent on this game from their resumes. Now they have to explain that eight-year gap instead.
@@pyrioncelendil Or they can just say "I'm doing X at this big game with a 200 Mill budget and with Sony backing it up" Hence why I said BEFORE launch. As long as the game hasn't launched it's perfectly easy to do so
This isn't a game that needed 8 years of development. I have a feeling that 2 years into development this game was much closer to release than the final version, which was ugly and had toxic devs. Sorry, but Devs who shittalk gamers are bad devs. No excuses.
There are objective, quantifiable ways of making a pretty face versus an ugly face, and if you can’t admit that then you’re beyond hope. A choice that makes a face ugly can be made up for by turning the dial one way on other features, but you would be objectively filling in for somewhere that was intentionally taken away from or otherwise obscuring the ugly. Sincerely, a 3D Modeler.
@@scofronaThe hunchback of notre dame has an intentionally uglified facial structure. The movie proceeds to make him appealing by virtue of its 2D makeup and fluidity of animation. He is ugly, on purpose. He is appealing to watch because he is well animated and surrounded by beautiful scenery. So you are right that Ugly does not equal unappealing But these character designs are ugly on purpose.
@@alexandergreene461 What does "ugly on purpose" mean to you? If it's the clothing and color scheme I'd agree, but if it's because a character is trans or fat then I'd have to say that's bigotry rather than a design critique.
@@alexandergreene461 he's not appealing to watch because the other things are good. He's appealing to watch because the character serves a purpose that is well executed. The design speaks to you, tells you a story, which is then contradicted by the actions of the character, thus making a very nice character journey and kind of a touching story. These characters have none of that. It doesn't have much to do with the rest being beautiful. There's many games, like Binding of Isaac, that have almost exclusively grotesque, hideous characters, yet are super charming.
@@scofrona If the character designs aren't interesting enough for you to learn their sexuality in the first place, finding that character gross and unappealing isn't bigotry
1:20 The character design was awful in its fundamental core, the appreciation of art such as character design, direction, or photography is subjective, yes, but the basic rules are not, color composition, for example, is something teachable.
TLDR: I think Thor has a natural instinct to go against the current of popular opinion, but in this video it really shows that he had to eat his own words after saying the design was subjective. It was a bad take from the viewer... until it was his. I initially thought that Thor was able to give some good advice and observations from time to time, but after this video I really find myself deeply mistrusting of a person that just snaps opinions like this. I've been accompanying the Concord case for a good while now and from my perspective in this video Thor is just yapping about something that I think he doesn't entirely understand. This is especially shown how he firstly takes a somewhat defensive take about how "design is subjective" (which is mostly a false statement imo, but that's another story), saying that the game was trying a weird unconventional art style ( 1:08 ), only to then just completely lose his own argument by his own words by saying the design is faulty by itself ( 8:07 ). For as much as I want to be understanding that he's streaming and it's easy to lose your train of thought while talking live to thousands of people, I feel like Thor likes to go against the current just to sound more intelligent or maybe cause controversy? Saying shit adverse to popular opinion can be nice from time to time, but doing it so many times and the way he usually does it with a sense of authority ("I've been in the gaming industry for x number of years, therefore my opinion matters more") is really disappointing. Does anyone else think about him this way or am I just reaching? lmao
Yeah he's very wrong about "beauty being subjective", etc. There are objective standards of beauty, and Concord ain't it. The characters are just plain ugly, unappealing, morbidly obese or whatever else have you. One looks like she's wearing a plastic bag over her head, like she walked out of an elder care home all deranged. It's a freakshow of the worst sort. Then we got androgynous fatty macgee and the cyan-red wierdo with a malformed skull, like come on. They're ugly, objectively.
I get the sense that Thor is terrified of saying anything bad about woke culture, which is what ruined this game. Everyone saw those character designs and the pronouns and the performative inauthentic corporate DEI "inclusiveness" and knew that the game would be trash.
Agreed. What we just saw here is a very standard case of "woke hostage syndrome" that every single person working in the video game industry is suffering from. At best he (like everyone else in this industry) is deathly afraid of speaking up against wokeness, at worst he drunk the koolaid. The problem is that all these character designs follow the far left woke guide book that dictact that nobody can be attractive (unless its homoherotic), everyone has to check has many "diveristy" check boxes as possible (which mean non-white, non-male, non-attractive) and everything has to drown in "millenial writing" that induce reflexive cringe from anyone looking at the result. THIS is the problem, it's okay, you can admit it.
The biggest problem I had with the character designs are not that they were ugly, it was that all but MAYBE one of them looked like they were background characters from a better game. They felt generic, lifeless, designed by committee
Of course they were designed by committee. The whole point of designing by committee is spreading the blame so no one person is singularly responsible for a foreseeable failure.
They had gone too far. They had spent millions, they had destroyed their outreach, they had taken zero caution. All that I could forgive. But, Concord... ...pastels?
All of the characters look like when you make a custom character in a game and turn the brightness and color all the way up and it looks really put of place
Ohhh common Thor, I’m not even close to being a professional Chas ter designer, I’m way better than your average person since I did study art theory for many years, but not a pro, AND I am confident I could have done better. Their characters broke every rule of good quality character design. It was awful, played awful and didn’t have a target audience, and required $40 entry fee to even TRY the game - it was obviously going to fail
Nothing went wrong with the game or the marketing. It was a game made for the modern audiences, and the numbers it got just reflect how many gamers exist in those modern audiences.
Yup, and if Thor is too blind to see or admit it, he is far less intelligent than I gave him credit for. Or, if it's because he won't admit, he's far more spineless than I thought. Sad.
Marketing actually kinda sabotaged it. The one trailer they did for the game was absolutely and incredibly well done...for a single player game. I remember the moment that I heard it was a hero shooter, it was like something died in my soul. What came out of having watched the trailer was legitimate hype, followed by existential disappointment. And negative advertisement is something you just can't do in gaming, because of how vital initial sales are. You turn off your initial audience for whatever reason, and you will pay the price; games that came back from bad advertising are very few and far between for a good reason. The first bit being that they were single-player games, and/or were lower-budget to start with. But the main thing that killed the game was that the gameplay itself was unpolished, which is just inexcusable for an eight-year development, AND you got to witness the sinking of Overwatch 2. Like, you had giant red warning signs the whole time you were in development, and you didn't address your own similarities/issues? You were warned that you had to have a solid game loop out the door, and while I get that is way easier said than done, it is also what is simply expected of saturated markets. You are either blatantly a cash grab, an outright experiment, or an ironclad office that makes every effort to give players everything they want, and as little of what they don't as possible. There is no room for mediocrity, especially when gamer budgets have gotten increasingly tighter in recent years. And I think that is something that is very hard to take into account post-covid: once upon a time, you could expect your average Little Timmy to just beg their parents for the $40-60 game that just came out, and most people wouldn't bat an eye at the cost. That is...just not the case in recent years, and it is 100% the fault of modern economic instability. People just can't purchase like they used to, and it was only a matter of time before this ugly truth came around and bit the gaming industry in the ass. And I think Concord is merely the latest and most disastrous faceplant, and will most certainly not be the last. It is also a very bad thing. Thor is right in that you can't make better games without knowing both what did work, and what didn't. If there is no room for mistakes, then quality overall is going to suffer because there is no room for anyone to learn. And considering what non-gaming markets and businesses look like recently...
truth is, minority groups fought for equality, those fights finally got mainstream, bad people turned the fights for equality into fights for superiority. people has to stop trying to make some groups special, you don't have to yell to everyone what you think you are. those things are cool to know but NEVER should be the main point of a character. look at Varus from League of Legends, he's cool af.
The characters were ugly. That's it. There is no hidden secret behind it. People don't want to play ugly and fat characters for no reason. Why is everyone acting as if it wasn't obvious.
Specifically, on the color palette, I see what they were trying to do here, but I am also not a huge fan. The color work reminds me of old 1950s/60s sci-fi book covers, and I really dig that the artists tried for that. I feel it went off the rails because they tried to encapsulate the entirety of that color expression in each form rather than as a holistic statement that considers the environment and the forms that occupy it. In my opinion, large, equally portioned blocks of contrasting colors in a single form create cognitive dissonance rather than visual interest. I also feel that characters fall into one of two camps: maximum vibrancy or completely desaturated. I wish there was a little more interplay between vibrancy and desaturated mid-tone in some of the designs. If you lean too heavily into either side, your expression can come off as flat or ungrounded, respectively.
Yeah not sure why he pushes back against the negativity that the Concord devs called down on themselves. You don't get to call your potential customerbase "talentless freaks" and lambast us and expect us to just accept that. We're gonna respond in kind, and the result is your game getting shut down two weeks after release cuz the "intended audience" never showed us, as they never do. The talentless freaks thing should be studied for years to come.
The sheer magnitude of Concord's failure makes it a useful tool for argumentation, which is why we've seen so many videos and takes from people claiming that "{{STUFF I DISLIKE}} is the reason the game failed". But yeah, I agree it's probably a pretty simple case.
There's also a number of minor nuances which, while they definitely didn't help Concord, were also FAR from the cause of its demise: - The Ranked mode FORCES players to swap characters. Each round you win, the winning character is greyed out and cannot be used by you for the rest of the match. This means you can not one trick/main a character, and you need a hero pool of at least 5 different characters. - Despite the first problem, you do not have access to the whole roster in-game - you must select a "deck" of characters to have available, and there are not enough slots in a deck for each character to be available. - The only cosmetic alteration to the characters is for unlockable variants of them. These variants come with stat changes to their weapon/abilities, meaning they aren't "cosmetic" at all.
