Lesson number 1 if you want gamers, don't make ugly things, same story as Pron Sites. they don't show ugly people, cause nobody wants to watch that. But most gamers are ugly, so what they play games to escape things, here look how much Eroge works. but that is perverted, yeah but that even sells better then making ugly stuff. Didn't one gacha game who was set for failure then turned 180 degree around showed you what gamers and people really want. Sex Sells simple as that or else all the pron sites would be gone. so all the females and males have to be super babes and hot model, yeah if you want to sell stuff yeah. you can toss one or two ugly character as long they are cool or overexcaggerated into the bunch. but almost all gamers wants nice stuff. but the people with screw loose. that is their problem not ours.
Well yeah people just dont like ugly things so it makes sense but I don't think turning the characters into horny baits is enough to make people play it. If a game is still all style and no substance no one would still wanna play it, and if the reviews of the people who did play it are to be believed the it really didn't try to break any mold.
hear me out: we reduce the amount of characters to 9 and name them the scout, soldier, pyro, demoman, heavy, engineer, medic, sniper and spy, and we seperate the two "teams" into red and blue and they fight in a variety of "fortresses" too
Going for realism instead of seeing the Moebius style through was the big mistake imo. Like yeah some concept art to 3d model changes weren't great but the main issue is that it looks best stylized and that call is nobody's fault except the execs who wanted it that way
There is a videogame that's like a 1:1 copy of Moebius style, it's called Sable. Even if the copy is quite obvious, I think it looks cool and it definitely stands out among the billions of either photorealistic or Fortnite-like 3d worlds we are used to see nowadays. Considering Concord had a MASSIVE budget and a world class team of artists, they could have made a wonderful and unique twist on the colorful and stylized Moebius style. They would have found their own voice and appeal instead of being so directly compared to Overwatch and others. This was a long way of saying I completely agree with you :'D
I agree. I was watching the concord cutscenes with my girlfriend and asking her opinion on the characters, and it hit me. Concord's entire shtick would have clicked instantly if the game was stylized like a cartoon or a comic. Making it hyper-realistic makes it feel weird.
Right? Like even though I think there's a LOT of issues with the designs the biggest problem is they reeeeally don't fit the environment. I can super see a world where they turned into something pretty good looking just from the maps being weirder and the lighting being less cookie cutter PBR realism.
Stop blaming every little thing on execs. You’re assuming they even tried stuff other than realism. Are you new to gaming, cause we’ve had plenty of success with heavily stylized games.
@@bannedmann4469 From the concord cinematic trailer I am very confident that doing "broader appeal sci-fi" was a conscious executive decision. Yes execs often take more blame than warranted but that's the nature of having a large team making a single _product_. Most of the blame for everything falls on executives because they have that responsibility, even if the responsibility is dealing with someone else's screw up. In theory that's why they get paid so much.
Only difference is that the redesigns were done for free in a short span of time, the people who worked on Concord were paid for 8 years, but hey, enjoy making fun of people's pastimes on the Internet to defend your favorite corporation!
The worst part is that some of the redesigns of female characters just make them prettier and put them in sexy outfits, and people still call that good design
@@diemes5463 Nobody is defending any corporations. It's a design vs design comparison. Whether they were done by a giant corporation or by a random person in their free time, that has no bearing in analyzing the designs as such. If your view of the design quality is influenced by who did them, then you are not analyzing the designs as such. Like another commenter mentioned some 'redesigns' are just making the female characters more attractive, but their armor/clothes don't look that interesting or even worse. And they also lack the things mentioned in this video.
It's wild to me that the art style is supposed to be Moebius and 1950s retro sci-fi. I am obsessed with that art style and have spent so much time looking into character design and art in that theme for my own game. It did not even occur to me that Concord was going for that until watching this video.
The problem is the design didn't blend with the environment of the game, I see in concept art they use a general color for each region like red, orange, or green, while in the game it shows regular futuristic settings. And also it's the matter of stylization, why use shiny plastic rendering when the character design relly more on flat color and hard shadow. It can be that it was a clash of idea from the developer with a bunch of marketing analytics and shareholder. They want it to be unique yet also play it safe and generic so it's more marketable.
@@qaztim11it already officially exists (just not in the form of a game), search “Concord Freegunner Adventures” They’re a bunch of official cel-shaded short films of the Concord characters.
I watched Pikat redraw one of the character of concord without changing anything but the art style. It was comic or anime like style similar to Hi Rush. And it doesn't look bad. If they want to really go stylized like Mobius, they should've go all the way instead of realistic but still, their pose and some elements should be change even in Pikat redraw she had to change the pose and some color, body proportion and elements to look good.
I have been saying this a lot too that Moebius' artstyle, his color choices and design of clothes and shapes only works with bold lines and illustrations. The moment you translate it out of it, it becomes unappealing and awkward
I also watched that video, and while the art style change was a major component, pikat DID change the design. She even admitted she ended up making more changes than she meant to- like the glasses, the entire shape of the coat, the pants, and the hair to a point was resized to fit the proportions more. Which to me goes to show there were execution issues in the designs more than any overall unsalvageable poison like people are saying. So many just need a few shape or color tweaks to at minimum be pretty decent. That video kind of annoyed me a bit with the “you are free to critique but you need to reframe your mind set. I’ll prove the designs are good by just drawing one in a different style!” Then proceeded to completely alter the entire silhouette, while still saying it was just the style. No shade to pikat at all, that channel has done wonders for helping me learn art and character design, it was just a weird video to make where the entire point was disproven IN the video itself.
@jesustyronechrist2330 exactly. Perhaps cell-shading could've helped to reinforce some of those lines, but it would most likely still need new shaders and tech to pull off something at all representative of the 2D source in 3D, and in motion at that. As it is, the 3D models look like base-level cosplays.
You know, all of the discussion aside, I find Concord's design fascinating in particular because it feels like they were on the cusp of something really interesting and for some reason they blew it. Like, why isn't the game like this 11:29 or this 11:13 So much potential, squandered.
Original or interesting, it doesn’t matter - most gamers still don’t want to impersonate an obese black woman, an androgynous obese boy or an ugly trans woman with weird fashion. Call me what you want, but that’s the truth. Characters don’t need to be overly sexualized to be appealing, but they need to be something gamers want to impersonate.
the thanos being soft because his character has circles is such a fucking funny and accurate representation of your point and how these concord redesign videos explain things lmao
No it’s not, it’s the deceptive part of his character. He’s a dad and it’s emphasized the whole time. Cloud is the reverse of that, someone who’s trying to be threatening and was literally modified to be so. It’s a bit of a spoiler, but there is a twist there. I don’t think he played it.
Actually Thanos' design is indeed safe, he's designed as a round dad, so it's rootable and understandable, which makes his horrible acts more terrifying as how does a kind man do such terrific thing
@@bannedmann4469 But the point of the video is that you need to look at the context of the work instead of just going "sharp angles threat round angles dad". With context, those two having a twist makes sense, which is what this video is all about.
I didn't know the design was based on Jean Giraud's art, that makes the character designs, make a ton more sense! I wish they made that more clear in the advertisements or developer stuff of the game.
Maybe if it was more stylized it would carry that same kind of character through, when instead, at least for me, it was trying to be Guardians of the Galaxy. Movie Marvel. Which evokes a different design esthetic to me that it was clashing with.
You don't see the intricate accessories and overdetails contrasted with bland neutral spaces for the eye that Jean Giraud uses. It makes his work appealing but not overwhelming. Its like the art team or execs only see neon colors and choke on happy chemicals before calling it a day.
I think the problem here is with the lighting and shaders. These designs look so good in cell shaded style. It might be a producers call to make realistic 3d or whatever.
The situation here is like the design of the Sonic (the movie) They hit the uncanny valley. Those don't even look like designs inspired from Moebius, except are indeed eccentric, but in some clinically sharp way. Like, not really understanding why people like Moebius, but trying to copy the eccentricity on purpose. Cell shaded style could indeed help, but also if they try to achieve the atmosphere from the Moebius universe.
I would argue that Lucio and Ana from Overwatch don't look like healers at all. Lucio has roller scates and a gun with speakers on it. What does that communicate? Probably that he moves fast and has some kind of sound related ability. There is nothing besides maybe his green color scheme that says "healer". With Ana, she just looks like a sniper. She has a militaristic outfit, a long rifle, and some orbs on a bandolier with yellow energy in them, which could be anything.
That's why context matters like he said in the video. Based on concept arts alone sure, it can be ambiguous. But in-game I do think it was well done. When I click on Ana on the hero selection screen, the whole thing already screams battle medic to me, with the way her syringe is emphasized, the blue and white color scheme of the rifle and the overall aura. Also yellow energy in gaming tends to be healing/support abilities.
And Lucio is exactly that, doesn’t have much healer output because his main skill is speed and he uses sound to boop enemies away. He is support. Ana is precisely that, a sniper who after a close call decided to switch bullets for more support ammo. The designs in OW are a combination of lore + function, not just function. The yellow is the healing, because in OW healing is represented by yellow. And this is why in this video Moma shows he doesn’t know what he is talking about because OW took a series of decisions in character design that were not common at the time and made it work, but he uses it to justify really bad game design from another game. Like using why an A exam didn’t get A+ to justify another C exam
@OndaPiloto and @Sylhux Since you're both making similar arguments, I'll respond to both of you. I'm not arguing that Lucio and Ana are bad character designs, I just think they don't convey as much as people say they do. What I'm trying to do is pretend I know nothing about the game, and that I've never seen the characters before. I think it's fair to say that someone like Mercy makes it super obvious what she does by looking at her, but Lucio and Ana are on the more subtle end. For all I know, Lucio could be a DPS character who runs around blasting people with soundwaves (which he sort of does do), but I can't tell that his main function is support just by looking at him. Ana's rifle looks kinda like a tranquilizer gun, so that's something, but the yellow grenades, which you both are keen to point out is obviously healing if you play Overwatch, could be some sort of yellow, damaging energy, it could be a buff of some kind for allies, it could be gatorade, but I don't think the association of yellow = healing is as common as you might think. Also her blue and white outfit doesn't really say "healer" to me. What about Soldier 76? He's blue and white, but he's DPS. He looks like a mean mercenary dude, but again you wouldn't know that he could shoot rockets and heal his teammates by just looking at him. Sometimes healing is red (like in Skyrim), sometimes healing is green (like in Resident Evil), sometimes healing is blue (like in Doom), and sometimes healing is yellow, but I can't think of many games besides Overwatch where healing is yellow. Like you said, it's contextually dependent. So my point is that between the factors of time and familiarity with the game (we've been playing and seeing these characters all over the place since 2016), and ALSO some really rock solid character design, you and I know exactly who these characters are and what they do. What you can't say is that all the information is instantly obvious the moment you see a character. It's not fair to say that when the moment you first saw the character was probably 8 years ago. Also I'm of the opinion that there is more than one good philosophy for character design. People tend to say that simplicity is king, but even Overwatch's character designs are undisputably very, very detailed. Now, their detail work is very intelligent, but people actually like details, as long as they're interesting. I think more games should be permitted to deviate from the popular approach to character design. The discourse around Concord has people throwing around a lot of absolutes, like the designs are just self-evidently terrible, but most people have only taken a cursory glance at the characters, and have no context (which you both just said is important). I think people aren't being fair, and that they never gave a game with a decidedly weirder vibe than Overwatch the chance to grow on them, because it was pre-judged and then judged post-mortem. Do I think the designs in Concord are fine? Yes. Do I think the concept art is 10 times better? Yes. Do I think they're as good as Overwatch's designs? No. Does every game need to follow Overwatch's approach to character design? I don't think so.