If the game's art style wasn't so garish, if the game's pacing wasn't so slow, and if the developers were actually open to criticism (they weren't), then it's these flaws that would've tanked Concord's success, simply because who'll accept such limitations in a hero shooter that costs $40 when you don't get screwed this hard by games that are f2p?
For all the people in the comments trying to say I said the characters weren't bad and then they were. No.
The opinion of if they look bad or not is subjective meaning it's personal opinion.
Some of these characters look great.
Some of them look like clown vomit.
Writing off the entire game and not learning from what did and did not work would be a mistake.
Always investigate things and always brush past the general "everything is bad and that's a fact" takes.
All that happens when you parrot along is you miss out on learning something new.
The blue lips remind me of when I sucked on a blue Popsicle
I think you're right, I think the main problem is market saturation, if I'm right then "marvel rivals" will also fail
I think the reason a lot of people think you said they’re not bad, and then described the ways that you thought some characters were bad, is because you made some general statements that were true for many of the characters, but not all of them, such as the comment about color choice and composition, which you did cite a counter example or two for.
I think there’s massive respect for your wisdom on a lot of topics from a majority of your audience, and I think that translates into a lot of people treating your opinions as facts, or more specifically, claims that are either to be agreed with objectively or disagreed with objectively. So the idea that your claims are subjective and personal is lost as a result of that mindset.
Modern social media has trained that into a lot of us in different ways that I don’t know how to describe. It’s hard to get out of that mindset.
another thing that really discouraged people from buying this game is the fact that the characters were given pronouns, which has absolutely 0 gameplay relevance or bearing
@@aznfooso... reactionary bs completely unrelated to gameplay?
Fun story: In the time when concord launched, i was on vacation without internet. I have been gone for just two weeks and when i returned concord was already dead, so i missed The WHOLE lifespan of a game that i didnt even know had been released, failed miserably and dissapeared before i came home
The game didn't even last the average lifespan of a housefly apparently, so if any bugs got into your house during vacation they probably had a more fulfilling lifespan than Concord ever would have.
They made basically every cryptoslop game look successful by comparison...
@@Subpar1O1 a fly lives 15 to 30 days, concord released on august 23 and was shut down September 6 giving it a lifespan if 16 days
@@panda__king365 cool, so it had the lifespan of a house fly
@@marcodiashd1844 Nice to meet one of the lucky ones. I heard some escaped.
Everyone is asking “How could Sony put out such a dud?”
The guys who backed Morbius and Madam Web?
But also the people that made astrobot,last of us,and spiderman Sony’s highs and lows are drastic
Well maybe if we ask them really nicely, they could relaunch Concord… I for example was really busy that week…😂
I honestly liked madam web, but it wasnt one of those i can watch 100 times and not get bored of it
Why did bro jump into the ambulance.
Sony Pictures and Sony Interactive Entertainment are functionally different companies
Can’t remember who said it but someone pointed out that the sort of vibe for the aliens is “humans in makeup”. Which is fine for movies, they benefit from that tactile nature. but with the limitless potential of animation why would you make it look like people playing dress up?
Honestly my first reaction to the characters was "Live-action series with limited costume budget"
@@Garbageman28 I think it was sort of a feature. Realistic design. Someone pointed out that it was for easier mock up for cinematics
Could be the original scope of the game vs. development hell. Someone said they re-used a lot of motion capture animation with drastically different character proportions as well. I've also heard that humanoid aliens could have been an older design intention where they were trying to emulate older sci-fi art and film.
"people"
it worked for mass effect tho..
I tried to burger shop called Conburg, where the burgers cost $35. The bun is green, the meat is purple, and the cheese is grey. The fries will be teal and cost $5. No seasoning will be added to any of the food, as everything must be very bland. We tried to compete with other established burger chains, but unfortunately, we had to shut down our store we worked very hard on. It's your fault as consumers we failed, not our decisions along the way. You all are talentless food critics that don't understand modern food design. This is the story of Conburg.
That's such a coincidence! 😂👍
Such a beautiful story, makes me happy
Shoulda called it conburger
Thor started saying "Well the characters aren't ugly" then later realized "They're unattractive".
Yes, they are ugly, they are not pleasing to look at.
Combination of mediocre gameplay, bad maps, bad color choices, bad character designs, and slap $40 on top.
It was a perfect recipe for failure.
From what I heard the gameplay is fairly good but not nearly good enough to overcome the other deficiencies of the game. It also looks like they just took various things from other games in the hopes of making something new and interesting. I.E. one of the characters plays like a warlock in Destiny 2.
Characters look AI generated
@@urazz7739 not even like a warlock. EXACTLY like a Icarus dash dawnblade with a fighting lion.
I think he meant unnatractive in a more sexual way.
I found Thor's perspective with the Clashing Colors was interesting. They were Trying to make the character designs "Unique" With colors that clash. Which can make them ugly to look at. I'm curious if it's possible to make some of Concord's characters design better or good just by changing the colors.
Trying to charge AAA price for a game in a group of games that are generally free to play was not a wise choice.
Same thing happened with Battleborn
Wasn't only 40$?
In all fairness it wasn't priced like AAA games usually are. But that doesn't devoid it of issue
you consider 40 dollars AAA price?
Overwatch did it, the difference is it looked ab-so-lutely dope on release and the betas were insane. Also I think the launch price was like $20? Like depending on the amount of cosmetics it would cost either $20 for no cosmetics or $40 for more cosnemtics.
The characters almost look like they pressed "random" on a character selection screen and called it a day.
Pretty much. A lot of veteran concept artists have analyzed and studied each character and you can see all the flaws in their study.. not only they look like average NPCs in an average story driven game, they tell nothing about their role in the game.
Giving a flank/assassin character a bloated, bright, easily spottable red coat was not the best choice, just to name one.
some of these characters seem to have been designed by artificial intelligence lol
@@BAD_222 Nah, the videos of AI generated images of the Concord characters actually look better.
basically this all the characters have no character or at least none that you can identify at first glance. Compare this to overwatch where at first glance you are actually get at least the impression of a theme. What also helps is that overwatch heavily leans on established "cultural" themes or archetypes, the western gunslinger, the japanese cyber ninja and so on which brings a bit more flavor. Concord just dosn't have that.
Its corporate memphis in videogames. Characters designed to offend no one... In reality they attract no one.
As a GameStop manager, this game was constantly advertised.
But everytime I brought it up, no one knew about it.
It was literally in every single ad break for EVO this year...the biggest fighting game tournament with the highest overall viewership. If that's not advertising, I don't know what is.
Ads are regional, not everybody sees them but good advertising is people talking about the game which no one did @@michaelfagan1575
@@michaelfagan1575 Seems like it was advertised but only to outside markets. Personally never saw like a twitch/youtube ad for it, only heard about it from other people. It'd be like if the next Blues Clues was coming out but they blew their ad budget for a superbowl spot. A ton of views, but not necessarily your target audience.
@@michaelfagan1575 On top of multiple videos and interviews last year.
Yeah i saw advertisement everywhere on twitch RUclips and game sites. The issue is none of the ads made the game looking appealing
You say it looks fast paced, but that's one of the big problems; It's not. Characters move really slow, especially compared to it's competitors.
Thank god I'm not the only one who thinks that. I swear it looked like the game was in slow mo or low gravity
Yup, Thor spoke without understanding how much the game sucked ass. He just presumed after that first visual impression that it was just another run-of-the-mill hero shooter that was simply late to the trend and presented nothing new.
Did he do zero research before speaking with such confidence? At least be a little skeptical if you're still learning about the thing. I nearly lost all respect for Thor now.
@@ethanfreeman1106He only spoke in the perspective of a dev and not a consumer ngl.
@@ethanfreeman1106 oh come on, he said the game must have had issues with the gameplay mechanics, he just hadn't played it so didn't know what they are but he was assuming they existed.
@@garethdewhurst1499fair point. Guess I just tried to dismiss his subjective opinion in the same way be initially dismissed that random chatter. I felt that was rather unfair, so I was compelled to try doing the same thing.
Thanks for calling me out.
With that said, would Thor thank us for calling him out? Because I feel like that's what most of the people who have this same sort of reaction to his take this time are trying to do, in all honesty. I'm no exception.
The skins are like "Baby's first Warhammer figure paintjob"
@@CaliHime omg I can't UNSEE it
My first Warhammer models were orders of magnitude better than how this game looked.
They very much look like a classic clown fiesta paint job
More like Sweet Baby's first Warhammer FIgure
@@waffleswafflson3076 sweet babys first warhammer figure inkjob? i see what you did there
I'm of the opinion concord's characters look like a bunch of middle age parents were going to a guardians of the galaxy themed costume party and there was a like $20 limit on how expensive your costume could be. So they went and slapped together whatever they had lying around at home and used left over paint to colour it.
Also thor saying "tHeRe'S LiTtLe aDvErTiSeMeNt" when in reality, a fkton of gaming news websites was literally shoving this game on people's mouth for like 2 weeks. IGN, Kotaku, PCGamer, etc, they all kept tweeting and writing articles about Concord about how great it is and ranked it above average. Even the "gaming" journalists themselves kept tweeting how good the gameplay was and how they kept playing it lmao.
@@randovid1 true
I love this channel but idk if he does his own art assets. Character design is hard, but also there are some short sighted mistakes made like inoffensive silhouettes etc. It's bad because it's very bland.
@@LeBellmont I believe he's mentioned in the past he has an artist he works with. But yeah, Concord's characters are a design mess.
@@LeBellmont there's also a lot of resources on good character design, any game dev course that's worth their salt teaches it
You know you've failed when even the Rule34 artists stay away from your characters.