@@gentlemanscarecrow5987 I don’t have time to read all the message, but in the comments you have people saying “I would have guess Lucio was a speedy character not a healer” from people that to me don’t seem to know the game
Amusingly (and correctly) a lot of people complained about legibility of overwatch on release, but so much time has passed people have forgotten. Overwatch has a lot of tall skinny women with similar silhouettes that genuinely affects legibility at a distance.
I saw some of the concept art done by the artists and the characters looked absolutelly GORGEOUS (If you can find, look at star child early concepts), I don't know what happened when deciding the final designs of the characters that they ended up looking so terrible.
@@ARStudios2000 you can find some on art station as the artists recently started posting them, Amanda Kiefer is one of them you can search but just put in concord in artstation and have a look around
I believe the concept is by Vinod Rams, his head design was much more interesting, and instead of just turning into a Twilight vampire, he would just tank the bullets and get a bunch of holes on him.
The biggest problem with the designs imo is simply that they didn't commit to the art style enough. There's something about them that even without context you can look at them and immediately tell "there clearly was something interesting going on here, but they chickened out at the last moment" and that communicates a lack of confidence in the game itself. If they chickened out of an interesting art style and visual language, what other interesting things did they chicken out on? Map design? Mechanics? Skins? Gamemodes? It's a cascading effect that immediately tells a potential plater that the game would most likely be boring and safe and therefore not worth playing
When I think of hero shooter, the last thing I think of is the work of Moebius. Moebius is visually striking due to not just character design, but color theory, lighting, and how the characters fit into the setting. Just because the art is good does not mean the initial execution was flawed from the start. If you want to make a game based on Moebius, make a 2D, stylized RPG. Or at least apply some stylization to the lighting and color, like Arcane, Dishonored, or the spider-verse films. applying Moebius to a Hero FPS with hyper realistic faces and realistic lighitng is the exact opposite of Moebius's work.
It baffles me that so many people think that giving female characters deep cleavages and conventionally attractive faces (and these being the only changes that are introduced) somehow make the designs good. There are lots of great female character designs in video games that are not overly sexualized, even in Overwatch you'know. A character being sexy doesn't automatically make them a better design. Each character has their own story, a narrative purpose, and should at least be readable in the in-game surroundings - these are the core aspects that should be redesigned, not the fact that characters have no overt booba.
Thank you, I thought I was crazy about feeling weird with those videos. They focused on physical appeal and did not acknowledge the philosophy of the development. Which is wild and quite disappointed
Those videos are correct though. I can't believe I have to say this but - Sex Sells. To both men AND women. A bunch of weird nerds decided they didn't like that reality - this thread included - but it's still just as true as it's ever been.
I make it a habit to turn off this app if it ever starts showing me ragebait, like the Concord deviants these last couple months. My first exposure to it's art style was going through people's portfolios on artstation, and happening to see a bunch of great fishing spaceship designs. I slowly went back through the general collection they were a part of, and noticed that all of it was good to great, and basically all of that work made it to 3D modeling. I'm a big fan of retro stuff like it, have been since Fallout 4's Boston. Concord looks, to me, like a great collection of cohesive art pieces, that dramatube plastered onto an idiot ball in their long-term efforts to make people slightly more blind.
2:10 I don't play Overwatch so I'm not gonna lie, I actually didn't know Lúcio was a healer until this video, I assumed he was a mobility/scout DPS that would *just* flank the opposing team with blasting shockwaves and little else. Though I suppose in hindsight it does make sense for music motif to play like "bard" support.
Because Lucio is not a main healer lmao. He is exactly that, mobility, gives the entire team mobility, in many teams the Lucio player gives the call outs, and there was a time when OW RUclips was filled with Lucio main videos playing as dps and booping people 😂
That’s because his idea of what “instant readability” is was slightly off. The concept isn’t that you’re supposed to understand immediately what a character’s function is based off their design, though I’m sure a lot of intention went into that separately, but the main purpose is to be able to tell instantly what that character you caught a small glimpse of halfway across the map is. There’s an insane amount of videos documenting this concept specifically with overwatch and there is a reason they succeeded where they did and why animators/designers praised them.
A lot of the redesign artists try to make something look good on a page, in a vacuum using general principles. Which on its face seems like what an artist is supposed to do, but as you've said, it misses the greater context of what the final product is trying to achieve as a whole. The whole point of having fundamentals to design is to offer us a tool-box to then make selective decisions to suit the experiences we design for, not a dogma with which every box must be checked. While I'm not trying to claim that the concord designs were successful, but they deserve to be fairly analyzed.
@@diemes5463 There's a difference between disliking a product and understanding where it's at fault, and why. That's the videos point, to critique the analysis of others and what they miss. All the market has spoken for is that the game was a failure, that does not mean whatever criticism we can allege against it is valid. I've watched the Sungrand analysis and felt it was quite amateur, but everyone's welcome to an opinion.
1:11 Both of your answers are bs from what I've seen. I've heard no one talk about goon at all. The second one, I've also never heard. The designs were just unappealing which is why they were bad. And they were from an assumed standpoint because couldn't guess the characters, which is bad from the making your audience feel stupid area.
@@furyberserk I'm not sure if you meant to reply to me or the video ( This isn't my video), but I've personally seen both those types of redesigns here on youtube. Criticalart_64 - Concord Character redesigned (430K views, definitely falls into the "goon" category for the female designs) Tyler Edlin - Critical Design flaws that ruined Concord ( 255K views, compares primarily to overwatch) Sungrand studios - Pro Character Designer Explains Concord VS Overwatch Characters (400K views, literally the title) Just those three are over a million views cumulative, and there are a ton of smaller channels that essentially follow the same logic. Totally understandable if you didn't encounter any of them ( I just got recommended them randomly by the algorithm), but they're certainly popular talking points. When the maker of this video refers to the "goon" topic, I believe it's just a crude summary of all the people that confuse appeal with sex-appeal and want every character to be like eve from stellar-blade.
@@jamespateluniversity Was Criticalart_64 explicitly saying we can't "goon" to the Concord designs, or was that just the impression you, personally, got from the artist's redesigns?
all of this discourse is incredibly new to me. I didn't know people thought it was design related lmao. I thought it was pretty obvious it was cus the game was a paid brand new IP in a genre landscape where f2p is king.
It had nothing to do with the price. Concord could not get a player base when it was in open beta. People understood that it was an overwatch clone, saw the designs and dropped it. If you think that designs were not a makor issue, you're tripping
Thank you!! This is the best take I've seen on Concord so far, so many other redesigns are just turning it into overwatch/apex/etc without ever considering what Concord was going for. It's sad to see those videos get so much attention/agreement. Also so many people not understanding the process and that regardless of the artists working on it ultimately its up to management to decide how far artists are able to push etc.
You’re forgetting that Concord was going for being another Overwatch and Apex etc.. it’s a carbon copy hero shooter. Leaving this context out is dishonest.
@@bannedmann4469 its a tac shooter with hero elements moreso than a hero shooter hence the focus on more retro futurist cyber militant designs for a lot of the characters. The gameplay and kit is more important than what YOU believe the game should be
@@bannedmann4469 Just because it's in the same genre as Overwatch or Apex doesn't mean that it should look the same. You're not adding context by saying this, quite the opposite. Paladins is also in the same genre and goes into a different direction with the design, more cartoonish and fantasy powered compered to your examples, and it works out for them. Overwatch itself didn't try to copy the direction of TF2 and has its own identity.
This was so cathartic to watch. I was going crazy thinking seeing people harp on the designs so much. Absolutely right that “it’s a miracle this got made at all”
Most redesignes have been horrific. And completely lack creativity and understanding of the original influences and setting. It's as if they're never seen retro scifi before. This is the best take on the topic to date, ty.
I appreciate seeing more discussion around the concord designs swinging back against the first wave of videos. Here’s actual paragraphs of my own contributions to the discussion: I for one definitely still found the designs ugly regardless of the discourse around the game, and I would attribute this to the uncanniness of their animation and facial construction, and color grading. I feel like you’re undervaluing the concept of readability here: I’m pretty sure everyone making that argument was assuming an audience who understands the language of videogames (a large audience which probably everyone who saw the trailers belong to), so it’s sort of a strawman to bring up the typical mom in her 30s-40s, who has more important things to do than even look at videogames. And it’s so unusual to say that this game specifically should either communicate to every layman, or shouldn’t bother communicating to anyone at all. Even if unsaid, I’m sure we all realize a major reason for the designs having backlash is that a large number of outspoken players see it as “social-justice coded”, and the mere thought of that drives them into an irrational frenzy. Of course, I’m NOT making the case that this is necessarily a failing if the design, but I would say this reaction annoying anti-progressivism gamers is the main reason the conversation has gotten so big. It’s probably for the best that you didn’t get into this, but the thing that annoys me the most about the redesign videos is that they just show skin and tits and say “fixed!” And then when you ask how it’s better everyone just goes “Uhmmm…sex SELLS, idiot. Everything should have SEX, literally every game SELLS because SEXY”, often dropping their own criteria in favor of giving a woman tits. I’m not sure why people seem to think that there is a conspiracy to force them to accept unattractive characters, but it is very sad to see that in some ways (though not all), the stigma of gaming has become even worse over the course of the last decade, thanks to people who are proving the stereotype right by whining about this.
Another thing of "the key to iconic logo design being Balance, Versatility, Simplicity" not being true is the Windows 98 and Windows 7 logos being so much more iconic than Windows 10 and 11s. I'm also more and more convinced that 1. the designs didn't really translate that well to the realistic style. 2. nobody's talking about how this is yet another one of Sony's poor decisions in publishing.
8:24 It's crazy how I think of blue potions as health items because I've played Doom so much. You are so right on how playing games for a long time influences someones associations.
my notification sound on my phone has been the doom multiplayer item respawn item for so long that i freak out when playing doom multiplayer now lol. it used to be the opposite when i had just changed: "wtf is spawning next to me?"
@@GraveUypo HAHAHA, I had something similar but with super mario 64 slider song. I used to have it as an alarm in my phone, it was crazy loud and it traumatized me so bad that every time I hear this music I feel stressed out.
Honestly glad to see someone bringing this up. It was mindblowing how so many artists out there 'fixing' the designs didn't recognise the influences the game was drawing on. My first thought on the failures of the art style was mostly on the actual engine itself and how the world and characters are rendered in-game. An undersold aspect, honestly. And I'm glad you mention the importance of time. People talk big game about things like 'simplicity in logos = good' but nah it's just whatever is trendy and associated with successful brands. Could be complicated as hell just as much, makes no difference in the end. We're pattern recognition machines
If the influence was Mobeus they certainly landed the designs, but... Who really cares about that? Artists certainly do, but consumers? Did they really think that those type of designs would be appealing to the general masses? I refuse to accept that and I still believe that the concept artists got fucked over because of the higher ups pointing to the worst of the designs.