They couldn't even make characters interestingly ugly.
I mean half of the races in World of Warcraft are ugly as hell but they at least look scary or dangerous. Most of the characters in Concord look like they were rejects from a Steven Universe fanfic.
To be fair the races in WoW, some might be ugly but they got their quirks and little details which make them great or sometimes even cute tbh. Trolls for example, if they got these big ass teeth on their side of the mouth sticking out it looks kinda cute now if an orc has that it looks kinda menacing just by the shape of their head and their overall looks. (Troll small elongated head kinda shaped.) (Orc bulky more roundish appearance and head shape)
These small details make a really big difference when designing characters. But apparently Sony just thought wuhuu let's just make SOMETHING
Edit: okay I forgot about orc babies and that they kinda look cute but overall orc = menacing, and, trolls = kinda cute but still menacing if u get what I mean
Because even if the WoW races are ugly in a conventional way, they still appealed to people. Rule 34 hit Warcraft orcs too, after all. It's all about knowing what appeals to different groups of people. Orcs appeal to people who want to play a huge, menacing monster of a man. They ALSO appeal to people who like looking at exaggerated hyper-masculinity, because let's face it, they're giant walls of muscle with deep voices and brutish appearances. That's going to appeal to some people.
Concord designs don't seem to be targeted at many people. Some of them seem to be targeted at certain political extremists who don't play video games, but that's not exactly going to help with sales. Not all of the designs are bad, but I don't think they're as effective at appealing to different groups of people like Warcraft designs have always been.
@@Grakor456 Yeah, they definitely had a target audience in mind, but it's one that doesn't actually play competitive shooters. To spend 200 million without considering your actual audience is insane.
perfect comparison. the gayest cartoon ever made is very similar.
@dominikborno4133 Fleek said it best the charscters look like the average population of Seattle.
Pirate: The character design is subjective.
Pirate a few minutes later: The Characters are too colorful.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but if all who behold it says it isn't beautiful, at what point does one accept it's ugly?
The characters in Concord look like they've never held a gun in their entire lives. Pristine armor with no scuffs, no visible scars on the characters, all rounded corners, that LIFE PRESERVER... it was all so cringe.
the answer is still never. its irrelevant how many people agree with something, its still subjective matter, both opinions can coexist, i can recognize something as subjective while also sharing the popular opinion. for me the character designs werent necessarily bad if they were presented in like a show setting, for a game context they are boring, i feel the same way for stuff like apex legends. having that said the character design really wasnt the nail in the coffin for the game, it was in fact that its not bringing anything new to an already saturated genre that in itself is fairly "niche" in the sense that who plays these games already has found their comfortable corner, and it charged 40 bucks upfront, probably with intent on still charging players for stuff like skins and alternate in game currencies as all these games do. not to mention the piss poor marketing, i didint even know about this game until the last trailer that came out wich was when? last summer fest? cant remember. not saying it never counts, cause ofc it does, but in this context character desing was the least of this game problem.
@@jacobwiren8142 Just curious. Why are you posting the same comment over and over again to people who make any comment about character designs?
did you miss the half dozen times in his conclusion to the character designs where he used the phrases “to me”, “i feel”, and “in my opinion”? stating the color composition is merely him using reasoning to support *his opinion*, not to make an objective statement
Pirate at the end: the characters aren't pleasant to look at for most of the people.
Pirate, internally: holy shit, my eyes! I can taste the colors!
1:14 - designers specifically pointed out exactly why the designs were bad, they screwed up many things. The characters are ugly, even if it's "subjective" yet over 90% of people agree
The characters in Concord look like they've never held a gun in their entire lives. Pristine armor with no scuffs, no visible scars on the characters, all rounded corners, that LIFE PRESERVER... it was all so cringe.
Are those artists the same ones who think turning a giant armour behemoth into a tall women wearing bikini is peak?
Well I think its also the fact that in "woke" space culture they are more likely to encourage whatever they are all doing so as to appear "non-judgemental" which also means that there is an extreme lack of useful criticism. The character designs really emphasize that, it seems like the result of shoulder patting rather than critique.
@@adamhollow5620 no
On a fundamental artistic level the characters were terrible designs. Color, shapes, silhouettes, contrast, role portrayal, etc. This isn't even touching preference or characterization.
A couple are borderline ok but the rest are just objectively bad.
Common Thor you say its preference when you see Madam Tupperware and NPC rocket lady?
"Some People" liked the character design... yes, all 700 people online.
And none with any art experience or basic colour knowledge will like it. i still cant believe they had actual designers. cause the values are wrong, and the colour combinations are completely off. Maybe the design leader was the equalent of tonedeaf for colours and ruined em all. its the only logical explanation i can think of
@GoalOrientedLifting they are just propagandized to the point their brains are mush... they adhere to the Judeo-American Empire regime lies so much that they actually believe the lie. It's an act of Faith to deny reality... so them denying reality demonstrates their religious fervor for Transhumanist Liberal Capitalism.
Fun fact; I had the opposite effect with Concord. I knew about it since early this year, because I saw it fuckin' *everywhere* on the PS Store. I saw it so much, so often, I genuinely got sick of seeing it every single time I looked in the store on my Playstation. Not surprised it failed. A small, spiteful part of me is glad I won't see it anymore.
Sony kept emailing me almost every week about it. Ass game, glad it’s dead.
Same. I couldn't get away and instead of forgetting how much it didn't appeal to me, I was forced to see it multiple times a day every day for a month.
It was like the original Destiny marketing IMO. When destiny was first announced, but without actual story elements, it was all just photos of the traveler but with the coming soon, or destiny awaits tagline. Everywhere I looked I saw mini ads for Concord too, but just with like the logo and a charlies angels pose of two characters.
Interesting. I saw more about Deadlock online while it was under an NDA than I did anything about Concord. I wonder if they tried to use an algorithm to heavily market to a select group and the algorithm just wasn't broad enough. Do you play a lot of shooters/have a heavy time investment in one specific shooter?
Laura Fryer put up a video called "Culture Killed Concord" that explains how a toxic work environment probably caused the people with the insight to identify and correct these problems to leave the team, or if they couldn't leave, to shut down and quietly do what was asked of them.
@myuzu_ yeah, watched it the other day. Really informative.
Especially since it reminded her of the live service game the studio she worked with created a while back.
Good vid.🙂👍🏾
Culture war also killed Concord, the elephant in the room.
After digging up tweets from the senior staff, you can clearly see who killed that game. The arrogant twat who called himself "The professor" is probably to blame a lot in this, I've never seen someone this obnoxious. Of course it was a magical pronouns person and he probably made all the dissident voices shut down or leave.
There's always a pattern of delusion with these "talentless freaks".
I wonder if it's like that in most AAA game studios. I'm interested to work in the industry, but I don't think I could comply with terrible directions that I know in my heart are bad artistic choices.
Maybe AA studios or indie are the best bet going forward.
Man thats sad. Morally very sad.
The $40 cost was the final nail in the coffin all the biggest hero shooters are free. Valorant,Ow2,and paladins all of which have long time players and are on all platforms so this game had 0 qualities to pull players looking 4 hero shooters away from these and to them.
Yea specially at this time because ow didnt used to be free but now they do have all these free options
It was 8 years in development, back when it started this type of game was very popular but now yeah it's weird how it seems they didn't even do a research to see if people were interested and willing to pay for it, besides the fact that the character design is odd, the game doesn't bring anything to the table that OW or any other already do.
I disagree with this. Good hero shooters are very hard to make well. Concord had Good concepts, but failed to actualize them. Plenty of people payed for OW one. But the feel, look, and execution of Concord was terrible. Concord also came out when You only have 3 other major competitors, and 3 other minor competitors. Concord was released in the perfect spot to maximize profit, right before Marvel Rivals come out but people are more interested in Deadlock but getting access to deadlock is iffy. OW was the only really hard hero shooter that is a direct competitor because Apex and Valorent are all very try hardy. The other competitors were just the standard soldier shooter with gimmicks, IE; Furry shooter, Blackops, and Battlefield, and their past and better versions that people are probably burnt out on. Concord was in the near perfect spot to max profit with only a few things holding it down, IF it was any good. It just wasn't that interesting.
Not a fan of this game but even Apex is free
Fort for gods sake is free
I do wonder if they released before OW went f2p, that more people may have been more open to trying it
Sounds like it was definitely a timing issue (or that the price point was too high)
Gameplay: clunky
Weapons: unsatisfying
Character designs: offensive to those they were meant to represent
Advertising: abysmal
Map design: actually good.
It died because:
A) £50 for 6 game modes and no campaign is stupid.
B) They had next to 0 advertising.
C) They made a game for an already saturated market.
D) The characters were not memorable.
E) Sony already fucked their reputation as a producer with HD2.
F) They expected people to make PSN accounts.
The list goes on at least twice or 3 times longer. But yeh. All of these are correct.
You really don't need much advertising these days. Get working copies into streamers hands before release, "content creators" will do the advertising job for you. Traditional advertising still matters but it's a much smaller piece than it used to be. Agree on all points though, didn't see anyone trying this or excited for it before release.
@@Hapkins-le6xf Fair point. I never saw HD2 official marketing. Found out about the game from RUclips
If they had good advertising, released this as a free game, released this game 8 years ago so the market wasn't saturated, Sony had a better reputation, and made no PSN requirement the game still would have failed because of the terrible character design and trying to cram DEI into games.
Helldivers debunks the notion that the pricetag had anything to do with the failure. It was the crap game design + forced woke politics. I know it, you know it, everyone knows it.