@@chok1169 Yeah those designs 100% have acceptable mass appeal, though certainly needing some tweaking. I mean even dirty bomb was a game with no surface level appeal but I actually quite liked its character design (the writing & va didn't hurt) for its first so many years of life and the game did quite well for itself. I do think a big element of the financial success of the project comes down to putting it at a $40 price tag when they don't have the respect and brand recognition that someone like Blizzard or Valve would have (and even they both have conceded to the importance of the f2p market) And the thing that failed with the art style is merely the undercommitment and lack of confidence, something not uncommon in development hell games
@@chok1169 Yes, people would like a lot more of these designs if the aesthetic was better executed. Make them more cartoony, and stylized, exagerate the characters more, go for a cell shaded aesthetic to lean into the moebius style more. By going with hyper realism in most aspects of the characters and design they made the entire thing less appealing
@@HOUROFPOW3R Give me the name of a popular game that has those types of designs and I will believe you. Because the whole roster of Concord was really unappealing except maybe one or two. If the game has a good rooster and is fun to play most people don't care about putting 40 bucks to play it. So I don't think the price tag was the reason for its downfall. Finally, what do you mean with "lack of confidence"? I think they went really deep with the modeus brief. Wanna know your opinion.
Concord only has 2 designs that look anywhere near appealing. And I don't mean sxually. And then there's the weird obsession with gut imagery which is even more ugly and macabre. Ruins the pieces. A 70s post futuristic world is a bad idea overall imo. At least for a hero shooter. It just looks ugly. Somethings are not meant to be man.
a good example for how little design can matter in a games success is Gigantic. Gigantic is a Moba-esque 3rd person hero shooter with great character designs and fun art direction, but its still a game trying to compete against the likes of League of legends and overwatch. sometimes all it takes for something to fail is a few bad decisions in spite of how beautiful it may be.
@@DoctorPhileasFragg i don't see how fast it failing has to do with anything. It's not really a comparison. It's an affirmation of one of the videos points, despite gigantic's GOOD designs and art style, its incredibly stupid hard to compete with something as monolithic as others in its genre like league of legends. Especially at an upfront price like gigantic (to my knowledge) has.
Ironically, one of the artists who worked on designing Concord characters, Vinod Rams, was a main character designer in Gigantic Their designs for the Concord characters look dramatically different from the final product and imo so much better
I think that in no small part had to do with very little marketing. Something Concord had in stupid ammounts considering they are even getting an episode of Secret level. Even when Gigantic was comming out I only heard about it from some specific youtubers. You obviously will have a hard time making an audience if the potential audience doesn't know you exist
Honestly I've seen TONS of people going at the executives and the higher ups rather than the artists themselves. At least from what I've seen. That's another thing about the whole thing; it's like the thing what each other has seen a lot is right contradicting what the other has seen. Like how Chroma says one of the most recurring complaints he heard was how people can't "jork off" to the designs when of all the times I've seen these designs critiqued, I've never heard of that statement once.
@@Notabear6810 That's true, the lead character artist vehemently defended the results - therefore either making himself a part of the crime at best, or revealing his total control over this aspect at worst.
@@DoctorPhileasFragg Exactly people ALWAYS wanna blame the execs but the artists signed on in the end and doubled down on the designs that were approved. They attacked people and literally called them UNtalented HACKS. And you want me to fell SORRY for them!? Nice joke😂 Although it wasnt ALL of them that did its just sad the main voice happened to be the creative director
I totally agree with you. I've seen sooo many bad and generic redesigns with willfully wrong design directions, and I always find myself wondering if I'm wrong about how I think about concept art, since so many other concept artists are going toward the basic academic concepts only, not thinking about the context of what the end product should look like. There's a reason a concept artist should be more of a designer, while lead artists and art directors still exist. This whole Concord thing has made me rethink a bit on how I teach concept art, since I've been doing the same thing with my students about the basics (shapes, colors and meaning) and I think a more brief and style oriented approach should be taken, and artists should start taking in consideration there's an art direction that needs to be taken in account, and without knowing the basics about that everything else won't come together. I was just amazed by seeing how many of the redesigns missed the base style landmark (retro 80's sci-fi) and kept on picturing the same modern stylized silhouettes and shapes.
You seem to reverse the cause and effect of Pharah's design. They went from "we want a character that flies and shoots rockets" through "so she should look like a bird" and "what nation would a bird-like design fit" to "let's make her Egyptian and adjust the design to that". They weren't like "hurr we wanna make an Egyptian character so let's make her a bird lol". The readability of the design (and its overall quality, as in "looks cool") is the starting point, not some random need for a country token. The "context" of the game's lore, overall design style and whatever is just a vehicle to allow such designs and help them make a coherent cast. It helps them be good designs, not limits them from being good. When judging Concord's designs, the context is at best just another hint to why they are bad, not some kind of justification for them being bad.
To be fair, the fact everyone ignore the art direction of the game may be testament of how little the art direction was communicated by the final designs- Like I love moebius' style and when I saw concord I did not for the life of me thought of that style for a single second... When you put specific characters side by side with a moebius one you see the ressemblance of the design, but the style itself isn't really there and so ironically enough the context that made the design work disapear Mobius is way softer with very desaturated colors, detailed linework and smooth gradients. And even design wise, it feel like concord's designs are attempts to copy existing designs they saw but a little worse to not be exact copies instead of making a trully original spin on them, it'd diluting the style not elevating it
Excactly, the game really could've looked great if the execs didn't force those uncanny and disgusting graphics onto the game for the sake of high fidelity. Ironically for them that decision ended up backfiring spectacularly. I feel sorry for the dev team, they worked hard on a project which was doomed to fail
I am not a game designer, but I can say 100% that character design can and has steered me away from buying or playing games. Something was definitely lost in translation from the concept art to the final product however n this game, and that's very unfortunate.
I mostly agree, but people were not buying the character looks before the game ever released. I don't say that to denigrate the artists. Things just don't always work out in business and art. In this case, the art may have deterred rather than attracted. I don't understand the sensitivity about it, personally. Take the L and do better next time.
@@ARStudios2000 There very well may not be. I am thinking more about the individuals and what they will work on next. One of them said on X that a bunch of them are considering quitting the games industry because of what people are saying. That seems very strange to me for professional artists, but failure is never easy.
I agree completely. We've seen the opposite in videogames and film, where you have something extremely beautiful but with no substance. Those also crash and burn. Videogames are a whole package of things, including setting, story, character development, character and world design, coding and many other things. If it depended exclusively on character design, Minecraft wouldn't be a thing.
The goddamn problem was that it was photorealistic slop, instead of something more original. TBH OW works because it dosen't want to push photorealism, it has a clear "cartoony" art direction and stylisation.
FUCKING FINALLY someone gets it. I was stunned at these self-proclaimed ''professional'' artists with their template ABC approach to ''character design''. I thought I was going crazy with how popular those videos were. AMEN to you Chroma Moma. I'm not a fan of the Concord final designs either but my biggest gripe about this is how this discussion will probably push back against trying new things.
fr, crazy how the mainstream didnt get it whatsoever, im was starting to think i was trippin. (im not saying the concord designs are neccessarily good)
@@Literature4343 agreed, I think that game was just a perfect storm for people to pile on it. It feels like these youtube artist channels are just capitalizing on a trendy topic but are completely wrong with their takes (or at the very least super misleading).
@@hoxtom3663 like honest the number of them are essentially just saying that they're not seeing enough "flesh" is mind boggling, all the while in a condescending demeaner, smh, like what do they know, they got a whole lotta coom but little design/fashion sense in their brains. And im a straight dude btw. And the other ones are just like "oh the proportions are too realistic and/or the colors are too bland (ie not akin to Overwatch aesthetics lol)" im like how is this critique?? and their redesigns have nothing to do with the theme/context of the game. its like saying a plane is objectively better than a car lol.
Sorry homie, but the end designs were shit. They were not appealing at all and I ain't blaming the artists, because from the beginning I said that concept artist that work in the industry know their shit and specially if they work for a big project. So I know for a fact that the higher ups had to have fucked up the end designs or what was the type of design they wanted which most of them are horrible and unappealing. I see a lot of drafts of the designs that look a lot better compared to the end designs by miles, so yah It was probably the higher ups, because I don't believe for a second that the concept artists didn't notice that the designs looked horrible. However, most redesigns on the platform didn't give that much attention to the context or brief on which the artists were working on for the designs of the game. And some of them focused too much on the rule book about the fundamentals of design... But, while it's true that rules are meant to be broken when you understand them, in the case of Concord none of the end designs are able to transmit that lmao.
Okay its fine if its supposed to be based on Mobius. But it has failed epicly at that. It looks like people in costumes cosplaying Mobius while missing the entire tone and mood of that art style and only focusing on the shapes and colors
It's like the concept/character artists never got told they were working on a realistic 3D game and the 3D artists completely missed the Moebius style.
That’s the point of the video, I think. People aren’t criticising it for failing at its art style, but rather using very formulaic methods that’s are used in modern designs. Not that these methods are bad, but they don’t actually know why these work under each context. If people wanted to redesign concord, it would be more accurate if they also attempted to use inspirations from Mobeus and retro sci fi. And hey, maybe make a design which follows the same design brief, and be better
Glad someone's bringing this up cause it's been bothering the hell out of me that almost every redesign i've seen for concord is just "ignore almost every trait from the original designs and give them big boobers". Like cool redesign dude i can totally see this woman in a sci fi bikini as the tank that eats damage.
thank you so much for uploading today...you saved my career . honestly..i was thinking of dropping out of art school but your videos keep reminding me of my love for drawing..especially your sketchbook tours..thanks
The designs are made for something like Moebius,Scavengers Reign, Fantastic Planet or Heavy Metal. If you look at the art directors portfolio, you see she is massively influenced by Moebius. The designs are good if not great, slap a cell shader over the designs and simplify some of the shapes to make them less realistic, and that aesthetic would kick ass. What killed this game (and a lot of the AAA games) is the focus on hyper-realism, let games be art, stop making every game look the same.
I think you’ve perfectly explained why I dislike redesign videos. Applying basic design principles is easy enough, but without any focus it ends up looking cookie cutter. Not exactly bad, but not as great as it could be.
YES FINALLY Concord designs are a conplete miss, but ALL redesigns I've seen are equally if not of WORSE quality than Concord's final designs. They all completely ignore intent, context and inspiration. If you have a bad hamburger and "fix" it by making it a hotdog, bad news: you didn't fix crap, you made a hotdog.
Which makes the redesigns people have made even worse. Intent is the first thing you learn in order to give critique, otherwise your critique goes nowhere and addresses nothing, as demonstrated by dozens of redesigns being straight up worse than the original designs when actually applied in context.
@@ranzu3138 I could throw a handful of paint at a canvas and say I "intended" for it to look like a Deer, doesn't make the end product any less off-putting. Stop apologizing for companies that want to shove their weird propoganda everywhere.
I agreed with the points you were raising right up until you started saying individual contributors can’t affect the overall quality or direction of large projects. That is 100% wrong. The most successful teams and projects rely on every member to be committed to excellence, and to have the courage to point out when work is not up to snuff. Every single person, 100% of the time. That’s where Halo came from.
I wish Team Fortess 2 was the gold standard for character archetypes in online shooters. I think OW1 characters do not read well to people who’ve not played the game much - the designs are good but so busy. The characters you referenced, aside from Mercy, do not read the way you describe them to a casual player like me. Lucio does not read as a healer nor support as readily as Reinhardt as a tank. It’s only until you play and begin to know the character archetypes do you begin to make associations with their designs.
@@MistaMocha I think that was literally the point though , its further exemplified later when he says ana is clearly a medic " because of her gun". It's unlikely anyone instantly recognizes some of the OW characters in a manner consistent to their gameplay roles. So judging Concord against overwatch on those terms would be a little logically inconsistent, yet its what several redesigners have done. While TF2 is indeed quite readable, I personally think clear distinction between characters is sufficient even if they are individually quite complex. Though I only say busy when the details are excessive and uncontrolled, which I don't think is the case for most OW characters.
here is the thing about the tf2 character, there designed as archetype not as characters. you can project any character onto them and it well fit just fine. Only reason you think of the characters character how you do is because of how popular the game and the characters are.
Also the writing for tf2 characters blows every single ow character so far out of the water it's not fair. The artists designing the ow characters are absolutely stellar at their jobs, but ain't nobody writing home about how much they love the personalities of ow character and writing fanfic for reasons other than their incessant need to goon.
it reminds me how some people though way of making better designs were either make then more "sexier" like some femine chars give em more breats and exposed areas instead of rly focusing of making the concept better, and it rather looked more like a fanservice redesign
The fact that concord supposedly will have style from meobius and means that whoever in charge of art and animation did a shit job doing it and deserved it's downfall
Two things can be true at the same time. Many redesigns misunderstand the point behind character designs. True. Concord's character designs are bad. Also true. This video makes a good point about the context of character design, and how "readability" figures into that. A lot of these redesign videos make the point that a character should be instantly recognizable as their role, for instance. And this is wrong. But a character SHOULD be instantly recognizable as themselves, because players will be familiar with said character and their abilities in the game. And then their design should also be linked to their function in a gameplay context. For example, the Heavy in TF2 is large. It serves the function of being able to recognize and target him easily, because he is a character with a large health pool and enormous damage output. Not recognizing the Heavy for what he is will kill you in two seconds. He is also large so the other characters can hide behind him while the Heavy soaks all damage as the Medic is healing him. This is why Overwatch has a huge character pool of large tanks. In short, part of their design is dictated directly by their function in the game. Even if all characters were reduced to just squares, the tanks would have to be big. This is also where things like abilities and effects come into play, which redesigners have admittedly been largely sleeping on (but some haven't been). For instance, in Overwatch when a character is hovering over the battlefield, you know it's Pharah. You don't need other context clues. OK, on to Moebius. I'm not seeing it. And I think Moebius is over-cited on the internet, particularly because he's one of the few Eurocomics artists Americans are familiar with. One could easily cite Juan Gimenez as inspiration for some of these designs. But people don't, because people only know Moebius. Well, I'm not seeing Moebius in the concept art. And arguably, neither does the maker of the video, because he only uses the Dune concept art as an example. I'm not seeing any Blueberry panels, here.
Why are you skipping past the gooning, exactly? You people discounting "sex sells" as the reason for games sales is wild to me. All of Riot's most successful skins are just skimpy ladies... or Jhin. Marketers knew for decades that sex sells, now suddenly it's not in vogue to acknowledge that? Why exactly?
I don't think you argued your case very well for a multitude of reasons. But I'll stick to three. 1. The in‐game designs do not reflect the influence of Jean Giruad very well. And there's a question of how many people are familiar his work. 2. Concord costs hundreds of millions of dollars. With a budget that big, designs have to appeal to a large audience. These designs just don't. 3. Plenty of people have tackled the pricing and genre oversaturaion issues. But the design issues are more meme-worthy and thus more popular.
Also, dismissing artists who want characters to have some visual appeal as gooning really put me on the opposite side of his argument right from the start. Especially when the next thing he does is list out good character design traits… like being visually appealing 🤦♂️ Edit: I just got to the part where his defense of concord is an example… of how overwatch *doesn’t* have “instant readability” because… your mom couldn’t figure out what’s happening on screen??? Who makes an argument against character design based on gaming literacy? Why would they cater to people who don’t play games?!? Yes *we* know red potions heal, *we* are the ones going to buy these games, *we* are the people they’re designing this for.
While You're right that there's been many factors to Concord's downfall which don't have anything to do with the design, I have to disagree when it comes to the inspiration factor and it nullifying the need for readability and good colour palette of the designs - I've seen a good breakdown that looks at the designs taking their inspiration and art direction into account, and they came to the conclusion that unfortunately the designs do not invoke the aestetics they are supposed to, and they definitely could be constructed better, taking into account the basic designs principles, the characters' presentation and the interpretation of the source material. It's true that certain silhouettes, shape and color language are all tropes that don't have to be religiously followed, but when they're broken intentionally and the end result looks good nonetheless, most people don't even notice. Also as You said, one has to take the context into account - and the context is that the characters exist in a fast-paced video game, and a very specific genre that is a hero shooter. These designs could do well in an open-world game, with a variety of textures and details, but look a bit out of place in a genre known for pushing proportions and expressions to create larger-than-life, exaggerated figures. It's not only Overwatch, TF2, a staple of the genre did it too. Interestingly, in case of Concord the 2D and early concepts look way better than the final versions, so probably something went wrong on the decision/art direction level. I'd assume that most people who actually do redesigns do not intend to demean the artists who undoubtedly worked hard to create the game (some even state it outright that it's not their intention) - this should never be the goal of critique. It's however hard not to acknowledge that something went wrong with the designs, and probably in multiple aspects.
Great Video most people don't actually go in-depth and properly on the Concord character designs issues, also your mechs are sick, ALSO MOEBIUS MENTION
@@hannahdeards9652 I think really the saturation and pallets, since concord just has really saturation and feels kind of muddy when the colors are define pared with some pretty weird overly design things you can see where it diverged and then kind of went wrong...
Sex sells for sure. Probability a big part of overwatchs relevance (even though ppl complain about it often) is from how attractive all the characters are, where when you look at all the characters they all seem to be mostly legs (looking like models with attractive proportions) also 73 vs 100k on r34
Absolutely this! I’ve been wanting to make a video in a similar vein where people judge a design completely devoid of context of the visual language surrounding it. The designs can be critiqued but you need to do that in the context of what they’re trying to communicate and achieve with their visual language
I'm not sure. Moebius looks pretty good for a SciFi story, but that art style doesn't necessarily translate to a game in the way Firewalk used it. Making a coherent setting isn't the same as making characters you want to play as. Anyway, it had other problems.
Great video, I think you made some great points. I agree sometimes things are iconic because of time, not because they have a magical designs. To often in the online space we dog pile onto things that are trendy even if that means kicking fellow artists while there down. I’m glad you put out a nuanced and thoughtful point of view.
The reason why critics of that game hover above "design" like a vulture over a dead carcass, is precisely because Concord tried so hard to be Overwatch, the uncontested gold standard of hero shoooters, and failed miserably at it. So everyone has a readily available way of making comparisons to explain why they think Concord looks bad. Sure, most people are not completely in the know about design concepts and all the theory that backs it up, but the theories are based on experience and what people learned over time, so they try to explain the "feeling" by using the comparison, to the best of their abilities. And yes, time is a key factor. Heck, the characters outlived the game because of, well, certain adult websites. I've also seen people compare Concord with Guardians of the Galaxy, a take that I agree with, and it might give a clue as to why people didn't like it. It borrows from GotG, but it's not it. It tries to copy Overwatch in structure and gameplay, but it doesn't have some of the elements that made it work. It is based on the Moebius designs, but it's poorly executed and falls short when brought to the actual game. Concord tries to be many things, and fails at all, with a price tag to make things worse. Couple all that with the MCU Hummor, the millenial writing, the Current Year-isms, and it's no surprised why it flopped so hard. Most of those issues are likely due to managerial interference from the higher-ups, and to that, I have no solutions aside from working your butt off with limited resources but greater creative freedom, the path of indie game devs. If it was launched back then, I still think it would flop based solely on the price tag, but probably not as much. When you get a trend setter game, people naturally gravitate towards it because it's the bigm popular one. Think League of Legends and DotA for MOBAs, Overwatch and TF2 for "hero" shooters, CoD and Battlefield for FPS. Most people probanly never heard of Smite, Paladins, and maybe if they're older, they played some Killzone and Counter Strike. PUBG or Fortnite, pick your poison. If there's a lesson to be learned here is that companies like Sony, who acquired Firewalk, apparently lost touch with the player base and doesn't know what interests players anymore.
While I love the style of Mobius, I can't really picture it being used in a pvp shooter game. I see it in an open world game like breath of the wild. The only way for it to work is if they really heavily leaned into it, like weapons that are designed based on the style seen in Mobius or retro future aesthetics, reloading animations, terminology, and just totally going all in 100% on the theme. Super niche, totally weird, but fully immersive. It's entirely possible that this was the intent in the beginning, but 8 years later and you don't really see any of that in these designs. Someone overhead definitely had a foot in these characters looking as bland as they do, possibly trying to appeal to a bigger audience, and ranking up the 200m dollar bill. As 'strange' and unique as Mobius is, not even they broke the fundamental principles of design the way you see in these characters. But appeal is a big part of marketing, and I think that's were they failed. It 100% wasn't because the character designs were flawed. There are TONS of games and media out there with characters that don't have good designs and look like shit, ngl, but are popular because they're still really good without it. In fact, I'm sure this game could have gotten a lot of people who just wanted to check out how bad the characters look. But no one wanted to pay $40 to do so, not in 2024. It just wasn't appealing enough to buy.
Man this is such a true click bait. Like i clicked on the video by the thumbnail wondering if there's any substance in it or is it just a roast video but man he's so true. Good one bro!
God thank you, so many people were acting like the only way a design can be good is if it visually spells out what the characters ability is when thats not the only way to make a good design
I think there's more nuance than that, and it's kinda naivé to replace one reductive opinion with another. That's just lazy. Yes, stereotyping to communicate a character role/behaviour/skill/purpose isn't THE only way to make a good design. But one could argue it is at least ONE of the best ways to make good design FOR a hero shooter. We are not talking about character design for a comic here. I think that's why the Moebius inspiration doesn't work either: That artstyle and design language only really looks appealing as illustrations with bold lines, not with a realistic 3D graphics.