I like how you said "No, you THINK the character design is ugly." and then you give examples of the character design being ugly.
Just because he agrees with the opinion that the design was ugly it does not mean it must be true for everyone and that is exactly what he said.
I think he downplayed it a bit too much but it is still not a contradiction to say what he said.
@@Mytelefe I'm sorry, but these characters are objectively ugly. Beauty isn't 100% subjective, there's a reason why there's "ideal" bodyshapes in movies, TV and games, etc. These characters look way too much like liberal urban college attendees and no one wants to get that close to the ugly side of real life many have to contend with.
@@Mytelefe oh well, I'm sure this thoughtprocess will make many a more game like Concord, since everyone is even more unhinged than Thor is in the western video game market, NO one can just "say it", they all have to play emperor's new clothing.
@@keithfilibeck2390 It's hard for people to admit the game was ugly through and through, full of woke garbage that is unappealing to most. It was made for those people, and they didn't even buy it themselves.
You only THINK the game is ugly.
...
But really, you think correctly.
Another problem I have with Concord designs: A lot of them don't tell me anything about the character
I look at Reinhardt from Overwatch and I instantly know what he is big, tanky and hard hitting with his hammer
I look at Scout from Team fortress 2 and I instantly know what he is fast, nimble and attacks at short range with his scattergun
6:10 Designs like this don't tell me anything
Also the fucking stock on a handgun lol. That shit just looks weird.
All you can tell from them is that they're not straight.
because the culture behind it is all about subverting expectations and rejecting visible reality.
@@maxparece4155And it isn't even a handgun, lol. It is a crossbow and slingshot combination type thing. That's how badly they convey information through their designs.
@@maxparece4155 yea funny thing is that stocks on hand guns were a actual thing.
The main things that killed Concord are:
The boring and generally bad character design.
The fact a Hero team Shooter cost $40 despite not seemingly doing anything different
And the Terrible PR by the developers on twitter.
Exactly. Anybody trying to say it was genders or woke is just outing themselves as a smooth brain/culture warrior.
"their characters werent bad" "ok guys so heres why these characters were bad" lol
True his argument went into the toilet when he looked at the character designs 😂
Well his first argument was right, it's all subjective. He then realized he agrees with the popular opinion of "these characters are pretty ugly" and went on to explain why that may be. His first point still stands, there's probably an audience these characters are appealing to, it's just nowhere near big enough to carry such a big game.
Also the "it wasn't marketed very well" is hilarious. This thing was marketed to the edges of the Earth and back. It's just no one cared. Why is Thor coping?
@@shykorustotora To be fair, I never heard of it before it launched. I frequent various social media, RUclips and so on. Not a single ad or banner seen for this thing. And if I did, it was not memorable at all.
@@shykorustotora Yeah I very clearly remember seeing the trailer for this game in showcase stream with many other game trailers. And even back then the trailer didnt impress me and chat seemed to have the same opnion too.
I remember watching the reveal trailer. and my immediate reaction was " oh another lesser Overwatch clone, I don't care"
The reaction from jesse Cox was exactly that and it did rounds.
Honestly, I was interested in it from the reveal trailer, up until they revealed what kind of game it was. Interest went from "This looks kinda neat, could be fun" to "oh... meh" instantly.
Some might be fine character designs, but they seem like background characters. No matter what colors you give them
100% Agree. They look like one scene wonders in a Guardians of the Galaxy movie.
@RealityRogue It all looks really "flat", everything stands out, which in return, nothing really does. I'm not really an artist but what I remember in design, it's really important for a design to have some focal point, which should catch your eye, but as I said earlier, nothing does.
Background characters in the release version of Cyberpunk 2077 for the nintendo switch maybe
"Some" that like those character designs number in the couple thousand tops. Otherwise this game would've succeeded. Thor can say whatever about liking the characters being subjective but when your game doesn't even make enough to stay alive more than 2 weeks and one of the biggest criticism heard everywhere is that your characters are ugly, I think you found the limit to that "subjectivity" cope.
@@JGD714 It's quintessentially "le meme face I was just PRETENDING to be tarded all along" - The video game
*criticizes chat for saying character designs are ugly by saying that’s just an opinion*
*immediately explains his opinion that the characters are ugly*
I will speak for myself here... The reason why I didn't touch Concord, was because the character designs were bland.
If a game doesn't look attractive to me, I don't care how well it plays. I'm not going to get into it. Shallow as that may come off. If it doesn't look kick ass, then it's a pass.
Too much competition out there for a 40 dollar game with lousy design elements.
Bland?....I mean bad or a dumpster fire would be understandable but bland? How much more flavouring do you want?
Have you tried Project Zomboid? Genuine question. For me it's the best zombie survival game I've played. Maybe not for you cause it looks "bland" I guess, but damn is the gameplay good.
Go play gacha games, it's for people like us
bland and lame, that's the gist of it, and all the Journo's want to play the game of not knowing this obvious fact, even Thors here.
Not just bland, they're literally hideous.
The fact sony dropped a crossover between infamous and prototype for this “game” is an absolute cardinal sin
What?! :( ( i dont game anymore but that could have been an amazing game)
Holy crap I can’t believe that
As someone who loved infamous and prototype: WHAT? I hadn't heard about this. omg
That's why people will cheer this failure giving up 2 banger titles and years to persue this hogde podge
That wasn't real.
I gotta disagree on some points, I do think that the character design (regardless of color) has something to do with it. Just look at some of em, like Daw (is his name) for example. He looks like a plumber in ski-gear for some reason, but then has bright orange latex cleaning gloves??? It just make no sense.
The tank (forgot her name) looks like she's wearing a rugby outfit with the most heinous color combination that has ever assaulted my retina's or the rocket lady, who is the exact opposite where it's literally all muted beige color all over with no defining features bar from the golfball helmet.
Combine that with all the weird color choices that don't match with eachother, in an over-saturated market at a $40 price point
"Its not made for you"
Me. "OK"
“The characters aren’t ugly”
*goes on to describe the characters being ugly *
@@swerve3031 fr bro just needs to admit the truth that the characters were abunch of DEI ugly bs
@@Snxgur nailed it. Characters designed by nothing but Woke Ideology. As a professional it's very hard to accidentally make such repulsive characters. They intentionally made them ugly to fit woke perspectives. Issue is, people who scream for woke inclusion dont actually play games.
its crazy bro
@@Snxgur "dei" has nothing to do with shit design. Shit-looking armor is a shit-looking armor.
@@Snxgur nothing to do with DEI, it's all specifically the clothing and accessories, and colour profiles of the characters.
The character designs look exactly like the worst design by committee slop where some out-of-touch executive kept demanding they design for some sort of caricature dubbed a "modern audience."
Then everyone found out that it's a $40 game in an over-saturated genre where the standard marketing model is F2P.
The character designs looks like something you'd find out of a urban liberal college campus' students and professor staff. Beyond ugly, and completely out of touch with the world outside.
"Out of touch" is the most apt term to describe it. Just like how I'd describe Thor after watching this clip.
I probably should shut up and go away instead of ranting like a madman and making a fool of myself, but man, I'm rather disappointed in this pirate dev guy. Devastated, even. He was supposed to save gaming... How dare he come out with such an L take when it matters most 😂
You can all admit that this has nothing to do with video games. It's okay. Nobody will be surprised.
If you were actually worried about the game, you would be talking about the gameplay instead of signaling your political beliefs over the character designs and the ways they are presented. Of the work that was put into this game, 1% of it was spent on pandering character design. But here you are, making sure everyone knows that the reason the game was bad was because it was woke. "Virtue signaling" used to be the buzzword, and all you know how to do is signal your virtues in response.
It was never really about video games for you. Just be honest that you're fighting for your political worldview to be the dominant one in a rapidly changing society, and video games just happen to be the setting that you're doing it in. You're not fooling anybody into believing this is about saving your hobby, and you aren't going to undo societal changes by crying when they're reflected in a piece of media.
@@ethanfreeman1106 What exactly is his "L take"? He didn't say it was "because the designs were woke" or anything, he criticized the character designs in nearly everything *but* that political jargon.
His main point was "the color theory is completely off", something based in pretty solid facts, some of the models in the game could look pretty cool if they got a new coat of paint
@@amystarnes5977 The gameplay could be some of the best out there, but if nobody picks it up because the character designs suck then the gameplay is irrelevant. The character designs were an obvious attempt at marketing towards "modern audiences" that don't actually exist in cost effective numbers. The films that pander to "modern audiences" fail, and as we've just seen with Concord, a huge part of the reason it also failed was this obsession with creating characters for a "modern audience".
1:08 Thor brother.. Everybody agrees it's ugly.. Come on now
Yeah, he's quite wrong here. There are objective standards of beauty and Concord fails at most of them. Fat, ugly freakshows will not make people want to play the characters.
Yea bro spent solid minutes pointing out how every opinion is subjective before stating his opinion which is actually the same. Basically he just wanted to point out something obvious like "opinions are subjective" which is completely pointless.
He also got hyper focused on the color theory like that's the only thing wrong with the character designs, and as if the character designs were the only thing wrong with the game.
I like Thor for many of his calm and collected insights but dude is just way out of the loop this time. He would've been a lot better off not talking about concord at all. 🤐
Yeah he really missed hard with his take on this game. It was just pure ass, plain and simple. He's talented enough to recognize that, even if he's trying to be nice to fellow devs. No reason to sugar coat this one.
I think he's being carefully for not defending his "fellow" dev feeling (read: rainbow mafias in western game industry)
@@pixelman2626that's exactly what's happening here. He's afraid of being called racist or bigoted. That comes from a place of ego and narcissism. Unfortunately things like this are sort of a test for peoples' intellectual honesty. Lots of creators whose content I enjoy are failing that test currently and essentially selling out to modern leftist ideology.