I never said it wasn't a good way to make a design, of course tying a characters ability to how they look can make awesome designs, and it works well for hero shooters. My problem was with people saying its the only way to make good designs. People act like if a healer isn't in doctors scrubs then it's a bad healer design inherently, for instance Plus id argue it's still not the only way to make good designs even for a hero shooter. As long as each class/hero is visually distinct from each other, it's fine. Overwatch has characters that communicate what they do through their design but it also has several characters that don't, like Ana. Since they still look distinct from each other, however, you'll know who does what at a glance once you've learned about them. Same with TF2, characters like Medic and Engi say what their ability is through design alone well enough, but without his sniper rifle nothing really screams sniper about Sniper. That's not a problem though since every single merc still looks visually distinct from each other As long as the classes in a hero shooter are distinct from each other then you'll know who does what at a glance the same as if their designs clearly communicated the ability
@@MaeIsOkay "As long as the classes in a hero shooter are distinct from each other then you'll know who does what at a glance the same as if their designs clearly communicated the ability" Concord did this and the designs suck and failed. And you are still holding this opinion regarding to hero shooters despite your point being proven wrong in the exact thing we are discussing? You used Overwatch as the good example, but isn't Concord the bad example? And would you consider your examples as the "best" designs in Overwatch? I don't think calling your opinion "wrong" is the right word here thought. It's more like "stubborn" and "unself-aware". It's like you forgot what your were even arguing for in the middle of the comment.
Dude the point of the video is that the designs sucked in ways besides the fact that they didn't have visual communications for character abilities. They sucked because they didn't have many interesting details and were generic, not because the fire mage wasn't red or the healer wasn't wearing doctors scrubs. My point with overwatch is that it's often pointed to as something with designs that communicate powers and look good, and it is. But it also has characters who's appearance don't communicate what they do and are still good. Ana is a good design despite the fact basically nothing visually cmmunicates her as a healer. I don't know why you think I forgot my point or that it's unselfaware? My point is that while visually communicates a characters ability through design makes for good designs, it's not the *only* way to make good designs. Again, Ana from Overwatch proves my point exactly. Nothing communicates her as a healer, a new player seeing her wont realize what she does through visuals alone. Even so, she is distinct from other characters to where once someone knows what she does, they'll see her and immediately know there's a healer on the field. Overwatch has both characters that visually signify what they do and characters that don't, because one way or the other is not the only good way to make character designs
This video is truly the lone wolf in a sea of sheep. I don’t think I ever once saw someone critiquing the game actually reference the intention of the designs. It’s sad to see a game fail but saying the sole reason was the characters is really just willingly being blind to the real issues.
You're right that trying to compete among free games but then charging for it makes the gamd destined to fail. My beef with the character designs is that the game was supposed to compete with hero shooters full of superstars and recognizable characters that you want to pick up. But they then proceed to design character, which are mostly on a mediocre frame, muted color schemes, and just to be plain uninteresting to face less risk. Staying away from risk is an issue I've been griping about with virtually every large company that exists because everything is boring or predatory to consumers now.
This is a giant tangent of a video with a point that doesn't make itself. Doesn't present itself. A viewer has to assemble it, like an IKEA furniture. IF, IF I understand this correctly, your gripe is that the design was flawed because... marketing was flawed? because the jump from old retro fugly space art design haven't been applied correctly? because people allegedly (and the one alleging is you, in a hostile, antagonistic and downright unlikeable manner) want easier designs?
It's their fault and those are their designs. How the hell would you say otherwise, unless you professionally deformed and simply fear getting same treatment later on if or when you fail as hard as them? 11:31
@@SunDry_Marchy He mentions at the end of the video the design pipeline that these characters go through before being put out in production. A lot of artists that knew what they were doing made good art for the game (see 11:13 for examples), they're not the problem. Poor management and a lack of consistent artistic direction ended up with the flawed designs that ended up in the final product.
Finally someone with a sensible opinion in this debate! I hate seing people start their videos with “I really dont want to insult anyone who worked on Concord, this was more of a studio effort” and then proceed to blame the character designers and only them for the downfall of not only the game, but the whole studio…
1:13 LITERALLY. I saw soooo many people give Roka a bigger chest in their redesigns, one guy even said he did it because her actual chest "wasn't realistic". So many redesigns-done by men especially-just made them "sexier" in the most conventional way possible.
@@battleframestudios8989 there's nothing wrong with doing a sexy redesign. The issue is when people equate standard issue sexiness to good design. Imagine if I "fixed" Roadhog's design by just giving him abs and claimed my design was superior because he's more attractive now. That's how these "boob job" redesigns can come across to people who are looking for some substantial character design work.
@@appended1 Roadhog isn't exactly an iconic design though, is he? If all the characters looked like roadhog, the game would've sold less no doubt. The "smart" thing they did was sneak a roadhog in with all the other characters that are mostly heroic/attractive/interesting
The fact that “not being able to jork it” is even a factor to be taken into consideration when thinking about “good character design” says a lot more about the critics than it does about the artists who worked on the game. Like I’m all up for being down bad but damn….
I recently heard this term "gooner" I was shocked that some kids unironically used being a porno addict a character trait - sexy characters are fine but holy crap...
It's not a real factor, that's just a strawman. The reality is that the characters unappealing to the majority of people who saw them and most people just don't have the vocabulary necessary to describe how they feel about it.
@@diemes5463 I "Concord", there is also the issue that people get together in a herd and the arguments are only repeated within the herd, no one will communicate differently so as not to offend the group, there is the same criticism with the added benefit of limited vocabulary.
You bring up a very important point, but I watched quite a few of those redesign videos, and I don't think any of them tried to make world fitting, moebius inspired characters, or claimed to do so. I think the main point they tried to make, was that it is not that hard to make more appealing designs with far less time, money and effort than concord devs had.
RUclips deleted my comment... Yeah, your comment doesn't make any sense. You can't just critique a game's art and not consider the original intent behind that art, just to claim yours as being better when it isn't even satisfying the original intent. The fact that these people doing redesign videos didn't even try to make their designs match the game's aesthetic and instead went completely into a different design style that they personally find more appealing is exactly the problem with these redesigns. You can't just take a Spartan from Halo and change it to look more like a Stormtrooper from Star Wars just because they both take place in space. They have completely different design philosophies that don't match. Character designs need to make sense and feel coherent with the world they exist in. Most of the redesigns don't. That isn't how constructive critique works. If your critique aims to completely change the design without care of what the original intent was, it's objectively bad critique. And the whole question of trying to prove that "it is not that hard to make more appealing designs in far less time, money and effort" is disrespectful and also completely misguided. The artists doing redesigns are 2D artists. They aren't 3D artists. They don't understand the process of translating 2D to 3D. Critiquing a 3D design by drawing it in 2D is not "fixing it." The original 2D designs for Concord were fine. The issue occurred when they were turned 3D, which was likely a result of executives stepping in and rushing the final 3D models. These "redesigns" would have the exact same result if they were in the same scenario. It isn't an accurate comparison.
@@thewatcher7940 I don't think you understood my comment. My whole point was that they're not critiquing these designs as Concord characters designs, they're critiquing them as characters designs in general, by separating the character from the world. And the point of those videos is to teach people about FPS character design in general, by highlighting different parts of it, explaining what they are and giving examples on how they would potentially improve it. So what they're saying is not "my design is better suited for this Concord character", they're saying "my design is more appealing for the intended audience", the audience being people who look for online hero shooters. If you showed a picture of Daw next to Mercy to them, and asked them who's design they prefer more, most people would pick Mercy. Some designs resonate with people more than others, It is not a matter of personal taste, and the redesign videos highlight all the reasons why some designs work more as hero shooter designs, and some do not work that well. The point about 2D redesigns not working well for 3D characters is something I partially agree on, but you can just compare the redesigns to some of the concept art that the guy shows in this video, like the sniper lady at 11:16 for example, the design looks pretty much the same as the ingame model.
this video is the best one i've seen about concord, i agree with all you said. those concept art and designs at the end made me realize how good this game would have been if sony didn't decide to remove all the soul from the game
I had no idea that concord supposed to be inspired by mobius. I can usually look at something and say thats ibspired by mobius. I dont think their final character designs reflect that very well
Really good points made here. Design unique to character backstory, and not just general principles of association, is so important to the depth of the characters The knowledge when character designers put enough thought to connect and give reasoning for why they have their designs made the way it was is so reassuring
The issue with Mobius's art direction is that it feels other worldly in a way that makes me feel like I'm not the character, but Concord is a third person shooter with a tight third person camera. A tight third person camera as well as a first persona camera both try to make you feel like you are the character and rely on that working to make the game feel, uh, groovy, to vibe... Hold on... To make the game experience feel more cohesive. Had to think of a better phrase, but basically to not feel like it's repulsing you out of the experience by breaking immersion. Anyway, the way to implement something like Mobius's style is to implement it into a third person video game with a free motion camera, or maybe a side scrolling game or a game with a 2nd person style camera like Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, and 3 where the camera is fixed or on rails but moves to new fixed locations or rails as you pass to new areas of the game world. Take the Odd World series as an example of doing this right in both 2D and 3D. Odd World does not use Mobius's style, but it uses a similarly disruptive art style to the game's immersion because it looks mildly repulsive in an other worldly and almost disturbing kind of way just like Mobius's, which is also an appeal to both of them. The way they make this work is they let you control the camera which works in a number of ways to help with strange art styles like these. Let me explain below. The first and most important effect that these other camera angles provide is a feeling that you are the camera and not necessarily the character. You can look at the character and scrutinize their designs and not feel averse within the realm of the "wierd but good" art style because you're the camera that's viewing them rather than being tied to them as closely as games like Concord. You have the freedom to examine. When you're playing as a character that feels too other worldly, being able to examine their details and take in the art style during gameplay and at your own will makes it easier to accept them as your character stand-in within the game world. It's the difference between being the Master Chief or Samus and feeling like you're them, vs playing as Link or Marcus Phoenix and feeling like they are them and you're getting to step into their shoes for a moment (in Link's case being the reason Nintendo ultimately gave up their failed attempts to make him a player stand-in and ultimately just accepted he is a stand alone character with a dedicated name like in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom). There are likely other ways this helps. I feel like I had a third to add here and forgot it in typing these two up, but this is enough to explain it, I think. This is all also why video games have had the freedom to make more varied and wierd art styles than film and those games still become extremely popular rather than remaining a small cult classic as in film. Players being able to explore the world at their own digression in games rather than being forced to view the world as the director sees fit is a massive part of why video games have some pretty wierd art styles that might otherwise be a turn off. It comes down to control of the camera in relation to the characters, and the cinematography of the video game landscape. Sure you can turn your character to turn the camera in a sort of free camera control sort of way in tight 3rd person and all first person games, but you can't turn your character separately from the camera. The game acts like a movie director in those games and controls the shot for you. It may seem subtle, but it's absolutely applicable to player psychology. LT;DR: If the player doesn't have control of the camera angle distinctly from the character, then wierd art styles like Mobius's don't work as well due to player phycology and cinematography.
i really love redesign videos because it's fun to see different takes on a thing, but concord's redesigns were something i didn't feel too much like watching because it only seemed about making the characters pretty/cool and it felt kinda empty?????? I don't know how to explain why i got these vibes from it. Nice video! This was a interesting perspective to hear
Aside from the ugly designs, I just hated how the characters just said nothing visually. I've played pretty much ... all hero shooters that were available on the market, I'm a huge FPS gamer and Concord was just sooooo confusing. At some point I pick a character at random and turns out that she has an animation where she equips a rocket launcher when I select her. So I have a vague idea of what she's going to be about AFTER I pick her, that's stupid. I picked Bazz once, the character looked flashy as hell and ..... it's supposed to be stealthy ? Same goes with the garbage taker robot, for some reason the garbage bags are explosive and I never quite understood what his vacuum was supposed to do. Ugly and confusing, I really did not spend a good time on this
Magic the Gathering didn't become popular because they had a lightning bolt on a card or a drawing of a black flower. Good or bad art is a nice catch, but it won't keep anyone.
Your premise of "character design is just one small piece of the puzzle" is flawed: 1) even when they had an open beta for free (no $40), no one showed up. 2) the gameplay was well done. Nothing wrong with the execution. It was not a bad game (mechanically) by any stretch of the imagination. 3) people attach themselves to characters so if the characters are meh, no one will play it. The character design in Concord was poison - people wanted to stay away from it.
Finally someone points it out! The characters may not be to appealing to a mass audience but these guys changing them without considering the intention at all and just do their standart procedure of improvement over it ha been bothered me a lot. They all seem so smug about it.
I've been avoiding most of the critiques where they have their own idea and be like "There, I fixed it". There's stuff you could critique and learn from the failings but the idea of improvements should keep in spirit with what they're going for. The push for realism cluttered the design and prevents choices of exaggeration and contrast. While there is a cynical side of needing to make characters appealing in order to incentivized purchasing skins to keep the game afloat, the real issue is that I couldn't get a sense of how these characters play. Even after reading their skills. If there was a character in most other games whose gimmick I never immediately got, it would at least make sense after it was explained to me.
I appreciate the points made in this video and completely understand them. People have made the argument that the complete reason that Concord flopped was purely because of the mediocre character design. Not true. It was not the fault of individual artists, as it was obviously mismanaged by those in charge of art and gameplay design. However, no matter how you spin it, concord's characters were a major factor in the game's unpopularity. They were ABSOLUTELY NOT the main reason, but one of, I believe, the biggest issues that drifted the game away from the public eye, alongside its shoddy marketing. The game didn't do well because it was another hero shooter dominated by a select few games (Overwatch, Team Fortress 2, Paladins, and now even Deadlock), cost $40, which made people more skeptical, had generic-looking gameplay that was clearly based off Destiny's crucible mode (some Bungie devs worked on this game), and tries to be both an arcade shooter and a tactical shooter, then failing at both. The maps were forgettable and abilities were not too well-balanced. Despite this, the gameplay was okay. It was fun, but not amazing, simply okay. Being okay, whilst costing money to access, whilst competing against one of the biggest hero shooters on the market, was suicide. So your point about the other reasons I listed being much greater problems than the character designs is a good point. BUT, having characters that either looked as generic as humanly possible or just completely unappealing did not do the game any favors. The last thing it needed was people making fun of the trash robot, the "white guy with green makeup" alien man, or the Blade ripoff with kneepads and Nike Air Jordans. Having no marketing, an unappealing cast and serviceable gameplay was what got only 2k people to play it WHEN IT WAS FREE during an open beta. I remember the first time I saw Overwatch's trailer and I saw Tracer for the first time and I remember thinking "Wow, she looks really cool!" and seeing Winston and thinking "That's a talking gorilla with a lightning gun - I gotta see what Overwatch is". Not once did I get that impression seeing any of the characters in Concord's trailer. Maybe the trash robot - but I can barely remember any of the characters' names as is. And a lot of people who had watched the game's trailer during that State of Play expo shared the same opinion I did, they barely cared about the game and how they presented the characters, and when they revealed it was a hero shooter, it was as if you watched the life leave someone's body in real life. The game was essentially dead from there. The game did not look interesting to a large collective of people, they did not vibe with the generic-looking characters having obnoxious "Guardians of the Galaxy-esque" personalities, AND it was a hero shooter. Hero shooters are made to have appealing characters, or what the hell is the point? Why would I want to play someone who looks stupid? It's the reason why you boot up Tekken 8, see a character like King and think "Oh damn, he looks really cool" or play League of Legends, see Riven and think "I want to main her and buy all her skins". I think that's why people grasp onto this idea that the character designs are what failed to the game even if it was a lot more complex than that. It's the most surface-level answer to give to someone who asks you "Why did Concord fail?" It's easy to respond with "Well, you have eyes, right? Look at it."
This is where I'm at. Like yes, a lot of the redesigns don't necessarily understand the vision of the game itself, but it's still true that the designs just don't seem to resonate with people. I've heard that the worldbuilding in Concord was actually super robust, which is something I'm interested in, but then I look at the cast of characters and none of them look like someone I want to play as, so why would I bother?
It's astonishing the way everyone in this comment section is trying to cope. People complaining about people making female characters. Conventionally attractive are completely missing. The point is as if there are offended that a character can be attractive.
I would love to blame the higher ups of the company for poor character design but at 4:23 you can see side by side 2 very similar designs and the one in 2d has more complexity (a bit too complex but it can be simplified), more variety in patterns and looks more like a badass tank than what artists at firewalk came up with in final design. The concept art from the game you show at the end is a very different style compared to what the final 3d needed to be in the end, their designs look good but they are too stylized leaving the 3d artist doing too much translations from 2d and 3d instead of having a more realistic 2d design from the get-go with better rendering of materials and more realistic proportions that would allow the 3d artist to just bring whats on 2d to 3d with minimal adjustments. EDIT: Also I just remembered that in 2023 firewalk wanted to launch the game but sony didnt like how the game looked at all so they outsourced all of 3d to other studio, it would explain why 2d designs look the way the look and it's because the game looked more stylized initially and then it was converted to more realistic 3d direction by sony and outsource artists had to work from stylized 2d concepts and turn them more realistic? Maybe?
That still isn't really the fault of the artists. The higher ups have to okay the designs. The artists are only doing what they're told, so if the higherups say that the cartoonish designs are good enough but the 3D artists struggle as a result, that's the fault of the higherups. Any situation in which the artist makes a "mistake" in the final design is the fault of the person whose job it is to decide whether that design is final. They easily could have allowed the artists to make changes. The artists can't make those decisions unless they are the ones in charge.
1. The problem with concord's character designs goes further than simple readability or goonableness or whatever. It's a hero shooter with no hero that caught anybody's eye. You can come up with hundreds of reasons why that is, but that is the core issue. 2. No, the $40 price tag is not the main reason the game failed. Concord had a free open beta that peaked at like 2000 players. It was clear since before the game even launched that nobody gave a shit about this game.
Team Fortress 2 already nailed character design almost 2 decades ago, the video game landscape would be in a better place if studios just made their game with thoses character only, no matter the genre, just put differents hats for the NPCs.
So reading the comments under this video, I am gathering some caveats that I want to criticise (trigger warning, I am giving you the harsh truth): - Some people almost seem to think these redesigns are "problematic" or even some sort of an "attack" they are taking personally. There's stuff like "I feel crazy", or "I thought I was the only one" that follow them going against the curve and disagreeing with the redesigns. Also identity politics because naturally... - Redesigns are inherently subjective and controversial to people. You have to sacrifice something, be it original intent or improvement. And both of those are subjective. - People offer a spectrum of opinions of: Redesigns are good / they misunderstood the assignment / they are worse / they are total dogwater and I hate it. Many don't like the redesigns, stating they don't agree with their idea of "good design" or "aesthetics". It's kinda like disagreeing with the "rules", thinking they are not rules or just meant to be broken. Which they are. - Many seem to take these redesign principles as attempts of "universal gospel", removing the context of the redesigns being a for a hero shooter video game where the designs HAVE to be not only clear for gameplay purposes so you can identify and separate them at a split-second glance, but also to be ATTRACTIVE to incentivise unlocking cosmetics for these character, via progression or by buying microtransactions. - People seem to be yearning or at least demanding people to accept or do more "plain" or "ugly" characters. This is a weird modern take that stems from an obsession to "subvert beauty standards" by repeatedly hitting your head on a wall and then shaming people for not liking your ugly designs. It's like some people want every single design to be a political/philosophical statement about aesthetics and if they fail to do that, they somehow a bigot or something negative. - This blatant disregard (and sometimes denial) of the context seems to be the main reason why people think the redesigns are even sometimes "problematic", like over-sexualizing or stereotyping. And to these people: Yes. You are right. That's the point. That's why they are professional designers who work on the industry and you are not. That's what is wanted and needed for vast majority of projects. It's not about making a political statement or representing reality. It's about making attractive designs for a video game. You just don't like it. You don't like that it works. You don't like that's what people want. And the worst part for you is going to be accepting that's going on and will go on. I know it makes you lose faith in humanity and get scared, but that's reality-- Not everyone likes what you like and dislikes what you dislike. Not everyone has your idea of looking things, of seeing how it impacts society or re-enforces some bias. Not everyone thinks like that. Not everything is a grand conspiracy to keep you down, some power play to spite neo-Marxism (which a lot of the ideology behind these philosophies on beauty standards stem from) - And finally: Some try to remove all accountability from the artists. This is a recurring motif with game design, where execs and managers take all the blame. There is this stigma of thinking creative types are always oppressed and can actually do no wrong. That they cannot make a bad piece of art, especially in a team environment. This is just a childish way of thinking about it and shows utter lack of experience or insight into the industry or art as a job in general. Even if the artists didn't do a bad job at the art and weren't allowed to change them by the execs, they did a bad job at convincing the execs. This is no longer about the artists doing bad art, but just being bad at their jobs. And for MANY people, they absolutely hate the idea of creativity mixing with a job. They refuse the former to be impacted by the latter. And this almost always tells you they are not a professional and don't make art for a living. TL;DR Don't change your opinion just because you see bunch of people online agree/disagree with something. Don't just follow the herd because you think you have found the place where "all the people with authority on the matter gather around". Because 99% of those people have 0 qualifications to make the opinions they are making, but they still do it with utmost confidence, as if experts. How do I know this? I am doing it right now.
MOBIUS' style just doesn't work in a hero shooter. It would've fared better in PvE centric game. Plus the realistic look just clashed with the stylized look of MOBIUS.
Dude this video was SO spot on, thank you! I don't even care about Concord all that much, but the message you're getting across is just perfect. I love it when people are smart and have good explanations about these stuff. I hope it'll help general non-artist audience to have a better understanding of why things are perceived as "good" or "iconic". As an artist myself, I started seeing a lot of Concord concept art posted after it flopped, some of it by my favorite concept artists, and I was really impressed. As you mention, a lot of that art is AMAZING! They just didn't translate well to the final 3d product because that's the industry for ya.
Excuses I've heard: "The game didn't have enough marketing!" - Deadlock had negative marketing. "No one will buy a $40 live service in 2024!" - HD2 launched at $40. "Diversity killed the game!" - OW has a literal monkey in the roster. "Hero shooters is a saturated market!" - Marvel Rivals. Maybe it was just a bad and bland game. Simple.
Its not that it flopped. People hated on this game when the first trailer came out. They said the game looked "fake and ugly" On the contrary, overwatches designs like Winston, genji and tracer became instantly iconic through trailers and cinematics even before the game came out
There's a selection bias at play here. There's a very large overlap between people who liked the Overwatch character designs, and people who are at all interested in Overwatch all these years later, and are looking for something to scratch that itch again. There's a bit of an echo chamber, where everything Overwatch is iconic. For me personally, the Overwatch character designs were so off-putting that I was never able to properly get engaged in the game. I find the concepts shown in the video so much more appealing.