The game was made for modern audiences, and it was played by the entire modern audience.
Nah, because even the modern audience didnt like it. Overwatch would be for the modern audience and its super succesful.
@@HaplessOne Oh yeah, all 30,000 of those players
So successful
Blizzard isn't going to be around for much longer and Microsoft just laid over like 2,000 of the worthless drones at that trash company
Says "character design is subjective", then immediately goes into why the character design is bad 😂😂😂
And that's his subjective take.
Yeah that’s… what subjective means… what?
It is subjective, but some rules in art exist for a reason. They're not objective but when 90% of people find something unappealing the difference doesn't matter much.
It does matter. Everyones opinion matters. @SaHaRaSquad
@@TheGeekFactor i think they brought it up because early in the video someone says that the character design it ugly and he says "no, you think the character design is ugly. you didn't like it for you" *and then* thor explains why he thinks it's ugly. so it kinda sounds like thor is shitting on that guy for having that opinion and then thor goes and has that same opinion. its kinda funny.
"subjective" Sure art is subjective, just like music, games or movies, but you are lying if you say there isn't a standard, a good designer/director (be it game designer, quest designer, character designer, etc) knows what will appeal to the major audience. And whoever throws colour theory around being the biggest problem with character design is trying their hardest to ignore the elephant in the room, tho there's definitely some really bad colour choices for sure.
Art is subjective and everybody has their own way of doing things. HOWEVER! In order to break the rules, one must first learn the rules before breaking them. The character designers clearly didn't.
Absolutely
I'm on the same page. A hot girl in an ugly dress is still a hot girl. This game had ugly girls in ugly dresses... edit, maybe not ugly, but they really didn't try...
People who can be cancelled for having the wrong thoughts can't address that elephant. Thor would've been better off just not talking about this game at all. Complicit in their woke games.
God save me from youtube commenters that are completely unable to recognize or use nuance.
Let me simplify this for you. Thor said "art is subjective". This does not, in any way or form, imply "art is subjective therefore any opinion on the art is invalid." For god's sake get off of twitter and learn how to interact with people without drawing erroneous conclusions!
They presented this to the customer base early on and their entire potential customer base said "This looks terrible, we don't want this". They responsed with "You're a bigot, istaphobe, etc." and they marched forward. They showed it later and the people with the money said the same thing. "we don't want this". The dev response was unchanged.
They did a paid beta for preorders followed by a free beta. The free beta had less players than the paid one (likely meaning a ton of refunds). The game came out and failed because of the exact reasons the customer base stated. Studio goes surprised Pikachu. It's clearly the bigots. They made a game for a customer that doesn't exist and blamed the people they had been shunning all along for its failure. The "modern audience" doesn't exist and the devs can't understand that they are part of an extremely loud extremely small minority with no money to spend on games.
They actually came out after the game exploded on the launch pad and announced that one of the characters was actually transgender because they thought that was going to bring in a wave of sales. Some projects fail because they deserve to.
There is a big difference between saying "these characters look bad" and "these characters look bad because they're LGBT/minorities/fat". The first is fine, the second is bigoted and is unfortunately a lot of what people who never even touched the game are complaining about. One of the characters was trans from the get-go but Sony did marketing that felt like pandering rather than genuine inclusivity (Catalyst in Apex Legends for example).
Correction
Devs do not make these decisions. Producers do. Devs produce the game that producers tell them to make. Designers draw the skins producers tell them to draw. Animators animate the models producers tell them to animate.
It is the producers that tanked this game, not the devs. Blaming devs for a bad production is like blaming the cook for a restaurant's decor.
Nailed it.
@@scofrona Don't get it twisted. Not wanting obese alphabet people of color on the screen is a completely legitimate opinion, held by the majority of the market, that stakeholders in this and other industries ignore at their (sometimes catastrophic) financial peril.
@@scofrona I think the big problem is that most people can't really tell why they don't like something when they don't, so they latch onto the obvious things. Like, they don't like the fat dude that looks kinda feminine in the face, so they latch onto that - fat and not masculine. Meanwhile, Roadhog in OW has (as far as I know) never really gotten criticism for being fat.
I think it was pretty dead on arrival because it was like what, a 40 dollar game? And the majority of the games in that genre, the overwatch type of stuff, are usually free to play. I think that’s a factor.
They lost more money than E.T. for Atari
Even adjusting for inflation?
I was in a focus group back in the early eighties, when I was a young buck, where they brought a bunch of us kids into an elementary school gym to have us try both atari's ET and the A-Team game that they were making for the 2600.
The overwhelming consensus was the A-Team game was fun and E.T. was confusing as all heck.
holy shit lol
Then this really has taken the throne as the worst failure in gaming holy hell
It looks like someone ate a rainbow, washed it down with sand, and just projectile vomited on all the characters.
Like they spilled bleach all over the game
That's exactly what happened, you described how wokism works.
As a colorblind person, a lot of these characters just look like blobs of incoherency.
Looks about like that without colorblindness too
you know what the concord character designs remind me of?
the meme "that moment when my character apears in the cutscene" and you have picture of pimp vader. thats the energy i get from most of these. its goofy but not the "im laughing my ass off" kinda goofy but more the "stares puzzled at the character for 10 minutes to try and figure out what exactly you are looking at" kinda goofy. and for me it lies 95% in the colors.
also concord really tries to be like guardians of the galaxy but "we have guardians of the galaxy at home" edition.
Yeah the thing is that whether the character looks good or not is subjective, but there are certain objective qualities to character design.
In a game like this, characters are meant to visually convey information about what they do so that you can better understand their abilities and make the game more intuitive. If you go through and try to guess what most of these characters actually do, they utterly fail to convey that in that regard. Like that purple and gold lady? She builds walls and does area denial. It’s bonkers.
Love how he expertly avoids saying they are just ugly unattractive character design =D
he also talks about colour theory and composition and explains why it's bad. Therein lies the difference.
@@bipolarminddroppingshe talks about some very obvious stuff using some big boy words. Big deal.
He still doesn't get why people react so negatively to the game. His knowledge is only surface level but you'll still worship him like the nordic god he is.
Which is fair, actually.
@@ethanfreeman1106 Gross
Yeah, I have lose a lot of respect on him on this one.
@@bipolarminddroppings My guy. The "color and composition" are not the main problem here. It's like pretending the problem with the monocycle you've entered to the nascar race is the paintjob.
The problem is that all these character designs follow the far left woke guide book that dictate that nobody can be attractive (unless its homoherotic), everyone has to check has many "diversity" check boxes as possible (which mean non-white, non-male, non-attractive) and everything has to drown in "millennial writing" that induce reflexive cringe from anyone looking at the result.
THIS is the problem, it's okay, you can admit it.
1:07 - "Character design was very ugly? .. No you THINK the character design is ugly" then proceeds to criticize the visual design for several minutes.
The problem was they got feedback. People made comments that were arguably fair. I heard during the beta there were no gamechanger like ults, TTK was abysmal, and your character moved like they were wearing one of those heavy sumo suits. What I then heard from the devs in response: it’s bigotry. If you use that as a response to legitimate criticism, you will fail 100% of the time.
And the moment that they made "bigotry" the hill that they chose to die on, everyone saw this as a slow motion train wreck in progress. Pay $40 for a foreseeable flop of a game, or pay nothing to watch it crash and burn. What are most people going to choose? 😏
Word, brothers. Preach 🙏
Thor clearly didn't understand what he was talking about. I hope he sees comments like these and realizes there's so much more that is wrong with the game than what comes up in his bare-bone, surface-level analysis of the characters' color schemes.
Another way to look at this is that constructive feedback about gameplay was drowned out by the sea of people crying about the game being woke, and being bigoted about it. I had to scroll for an unfortunately long time in these comments to find you describing actual gameplay issues. Literally everyone else is arguing about "DEI" and pronouns. If the feedback to my game looked like this comment section, I'd probably think I was being trolled by bigots too. Even this video isn't about the gameplay.
No, I don't have any sympathy for sony losing hundreds of millions of dollars over a genuinely bad game that was super pandering to minorities. It just sounds like both the developers AND players are conflating gameplay issues with the "woke/anti-woke" nonsense. If you make a big deal over that stuff (Either because the devs are pandering, or because players are obsessed with crying "woke" at any given opportunity) then everyone is going to have a bad time because we're not even talking about video games anymore.
"character design is ugly"
"No that's subjective, that's just you"
*Goes on for the next several minutes to criticize character design and color use*
critiquing something is different to just saying "it's ugly" or "i dont like it"...
Thor is literally talking about colour theory and design nuance. At no point does he call it ugly or talk about subjective stuff like that. He is talking in well established design terms about theoretical concepts, he even says the character design itself is fine, it's just a colour palette issue.
Can you not see the difference?
He's saving the ass of his friends in the industry by being empathetic, or something. Any other person would just bash the designs bc we don't know the context where they were made.
@@bipolarminddroppingsare you unable to see that everything that has ever been expressed or perceived by anyone is subjective by definition? Mentioning that every single time before going into discussion is rather redundant and serves no purpose than to show how level headed you are compared to the opposition.
Facts are what people generally agree upon. It's not the same as your reality. People who talk like "such and such are supposed to be an objective fact" are just appealing to the delusion of there being one universal knowledge of truth, and the assumption that if I am self-aware to that degree then I'm probably more correct than you are.
In other words: big boy words equals a lot of nonsense.
@@bipolarminddroppings is he a trained character designer, concept artist, etc, or a programmer and hacker? Because you don't understand my original comment, referencing that his criticism is also in the realm of opinion, and gas lighting his own audience as he then goes in with a similar commentary.
@@bipolarminddroppings Critiques of art are subjective. No critique of art is objective because value doesn't exist independent of some perspective. Both "bad color composition" and "weird" are subjective opinions. The core difference is that he's calling it ugly in greater detail than Twitch Chat can reasonably express, especially without prior exposure to inter-subjective models of aesthetics, like color theory. He was probably being overly charitable to Concord when reacting to Twitch Chat before he saw the evidence, so he provided a meaningless dismissal, "that's subjective", which if that were a reasonable dismissal, then it would dismiss all critiques of art.
Deadlock being popular indicates that it's not a market saturation issue.
But, but... Deadlock is a moba, is more like Dota 2 with guns
@@Scary_Balthazar The point is still legit. The game isn't even officially announced, has no known release date and it's steam page isn't even 10% finished. Somehow clocking in 150 thousand players daily already. NO MARKETING. Concord actually had a lot of marketing done, but no one cared to share the trailers with their friend because the cast is full of ugly-ass, woke, DEI-looking freakshows out of a urban liberal college campus. Both the students and the professors, because you got granny with a plastic bag on her head who escaped the asylum and more. Fat, freak-show-coloured freaks is the cast of characters in this game. No one wanted to share that with their friends.
Deadlock has an interesting idea and character roster
@@Scary_Balthazar Marvel Rivals had closed beta the same time Concord had open one, and it pulled 25 times the number of players Concord did.
Deadlock proves its not a genre issue
Helldivers proves its not a monetization issue
Its the politics.
I didn't hear about the game until it was cancelled.
when majority of potential customers agree that character design is ugly that ceases to be subjective and becomes an objective fact
That was my point
No it doesn't
Not even a little bit...That's not what objective means. 😂
Also thor saying "tHeRe'S LiTtLe aDvErTiSeMeNt" when in reality, a fkton of gaming news websites was literally shoving this game on people's mouth for like 2 weeks. IGN, Kotaku, PCGamer, etc, they all kept tweeting and writing articles about Concord about how great it is and ranked it above average. Even the "gaming" journalists themselves kept tweeting how good the gameplay was and how they kept playing it lmao.
A majority of people can hold the same opinion. That doesn't make it a fact. An objective fact isn't an opinion that a majority agrees on, it's something that can be proved without any opinion or bias present.
As an artist- it's not only the colors on characters, the designs seem unappealing too. So many of them at first glance look like unlikeable pricks. And I feel like hero shooters live and die by people finding their "main". If you find every single character unappealing enough that you don't even want to try how do they play it's a big issue.
The second issue being that some of the characters you cannot figure out how do they play by just looking at them. Just look at OW characters, for most of them you can glance at them and figure out to some extend how do they play.
Last thing is controversial and I am hesitant to mention, but I feel it has some part in it too. I feel having conventionally attractive characters that warrant flood of fanart does alot for excitement for the game. We all know what Overwatch is ACTUALLY known best for online, and I was commissioned few times to do nsfw art of them too. There is argument there about oversexualization of characters, which is valid. But it is clear that it did have alot to do with popularity of games like OW, Valorant, Street Fighter and so many more. Dedicated fans will play those either way, but appealing characters might make a good chunk of casuals play the game. Look what happened when Lady Dimitrescu was revealed in RE Village, internet was down bad for MONTHS. Absolutely the best free marketing a game could ever have
++
Concord has the distinction of being the first game successfully able to resist rule 34. It's currently trending as 'I can fix it' within the character designer community.
Imagine creating art so objectively horrid that it spawns a sub culture committed to repairing the aesthetic damage.
* No marketing
* No innovation
* SONY (free space)
* Saturated Market
* High budget production
That's a video game production failure BINGO!
(edit) Notice how "dev talent" isn't on the card?
I'm sorry, but this doesn't work as the excuse. Deadlock from Valve is no different and they struggled keeping the game a secret, it's not even announced yet and is doing well. I'm seeing the exact same list you're making there for Concord. No marketing, no innovation (at a glance), Valve ('free space'? Whatever that means), saturated market, high budget production.
Difference is that Concord is full of ugly-ass freakshows of characters and DEI Woke garbage and Deadlock doesn't seem to share those specific flaws.
Meanwhile Deadlock, which has yet to get it's Steam page set up properly, enjoys 150k player peaks daily at the moment.
You really are trying your hardest to miss the main problem
Paid game in a genre where the leading contenders are F2P was also a *big* deal as well.
@@Femtoisbackandbetterthe fact that they didn't list 2 main problem is just laughable at this point
His technical analysis of business & design is quite on point.
Although Thor is A)missing or B)unwilling to admit why the game actually failed.
That's A)because he's too ingrained within American tech industry or B)he actually has weak, unoffensive, fance-sitting takes where it matters.
or C) he has a nuanced view of the situation that's not satisfying for drama hogs
"Some people like it" yea that's the issue. You cant be spending 9 figures for some to like it.
Bruh 8 years for a game we didn't need in the first place. The free games do it just fine we didn't need this. It's sad.
8 years ago this probably sounded like a better idea. On the other hand, it also means they had tons of games to compare to and improve on. Maybe they didn’t have the code but they knew the mechanics and what made those games fun. Instead they just made a poor copy.
Those games didn't exist when they started.
@@Alacritous fairly sure Overwatch existed when they started their Overwatch clone.
also, 2 years in you can do another check and go "ok, so people are actually sticking with Overwatch, what is the negative and positive things about it" and add that to your game.
it's literally the same BS people said when the Epic Game Store launched and it was just bad, it missed and still missing some very basic features and they went "well, steam had so many years to improve!" yeah ok, but at what point did someone go "what is Steam doing well and what can we improve on what they aren't doing well?"
the same with Concord, they for some reason did 8 years of just tunnel vision and then are surprised when their game flops.
@@Alacritous But they had the time to adjust the design over the years that had hero shooters. Even during development cycle, you can iterate on the design based on the outside inputs like how is competitor doing etc.
There was TF2 when they started and the characters in there are iconic. Simple in design but you can recognize them and their color schemes wasn't hurting your eyes.
@@Alacritous and yet they had all that time to look at the ones that did come out and yet still made garbage?
Before he reviews the character designs: *says the objectively true thing, that character design is subjective
After he reviews the character designs: *tries to find some way of saying the character designs are ugly without actually saying they're ugly, because he lead the video with the objectively true statement that it's subjective
Yeah basically this video is ten minutes of watching Thor struggle with self-inflicted cognitive dissonance.
Oh no, who would've thought that most people generally share similar 'subjective' taste
Let's not forget that the character designs weren't the only thing that didn't land. The sound design for *every* gun sounded weak. Most had less impact than a paintball gun, and the rocket launcher sounded safe to hand to an eight year old unsupervised.
I'm one of the people who played it. I loved the game and liked it even more like Valorant or Overwatch gameplaywise. The massive downers were the slow movement speed and the 40 $ entry price.
I want to hear more of these opinions, like actual game experience.
If the devs weren't bashing players like many in the industry do these days, it would have had a better turnout.
That ttk tho. I couldn't after 1 match (played at friend's acc)
Did you like the character designs?
@@nims5537 I liked them well enough except for Emari's helmet, but that's just because I don't like open helmets like that without a visor of some kind.
I'm an Overwatch player. I am THE TARGET demographic and I didn't hear about the game until I heard it flopped. Major misstep by marketing. Even bad games have more preorders than this.
Yup, the marketing of this game was basically everything you don't want to hear about a game. Truly dead before arrival
Marketing has little to do with it. Deadlock is in the same situation as Concord (Actually worse, they've done literally zero marketing) and already has 150k players daily without being officially announced with a release date yet, not even available for a public beta. Concord actually put out trailers and cinematics, etc, but people just didn't share them because ugly.
The game is ugly, the characters are ugly, and that's why no one talked about it or got hyped for it. They marketed it, just no one cared to share the trailers with their friends, etc, because the cast of characters is the ugliest to date in any hero shooter. Also costs money, when all the competition is free. It's a woke DEI garbagefest.
@LethalOwl I don't think that this is a good comparison. Concord was made by a brand new studio, so they didn't have any brand recognition. Valve on the other hand is Valve they have a reputation of not putting something out unless it's top tier quality. This Gane failed because it was generic, expensive for the market it's in and undermarketed.
Overwatch players are playing Overwatch 2. Mind blown.
Everybody says it was a bad game. Nobody talked about hitboxes, maps, guns, balance, server tick rates, and more technical staff.
I had no idea this game existed until the stories broke about it being taken down.
@@addol95 going to say doubt on that one
@@jenerossitea9247I didn't know about this game until the same reason as OP.
However, I'm not really into team shooters like OW, Paladins, etc. so I'd imagine that's why I knew nothing about Concord until it was already gone.
Drinking game: take a shot everytime Thor says Colour
Good thing he's not British. I'd be destroyed. He just said color. Phew
Would not recommend finished bottle before video
Uhm 🥴🥃 what is a colour anyway?!?!?
he's american, he doesnt say colour, he says color 😊
1:20 The only actual arguments that talked about the game being in any way good were "its game play feels alright", that's all. Unless you want to believe the video game media outlets like Kotaku or IGN who have made themselves clear to be biased to malicious extent, this game failed on every front except *maybe* the game play feeling OK which isn't enough.
There are also rules or rather trends in art that do define if something looks good or on a base line appealing to look at, if there weren't we wouldn't have art schools so the argument of subjectivity in this case is pretty poor. Theres more than enough videos and clips of artists going over why games characters look bad with great explanations.