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Lesson number 1 if you want gamers, don't make ugly things, same story as Pron Sites. they don't show ugly people, cause nobody wants to watch that.
But most gamers are ugly, so what they play games to escape things, here look how much Eroge works. but that is perverted, yeah but that even sells better then making ugly stuff.
Didn't one gacha game who was set for failure then turned 180 degree around showed you what gamers and people really want. Sex Sells simple as that or else all the pron sites would be gone. so all the females and males have to be super babes and hot model, yeah if you want to sell stuff yeah. you can toss one or two ugly character as long they are cool or overexcaggerated into the bunch. but almost all gamers wants nice stuff. but the people with screw loose. that is their problem not ours.
fair, but i dont think that's the point of the video, quite the opposite..
you havent watched enough pron.
Well yeah people just dont like ugly things so it makes sense but I don't think turning the characters into horny baits is enough to make people play it. If a game is still all style and no substance no one would still wanna play it, and if the reviews of the people who did play it are to be believed the it really didn't try to break any mold.
@@RosmarinusCruz The art is fine its remind me of Earthworm Jim.
Pretty faces can sell, but you know what sells more?
Good design.
"Ugly" characters are never, ever, going to be a problem. Bad design is a problem.
hear me out: we reduce the amount of characters to 9 and name them the scout, soldier, pyro, demoman, heavy, engineer, medic, sniper and spy, and we seperate the two "teams" into red and blue and they fight in a variety of "fortresses" too
jesus christ this is genius. can we get someone on this?
and then we never release a sequel?!
@ and then we let it rot under bots, cheaters and an increasingly angry playerbase!
say that again
Hol up… you might be onto something
Going for realism instead of seeing the Moebius style through was the big mistake imo. Like yeah some concept art to 3d model changes weren't great but the main issue is that it looks best stylized and that call is nobody's fault except the execs who wanted it that way
There is a videogame that's like a 1:1 copy of Moebius style, it's called Sable. Even if the copy is quite obvious, I think it looks cool and it definitely stands out among the billions of either photorealistic or Fortnite-like 3d worlds we are used to see nowadays. Considering Concord had a MASSIVE budget and a world class team of artists, they could have made a wonderful and unique twist on the colorful and stylized Moebius style. They would have found their own voice and appeal instead of being so directly compared to Overwatch and others.
This was a long way of saying I completely agree with you :'D
I agree. I was watching the concord cutscenes with my girlfriend and asking her opinion on the characters, and it hit me. Concord's entire shtick would have clicked instantly if the game was stylized like a cartoon or a comic. Making it hyper-realistic makes it feel weird.
Right? Like even though I think there's a LOT of issues with the designs the biggest problem is they reeeeally don't fit the environment. I can super see a world where they turned into something pretty good looking just from the maps being weirder and the lighting being less cookie cutter PBR realism.
Stop blaming every little thing on execs. You’re assuming they even tried stuff other than realism. Are you new to gaming, cause we’ve had plenty of success with heavily stylized games.
@@bannedmann4469 From the concord cinematic trailer I am very confident that doing "broader appeal sci-fi" was a conscious executive decision. Yes execs often take more blame than warranted but that's the nature of having a large team making a single _product_. Most of the blame for everything falls on executives because they have that responsibility, even if the responsibility is dealing with someone else's screw up. In theory that's why they get paid so much.
A recent guilty pleassure has been sharing concord redesigns that are even worse than the originals with my friends
Kinda wish there was a video with that 😅
@@vicc19I’d watch that lol
Only difference is that the redesigns were done for free in a short span of time, the people who worked on Concord were paid for 8 years, but hey, enjoy making fun of people's pastimes on the Internet to defend your favorite corporation!
The worst part is that some of the redesigns of female characters just make them prettier and put them in sexy outfits, and people still call that good design
@@diemes5463 Nobody is defending any corporations. It's a design vs design comparison. Whether they were done by a giant corporation or by a random person in their free time, that has no bearing in analyzing the designs as such. If your view of the design quality is influenced by who did them, then you are not analyzing the designs as such.
Like another commenter mentioned some 'redesigns' are just making the female characters more attractive, but their armor/clothes don't look that interesting or even worse. And they also lack the things mentioned in this video.
It's wild to me that the art style is supposed to be Moebius and 1950s retro sci-fi. I am obsessed with that art style and have spent so much time looking into character design and art in that theme for my own game. It did not even occur to me that Concord was going for that until watching this video.
That shows you just how much they watered down the style in favour of boilerplate AAA game aesthetics
@@zeppie_by trying to “play it safe,” they unwittingly took a massive risk that didn’t pay off at all
I definitely see the retro sci fi, but I never picked up on the Moebius influence.
Same, how can they drop the ball so hard?
Not very coherent. I appreciate some of the points, but it's hard to follow with how often you cut off, go on non sequiturs, etc
The problem is the design didn't blend with the environment of the game, I see in concept art they use a general color for each region like red, orange, or green, while in the game it shows regular futuristic settings. And also it's the matter of stylization, why use shiny plastic rendering when the character design relly more on flat color and hard shadow.
It can be that it was a clash of idea from the developer with a bunch of marketing analytics and shareholder. They want it to be unique yet also play it safe and generic so it's more marketable.
Cell shaded concord would go hard
@@qaztim11it already officially exists (just not in the form of a game), search “Concord Freegunner Adventures”
They’re a bunch of official cel-shaded short films of the Concord characters.
I noticed that too!! The settings were so lame compared to the concept art.
@@qaztim11 you can find official cel-shaded Concord animations by searching “Concord Freegunner Adventures”.
@@qaztim11 you can find official cel-shaded Concord animations by searching “Concord Freegunner Adventures”.
I watched Pikat redraw one of the character of concord without changing anything but the art style. It was comic or anime like style similar to Hi Rush. And it doesn't look bad. If they want to really go stylized like Mobius, they should've go all the way instead of realistic but still, their pose and some elements should be change even in Pikat redraw she had to change the pose and some color, body proportion and elements to look good.
I have been saying this a lot too that Moebius' artstyle, his color choices and design of clothes and shapes only works with bold lines and illustrations. The moment you translate it out of it, it becomes unappealing and awkward
@@jesustyronechrist2330Leelo from the Fifth Element disagrees with you
I also watched that video, and while the art style change was a major component, pikat DID change the design. She even admitted she ended up making more changes than she meant to- like the glasses, the entire shape of the coat, the pants, and the hair to a point was resized to fit the proportions more. Which to me goes to show there were execution issues in the designs more than any overall unsalvageable poison like people are saying. So many just need a few shape or color tweaks to at minimum be pretty decent. That video kind of annoyed me a bit with the “you are free to critique but you need to reframe your mind set. I’ll prove the designs are good by just drawing one in a different style!” Then proceeded to completely alter the entire silhouette, while still saying it was just the style. No shade to pikat at all, that channel has done wonders for helping me learn art and character design, it was just a weird video to make where the entire point was disproven IN the video itself.
@jesustyronechrist2330 exactly. Perhaps cell-shading could've helped to reinforce some of those lines, but it would most likely still need new shaders and tech to pull off something at all representative of the 2D source in 3D, and in motion at that. As it is, the 3D models look like base-level cosplays.
@@torbjornkallstrom2316Honestly I'd say the fifth element more defines its own aesthetic around being vaguely unappealing and awkward tbh
You know, all of the discussion aside, I find Concord's design fascinating in particular because it feels like they were on the cusp of something really interesting and for some reason they blew it. Like, why isn't the game like this 11:29 or this 11:13 So much potential, squandered.
Realistic shading screwed them up a lot.
Original or interesting, it doesn’t matter - most gamers still don’t want to impersonate an obese black woman, an androgynous obese boy or an ugly trans woman with weird fashion. Call me what you want, but that’s the truth. Characters don’t need to be overly sexualized to be appealing, but they need to be something gamers want to impersonate.
the thanos being soft because his character has circles is such a fucking funny and accurate representation of your point and how these concord redesign videos explain things lmao
No it’s not, it’s the deceptive part of his character. He’s a dad and it’s emphasized the whole time. Cloud is the reverse of that, someone who’s trying to be threatening and was literally modified to be so. It’s a bit of a spoiler, but there is a twist there. I don’t think he played it.
@@bannedmann4469 Thanos's design works very well for what his character is trying to communicate indeed, it's all about context
Actually Thanos' design is indeed safe, he's designed as a round dad, so it's rootable and understandable, which makes his horrible acts more terrifying as how does a kind man do such terrific thing
@@bannedmann4469 But the point of the video is that you need to look at the context of the work instead of just going "sharp angles threat round angles dad". With context, those two having a twist makes sense, which is what this video is all about.
@@johnrumouro9098What context did the redesigners miss about the terrible shape choices in Concord then?
I didn't know the design was based on Jean Giraud's art, that makes the character designs, make a ton more sense! I wish they made that more clear in the advertisements or developer stuff of the game.
Because it is badly done. Game Sable did the same and no one had to advertise it because you open the game and you see it
Maybe if it was more stylized it would carry that same kind of character through, when instead, at least for me, it was trying to be Guardians of the Galaxy. Movie Marvel. Which evokes a different design esthetic to me that it was clashing with.
Wait the characters were based on Moebius work?! Jesus Christ! 😂
I think this is the real issue. The reason the design was "bad" is because nobody understood how to intrepret the designs.
You don't see the intricate accessories and overdetails contrasted with bland neutral spaces for the eye that Jean Giraud uses. It makes his work appealing but not overwhelming.
Its like the art team or execs only see neon colors and choke on happy chemicals before calling it a day.
I think the problem here is with the lighting and shaders. These designs look so good in cell shaded style. It might be a producers call to make realistic 3d or whatever.
Yeah, these designs are made for a foggy, dreamy sci-fi world, not hyper realism. In concept, they're great designs.
Also basic artists stylization would have helped looking at the concept art they literally took all the characters flare @@luskart
The situation here is like the design of the Sonic (the movie) They hit the uncanny valley.
Those don't even look like designs inspired from Moebius, except are indeed eccentric, but in some clinically sharp way. Like, not really understanding why people like Moebius, but trying to copy the eccentricity on purpose. Cell shaded style could indeed help, but also if they try to achieve the atmosphere from the Moebius universe.
fr i feel like people underestimate how much of an impact art style has on character design
so true
I would argue that Lucio and Ana from Overwatch don't look like healers at all.
Lucio has roller scates and a gun with speakers on it. What does that communicate? Probably that he moves fast and has some kind of sound related ability. There is nothing besides maybe his green color scheme that says "healer".
With Ana, she just looks like a sniper. She has a militaristic outfit, a long rifle, and some orbs on a bandolier with yellow energy in them, which could be anything.
That's why context matters like he said in the video. Based on concept arts alone sure, it can be ambiguous.
But in-game I do think it was well done. When I click on Ana on the hero selection screen, the whole thing already screams battle medic to me, with the way her syringe is emphasized, the blue and white color scheme of the rifle and the overall aura. Also yellow energy in gaming tends to be healing/support abilities.