"Looks ugly" isn't the same as "unappealing design with poor colour and design theory choices", both are opinion but one of them is opinion with some reasoning. It's still subjective over all but objective points to back it up, like "this goes against colour theory" or such, vs "It's ugly" or "It's woke" or whatever other brain rot.
@@NikiGothBunneh I mean if the game gets a peak player base of 700 and the most agreed upon take is "it's ugly" it's not really brain rot it's just common consensus.
When making a product, you listen to the people you want to buy your product (obviously) but the management for this games production called any criticism of the character design both from online for the early access and QA "White noice". If 90% of people agree "this is ugly" it doesn't matter if it's an opinion or not in practice, same way as with "Rings of Power" or other corporate slop.
Something that was obvious from the beginning is the art design. Art does not appear like that, it has to go through some refinement process to appear as such. With a little bit of google searching, you can find that the old designs for concord had a lot more flair and personality, that were likely squashed and trampled over by some higher up executive. Second of all, there was a big gamble in selling narrative, and they were likely going to give us more information about the lore of the story AFTER it had released... which depended on the game being taken up... which never happened. This is nothing else than the fault of executives.
I would love to see a documentary about the internal situation of the studio as this was going on.
Would be an amazing case-study, because how it went down so quickly is extremely bizarre.
I vaguely remember reading an article about the development hell of this game like 3+ years ago, and how it had shifted focus and style multiple times
I don't normally disagree with you but "The Characters are ugly" is (as you say) subjective. But the criticism is "The Character were deliberately made to be ugly" which is either a fact or it isn't. No subjective opinion required.
This, this should be all the way at the top
The characters weren't deliberately designed to be ugly though are you insane
@@Megaman231122 Sure they were. Pink-hair-side-shave-green-skin girl? That's a deliberate choice, and no person alive would think it's actually not ugly.
@@Megaman231122 every possible attempt was made to make the characters the antithesis of "traditional beauty". As a way to virtue signal for inclusion. Which backfired HARD, because they ended up with an entire roster of unlikeable, unnattractive, unrelatable characters that very few people get excited about BEING for a couple hours. I don't get excited about playing a character based on an overweight trans woman. Doesn't mean I hate trans people, doesn't mean I don't think characters like that should exist. Means I don't get excited, by inhabiting one. And there are many, many, many other people. In fact MOST of the gaming community as is evidenced here, who feel the same way. The problem with Concord is they didnt provide ANY relatable characters to their primary audience. Not even one. Tired of this comment section pretending it ain't what it is.
"Imagine Overwatch launching to 190 players peak", this actually DID happen to a game called Battleborn around the time Overwatch was released, and it was completely overshadowed and only averaged around under 1000 players after the first 3 months. History repeats itself....
The trailers made it look fast paced, and then you watch actual gameplay and it's slooooow as shit.
Time to kill is also slow as s**t, lol!
This game was made for people who think at a snail's pace.
"ugly" might be subjective but t
concord's designs certainly weren't very distinct. I've never played Valorant or Overwatch or Genshin but even if you showed me new characters from those games they all have strong enough senses of style that I could tell you what game they're from that alone
I look at every single one of those characters and can't get a drop of personality at all. I can't even place them in the same reality whatsoever. Legitimately it looks like a placeholder.
It had little to no marketing, and the little marketing it DID have came exclusively from the people talking about how generic it was, and how boring the character designs were. It doesnt help that the developers were actively fighting their supposed customers
Anyone who played Destiny knows 95% of the shaders you got were like this. Garish.
"Glowhoo would like to know you're location" 😂
"calling it ugly is subjective,"
Proceeds to critique the color scheme of the character models calling them unappealing.
So they're ugly. Glad we agree
The absolute single biggest failure in video game history "Welllll, it just didn't land right, it wasn't the character design, you say you don't like the characters but that's your opinion".
Can you believe the delusion in this guy? The BIGGEST failure in video game history "it just didn't land right". Can you hear yourself?
He’s a former wow dev. Of course his takes are abysmal.
I also found it weird that someone said the designs are ugly, and Thor said "No that's subjective." ...then proceeded to explain why every character design is ugly for 7 minutes. Like he didn't agree with it until it was 'his' idea.
@@FishAnvil if you can't see the difference between talking about colour theory and colour composition and saying "that's ugly" then you're really on the wrong channel.
Hit the three little dots by the bottom of the video and select "Don't reccommend this channel"
@@Nope-uj6yh he was on the security team for wow. He wasn't a dev. If you're gonna insult someone's work history, at least get it right.
Also, WoW is only the most successful game in history, and Blizzard were historically known as one of the greatest dev teams ever. You must be new here...
@@bipolarminddroppings key word there being “were”. Now they produce propaganda and nothing else. Eat a bowl of dirt.
I played in the closed beta and what I took away from it was the game modes were not fun, the character mechanics felt clunky, the menu's weren't all that fantastic either (leaning towards confusing at times). And there was some super confusing weird mechanic with picking your roster to get certain bonusses that would then benefit your team.
Before even jumping into the game I looked into some gameplay footage of what the game modes were to communicate this to my team and discuss strats:
Trophy hunt mode, player deaths drop a trophy. -> quick respawn
Cargo run: capture the flag / extraction -> No respawn, Team deathmatch
Clashpoint: King of the hill?? -> No respawn, Team deathmatch
The no respawn modes basically meant if you worked together and just focused on making kills, the objective meant nothing. You just win by wiping the other team, then worry about the objective. We were playing with a full premade team and all of us had either lots of experience in valorant or overwatch so we didn't have much resistance. The Trophy hunt felt more balanced (it wasn't), we did still play against people that had no idea what was going on most of the time, you had to actually pick up a token after you killed someone and a lot of people didn't. But at the very least the game kept going for a while rather than just wiping the other team.
The characters either felt not that impactful to play or clunky. I started mostly on Roka, basically Pharah from Overwatch but with the hoverpack from Spelunky 2. How it worked is: you jump into the air, then you activate the hoverpack, locking you at your height, you couldn't gain more height once you enabled the hover. That wasn't the most clunky part though. Roka's Blast Dive ability, comparable to Doomfist's Seismic Slam: You slam into the ground from above. However with Roka, you had no control. It was a set location based on your height and looking direction. You couldn't aim it to be more below you or further away.
In the Deathmatches, healing characters like Daw meant you had a much higher chance of winning. This may sound obvious but, with everyone being able to freely pick, the odds of people picking Daw were pretty low. In Trophy hunt you could switch between characters, if you started out as Daw and placed healing pads, the pads would remain if you swapped to a different character until the opponent destroyed them. Basically you could have heals without a healer.
My favourite character to play was probably Kyps, as it was pretty much Sombra from Overwatch and you could carry entire lobbies.
However, multiplayer games are always more fun with friends and even though the close beta was pretty short, none of us felt really compelled to keep playing after a day. I did continue a bit with solo games to try different characters and settled on Kyps but it was already clear to us that nobody would care for the game if it came out.
Not sorry for the pants comment, bread for the mods.
PS. The character designs had no impact on the gameplay for me. I do believe It took away a lot of the appeal to buy the game for people that didn't get a chance to play it.
None of the gameplay matters when nobody wanted to touch the game in the first place.
I didn't know about it at all. When I heard Concord was cancelled and being refunded, I immediately was like "wait didn't the Concord jet get grounded like 10 years ago?"
I really don't think they were trully blindsided. I think upper management was aware of what everyone below them already knew, but they wanted a couple more months of pay and also as time to look for a new job before their CV was tainted by this shitshow.
It's too late for that too. Let's say they remove the eight years that they spent on this game from their resumes. Now they have to explain that eight-year gap instead.
@@pyrioncelendil Or they can just say "I'm doing X at this big game with a 200 Mill budget and with Sony backing it up" Hence why I said BEFORE launch. As long as the game hasn't launched it's perfectly easy to do so
This isn't a game that needed 8 years of development. I have a feeling that 2 years into development this game was much closer to release than the final version, which was ugly and had toxic devs. Sorry, but Devs who shittalk gamers are bad devs. No excuses.
> makes hero shooter
> makes heroes unheroic
🤔
There are objective, quantifiable ways of making a pretty face versus an ugly face, and if you can’t admit that then you’re beyond hope. A choice that makes a face ugly can be made up for by turning the dial one way on other features, but you would be objectively filling in for somewhere that was intentionally taken away from or otherwise obscuring the ugly.
Sincerely, a 3D Modeler.
Ugly =/= Unappealing. Not every character needs to be beautiful to have a good design.
@@scofronaThe hunchback of notre dame has an intentionally uglified facial structure.
The movie proceeds to make him appealing by virtue of its 2D makeup and fluidity of animation.
He is ugly, on purpose. He is appealing to watch because he is well animated and surrounded by beautiful scenery.
So you are right that Ugly does not equal unappealing
But these character designs are ugly on purpose.
@@alexandergreene461 What does "ugly on purpose" mean to you? If it's the clothing and color scheme I'd agree, but if it's because a character is trans or fat then I'd have to say that's bigotry rather than a design critique.
@@alexandergreene461 he's not appealing to watch because the other things are good. He's appealing to watch because the character serves a purpose that is well executed. The design speaks to you, tells you a story, which is then contradicted by the actions of the character, thus making a very nice character journey and kind of a touching story.
These characters have none of that. It doesn't have much to do with the rest being beautiful. There's many games, like Binding of Isaac, that have almost exclusively grotesque, hideous characters, yet are super charming.
@@scofrona If the character designs aren't interesting enough for you to learn their sexuality in the first place, finding that character gross and unappealing isn't bigotry
1:20 The character design was awful in its fundamental core, the appreciation of art such as character design, direction, or photography is subjective, yes, but the basic rules are not, color composition, for example, is something teachable.
Not to mention making your characters morbidly obese or super androgynous and generally ugly AF to look at.
TLDR: I think Thor has a natural instinct to go against the current of popular opinion, but in this video it really shows that he had to eat his own words after saying the design was subjective. It was a bad take from the viewer... until it was his.
I initially thought that Thor was able to give some good advice and observations from time to time, but after this video I really find myself deeply mistrusting of a person that just snaps opinions like this.
I've been accompanying the Concord case for a good while now and from my perspective in this video Thor is just yapping about something that I think he doesn't entirely understand. This is especially shown how he firstly takes a somewhat defensive take about how "design is subjective" (which is mostly a false statement imo, but that's another story), saying that the game was trying a weird unconventional art style ( 1:08 ), only to then just completely lose his own argument by his own words by saying the design is faulty by itself ( 8:07 ).
For as much as I want to be understanding that he's streaming and it's easy to lose your train of thought while talking live to thousands of people, I feel like Thor likes to go against the current just to sound more intelligent or maybe cause controversy?
Saying shit adverse to popular opinion can be nice from time to time, but doing it so many times and the way he usually does it with a sense of authority ("I've been in the gaming industry for x number of years, therefore my opinion matters more") is really disappointing. Does anyone else think about him this way or am I just reaching? lmao
Nah, I definitely got that vibe from this as well. Feels more contrarian than actually intelligent.
Yeah he's very wrong about "beauty being subjective", etc. There are objective standards of beauty, and Concord ain't it. The characters are just plain ugly, unappealing, morbidly obese or whatever else have you. One looks like she's wearing a plastic bag over her head, like she walked out of an elder care home all deranged. It's a freakshow of the worst sort. Then we got androgynous fatty macgee and the cyan-red wierdo with a malformed skull, like come on. They're ugly, objectively.
I get the sense that Thor is terrified of saying anything bad about woke culture, which is what ruined this game. Everyone saw those character designs and the pronouns and the performative inauthentic corporate DEI "inclusiveness" and knew that the game would be trash.
He sure as shit wanted to do that since the whole Stop Killing Games thing.
Agreed. What we just saw here is a very standard case of "woke hostage syndrome" that every single person working in the video game industry is suffering from.
At best he (like everyone else in this industry) is deathly afraid of speaking up against wokeness, at worst he drunk the koolaid.
The problem is that all these character designs follow the far left woke guide book that dictact that nobody can be attractive (unless its homoherotic), everyone has to check has many "diveristy" check boxes as possible (which mean non-white, non-male, non-attractive) and everything has to drown in "millenial writing" that induce reflexive cringe from anyone looking at the result.
THIS is the problem, it's okay, you can admit it.
The amount of toxic positivity from him towards the devs is sickening to me.
The biggest problem I had with the character designs are not that they were ugly, it was that all but MAYBE one of them looked like they were background characters from a better game.
They felt generic, lifeless, designed by committee
Of course they were designed by committee. The whole point of designing by committee is spreading the blame so no one person is singularly responsible for a foreseeable failure.
I feel like they made the color ugly, so that they could monetize colors that make sense and would actually make the character look better.
This is what killed Halo Infinite too. Despite Halo having a huge fanbase. Absolute insanity.
They had gone too far. They had spent millions, they had destroyed their outreach, they had taken zero caution. All that I could forgive. But, Concord...
...pastels?
All of the characters look like when you make a custom character in a game and turn the brightness and color all the way up and it looks really put of place
Ohhh common Thor, I’m not even close to being a professional Chas ter designer, I’m way better than your average person since I did study art theory for many years, but not a pro, AND I am confident I could have done better. Their characters broke every rule of good quality character design. It was awful, played awful and didn’t have a target audience, and required $40 entry fee to even TRY the game - it was obviously going to fail
1:25 “some people like the character design”. No. Not enough to buy it.
Nothing went wrong with the game or the marketing. It was a game made for the modern audiences, and the numbers it got just reflect how many gamers exist in those modern audiences.
Yup, and if Thor is too blind to see or admit it, he is far less intelligent than I gave him credit for. Or, if it's because he won't admit, he's far more spineless than I thought. Sad.
Wait what ? You realize Overwatch 2 has over a hundred million players right ?
Marketing actually kinda sabotaged it. The one trailer they did for the game was absolutely and incredibly well done...for a single player game. I remember the moment that I heard it was a hero shooter, it was like something died in my soul. What came out of having watched the trailer was legitimate hype, followed by existential disappointment. And negative advertisement is something you just can't do in gaming, because of how vital initial sales are. You turn off your initial audience for whatever reason, and you will pay the price; games that came back from bad advertising are very few and far between for a good reason.
The first bit being that they were single-player games, and/or were lower-budget to start with.
But the main thing that killed the game was that the gameplay itself was unpolished, which is just inexcusable for an eight-year development, AND you got to witness the sinking of Overwatch 2. Like, you had giant red warning signs the whole time you were in development, and you didn't address your own similarities/issues? You were warned that you had to have a solid game loop out the door, and while I get that is way easier said than done, it is also what is simply expected of saturated markets. You are either blatantly a cash grab, an outright experiment, or an ironclad office that makes every effort to give players everything they want, and as little of what they don't as possible. There is no room for mediocrity, especially when gamer budgets have gotten increasingly tighter in recent years.
And I think that is something that is very hard to take into account post-covid: once upon a time, you could expect your average Little Timmy to just beg their parents for the $40-60 game that just came out, and most people wouldn't bat an eye at the cost. That is...just not the case in recent years, and it is 100% the fault of modern economic instability. People just can't purchase like they used to, and it was only a matter of time before this ugly truth came around and bit the gaming industry in the ass.
And I think Concord is merely the latest and most disastrous faceplant, and will most certainly not be the last.
It is also a very bad thing. Thor is right in that you can't make better games without knowing both what did work, and what didn't. If there is no room for mistakes, then quality overall is going to suffer because there is no room for anyone to learn. And considering what non-gaming markets and businesses look like recently...
@@MrWhite2222 Much of indie games caters to that modern audience so he can't talk against it.
truth is, minority groups fought for equality, those fights finally got mainstream, bad people turned the fights for equality into fights for superiority.
people has to stop trying to make some groups special, you don't have to yell to everyone what you think you are.
those things are cool to know but NEVER should be the main point of a character.
look at Varus from League of Legends, he's cool af.
The characters were ugly. That's it. There is no hidden secret behind it. People don't want to play ugly and fat characters for no reason. Why is everyone acting as if it wasn't obvious.
Space Marines 2 disagrees
@@DoctorOaksSpace Marines look badass. Being fat or ugly doesn’t make you unlikeable alone. You’re the sum of your parts.
@@joebob7483 yeah ik, I was just pointing out being hot isn't always a requirement
Specifically, on the color palette, I see what they were trying to do here, but I am also not a huge fan. The color work reminds me of old 1950s/60s sci-fi book covers, and I really dig that the artists tried for that. I feel it went off the rails because they tried to encapsulate the entirety of that color expression in each form rather than as a holistic statement that considers the environment and the forms that occupy it. In my opinion, large, equally portioned blocks of contrasting colors in a single form create cognitive dissonance rather than visual interest.
I also feel that characters fall into one of two camps: maximum vibrancy or completely desaturated. I wish there was a little more interplay between vibrancy and desaturated mid-tone in some of the designs. If you lean too heavily into either side, your expression can come off as flat or ungrounded, respectively.
> "Shit doesn't smell bad, you just *think* it smells bad"
Thor wisdom
That sounds like gaslighting.
Some people *do* like the smell of shit though
Yeah not sure why he pushes back against the negativity that the Concord devs called down on themselves. You don't get to call your potential customerbase "talentless freaks" and lambast us and expect us to just accept that. We're gonna respond in kind, and the result is your game getting shut down two weeks after release cuz the "intended audience" never showed us, as they never do.
The talentless freaks thing should be studied for years to come.
@@matthewpicchu8232 😮💨🤣can we not normalize mental illness?
They designed characters for 50 year old lesbians.
Guess what, their marketshare is rather small.
What they thought 50 year old lesbians would want. 50 year old lesbians have better taste than this. This game appealed to absolutely nobody.
The sheer magnitude of Concord's failure makes it a useful tool for argumentation, which is why we've seen so many videos and takes from people claiming that "{{STUFF I DISLIKE}} is the reason the game failed". But yeah, I agree it's probably a pretty simple case.
There's also a number of minor nuances which, while they definitely didn't help Concord, were also FAR from the cause of its demise:
- The Ranked mode FORCES players to swap characters. Each round you win, the winning character is greyed out and cannot be used by you for the rest of the match. This means you can not one trick/main a character, and you need a hero pool of at least 5 different characters.
- Despite the first problem, you do not have access to the whole roster in-game - you must select a "deck" of characters to have available, and there are not enough slots in a deck for each character to be available.
- The only cosmetic alteration to the characters is for unlockable variants of them. These variants come with stat changes to their weapon/abilities, meaning they aren't "cosmetic" at all.
If the game's art style wasn't so garish, if the game's pacing wasn't so slow, and if the developers were actually open to criticism (they weren't), then it's these flaws that would've tanked Concord's success, simply because who'll accept such limitations in a hero shooter that costs $40 when you don't get screwed this hard by games that are f2p?
I think you meant nuisance not nuance but overall a good comment