And Lucio is exactly that, doesn’t have much healer output because his main skill is speed and he uses sound to boop enemies away. He is support.
Ana is precisely that, a sniper who after a close call decided to switch bullets for more support ammo.
The designs in OW are a combination of lore + function, not just function. The yellow is the healing, because in OW healing is represented by yellow. And this is why in this video Moma shows he doesn’t know what he is talking about because OW took a series of decisions in character design that were not common at the time and made it work, but he uses it to justify really bad game design from another game. Like using why an A exam didn’t get A+ to justify another C exam
@OndaPiloto and @Sylhux Since you're both making similar arguments, I'll respond to both of you.
I'm not arguing that Lucio and Ana are bad character designs, I just think they don't convey as much as people say they do. What I'm trying to do is pretend I know nothing about the game, and that I've never seen the characters before. I think it's fair to say that someone like Mercy makes it super obvious what she does by looking at her, but Lucio and Ana are on the more subtle end.
For all I know, Lucio could be a DPS character who runs around blasting people with soundwaves (which he sort of does do), but I can't tell that his main function is support just by looking at him.
Ana's rifle looks kinda like a tranquilizer gun, so that's something, but the yellow grenades, which you both are keen to point out is obviously healing if you play Overwatch, could be some sort of yellow, damaging energy, it could be a buff of some kind for allies, it could be gatorade, but I don't think the association of yellow = healing is as common as you might think. Also her blue and white outfit doesn't really say "healer" to me. What about Soldier 76? He's blue and white, but he's DPS. He looks like a mean mercenary dude, but again you wouldn't know that he could shoot rockets and heal his teammates by just looking at him.
Sometimes healing is red (like in Skyrim), sometimes healing is green (like in Resident Evil), sometimes healing is blue (like in Doom), and sometimes healing is yellow, but I can't think of many games besides Overwatch where healing is yellow. Like you said, it's contextually dependent.
So my point is that between the factors of time and familiarity with the game (we've been playing and seeing these characters all over the place since 2016), and ALSO some really rock solid character design, you and I know exactly who these characters are and what they do. What you can't say is that all the information is instantly obvious the moment you see a character. It's not fair to say that when the moment you first saw the character was probably 8 years ago.
Also I'm of the opinion that there is more than one good philosophy for character design. People tend to say that simplicity is king, but even Overwatch's character designs are undisputably very, very detailed. Now, their detail work is very intelligent, but people actually like details, as long as they're interesting. I think more games should be permitted to deviate from the popular approach to character design.
The discourse around Concord has people throwing around a lot of absolutes, like the designs are just self-evidently terrible, but most people have only taken a cursory glance at the characters, and have no context (which you both just said is important). I think people aren't being fair, and that they never gave a game with a decidedly weirder vibe than Overwatch the chance to grow on them, because it was pre-judged and then judged post-mortem.
Do I think the designs in Concord are fine? Yes. Do I think the concept art is 10 times better? Yes. Do I think they're as good as Overwatch's designs? No. Does every game need to follow Overwatch's approach to character design? I don't think so.
@@gentlemanscarecrow5987 I don’t have time to read all the message, but in the comments you have people saying “I would have guess Lucio was a speedy character not a healer” from people that to me don’t seem to know the game
Amusingly (and correctly) a lot of people complained about legibility of overwatch on release, but so much time has passed people have forgotten. Overwatch has a lot of tall skinny women with similar silhouettes that genuinely affects legibility at a distance.
Really good analysis of concord and design principles and philosophy that we take for granted
Thank you :)
It feels like no one understands the rule of cool anymore
I saw some of the concept art done by the artists and the characters looked absolutelly GORGEOUS (If you can find, look at star child early concepts), I don't know what happened when deciding the final designs of the characters that they ended up looking so terrible.
Where can I find early dtat child concept art? I've been trying to find concept art for the characters and I've had a hard time finding them
@@ARStudios2000 you can find some on art station as the artists recently started posting them, Amanda Kiefer is one of them you can search but just put in concord in artstation and have a look around
@@ARStudios2000 Artstation
@@Alvara9 thanks!
I believe the concept is by Vinod Rams, his head design was much more interesting, and instead of just turning into a Twilight vampire, he would just tank the bullets and get a bunch of holes on him.
The biggest problem with the designs imo is simply that they didn't commit to the art style enough. There's something about them that even without context you can look at them and immediately tell "there clearly was something interesting going on here, but they chickened out at the last moment" and that communicates a lack of confidence in the game itself. If they chickened out of an interesting art style and visual language, what other interesting things did they chicken out on? Map design? Mechanics? Skins? Gamemodes?
It's a cascading effect that immediately tells a potential plater that the game would most likely be boring and safe and therefore not worth playing
When I think of hero shooter, the last thing I think of is the work of Moebius. Moebius is visually striking due to not just character design, but color theory, lighting, and how the characters fit into the setting. Just because the art is good does not mean the initial execution was flawed from the start. If you want to make a game based on Moebius, make a 2D, stylized RPG. Or at least apply some stylization to the lighting and color, like Arcane, Dishonored, or the spider-verse films. applying Moebius to a Hero FPS with hyper realistic faces and realistic lighitng is the exact opposite of Moebius's work.
THIS
gamers DO NOT GIVE A FCK about context or intentiont
they want to play a game
Very well said. 👏
It baffles me that so many people think that giving female characters deep cleavages and conventionally attractive faces (and these being the only changes that are introduced) somehow make the designs good. There are lots of great female character designs in video games that are not overly sexualized, even in Overwatch you'know. A character being sexy doesn't automatically make them a better design. Each character has their own story, a narrative purpose, and should at least be readable in the in-game surroundings - these are the core aspects that should be redesigned, not the fact that characters have no overt booba.
But why not make attractive faces
@@mr.crowjo_3933Some people just dont want too.
Nobody wants ugly female characters
Its makes them good if you are not a fat woman or a sissy fag
If you watch the character trailers for concord you'll know there isn't much in the writing of the characters either.
Thank you, I thought I was crazy about feeling weird with those videos. They focused on physical appeal and did not acknowledge the philosophy of the development. Which is wild and quite disappointed
Those videos are correct though. I can't believe I have to say this but - Sex Sells. To both men AND women. A bunch of weird nerds decided they didn't like that reality - this thread included - but it's still just as true as it's ever been.
I make it a habit to turn off this app if it ever starts showing me ragebait, like the Concord deviants these last couple months. My first exposure to it's art style was going through people's portfolios on artstation, and happening to see a bunch of great fishing spaceship designs. I slowly went back through the general collection they were a part of, and noticed that all of it was good to great, and basically all of that work made it to 3D modeling. I'm a big fan of retro stuff like it, have been since Fallout 4's Boston. Concord looks, to me, like a great collection of cohesive art pieces, that dramatube plastered onto an idiot ball in their long-term efforts to make people slightly more blind.
@@jeffmorris5802 true! minecraft is the pinnacle of sexual appeal
@chungo. You understand saying "sex sells" isn't the same thing as saying "sex is required", right?
@@jeffmorris5802 my comment wasn't said in jest, friend 😉
2:10 I don't play Overwatch so I'm not gonna lie, I actually didn't know Lúcio was a healer until this video, I assumed he was a mobility/scout DPS that would *just* flank the opposing team with blasting shockwaves and little else. Though I suppose in hindsight it does make sense for music motif to play like "bard" support.
Because Lucio is not a main healer lmao. He is exactly that, mobility, gives the entire team mobility, in many teams the Lucio player gives the call outs, and there was a time when OW RUclips was filled with Lucio main videos playing as dps and booping people 😂
He doesn't look that dps either.
@@OndaPiloto In fact they nerfed his healing at one point to push him more into this direction.
@@DoctorPhileasFragg I still remember the days you could do with zen + Lucio, even when both are supposed to be utility 😂
That’s because his idea of what “instant readability” is was slightly off. The concept isn’t that you’re supposed to understand immediately what a character’s function is based off their design, though I’m sure a lot of intention went into that separately, but the main purpose is to be able to tell instantly what that character you caught a small glimpse of halfway across the map is.
There’s an insane amount of videos documenting this concept specifically with overwatch and there is a reason they succeeded where they did and why animators/designers praised them.
A lot of the redesign artists try to make something look good on a page, in a vacuum using general principles. Which on its face seems like what an artist is supposed to do, but as you've said, it misses the greater context of what the final product is trying to achieve as a whole. The whole point of having fundamentals to design is to offer us a tool-box to then make selective decisions to suit the experiences we design for, not a dogma with which every box must be checked.
While I'm not trying to claim that the concord designs were successful, but they deserve to be fairly analyzed.
They have been, the market has spoken. Also Sungrand has a great analysis on Concord
@@diemes5463 There's a difference between disliking a product and understanding where it's at fault, and why. That's the videos point, to critique the analysis of others and what they miss. All the market has spoken for is that the game was a failure, that does not mean whatever criticism we can allege against it is valid.
I've watched the Sungrand analysis and felt it was quite amateur, but everyone's welcome to an opinion.
1:11
Both of your answers are bs from what I've seen. I've heard no one talk about goon at all. The second one, I've also never heard. The designs were just unappealing which is why they were bad. And they were from an assumed standpoint because couldn't guess the characters, which is bad from the making your audience feel stupid area.
@@furyberserk I'm not sure if you meant to reply to me or the video ( This isn't my video), but I've personally seen both those types of redesigns here on youtube.
Criticalart_64 - Concord Character redesigned (430K views, definitely falls into the "goon" category for the female designs)
Tyler Edlin - Critical Design flaws that ruined Concord ( 255K views, compares primarily to overwatch)
Sungrand studios - Pro Character Designer Explains Concord VS Overwatch Characters (400K views, literally the title)
Just those three are over a million views cumulative, and there are a ton of smaller channels that essentially follow the same logic. Totally understandable if you didn't encounter any of them ( I just got recommended them randomly by the algorithm), but they're certainly popular talking points.
When the maker of this video refers to the "goon" topic, I believe it's just a crude summary of all the people that confuse appeal with sex-appeal and want every character to be like eve from stellar-blade.
@@jamespateluniversity Was Criticalart_64 explicitly saying we can't "goon" to the Concord designs, or was that just the impression you, personally, got from the artist's redesigns?
all of this discourse is incredibly new to me. I didn't know people thought it was design related lmao. I thought it was pretty obvious it was cus the game was a paid brand new IP in a genre landscape where f2p is king.
he is lying, everyone know if was about the price
but when you see a video about the DESING, it would be obiusly only about the desings
Most people that I’ve seen say “the designs were bad enough but then they put a price tag in it to make sure it will never survive”
Concord's failure was a result of a myriad of mistakes. Designs are just one of them.
It had nothing to do with the price. Concord could not get a player base when it was in open beta.
People understood that it was an overwatch clone, saw the designs and dropped it.
If you think that designs were not a makor issue, you're tripping
Thank you!! This is the best take I've seen on Concord so far, so many other redesigns are just turning it into overwatch/apex/etc without ever considering what Concord was going for. It's sad to see those videos get so much attention/agreement. Also so many people not understanding the process and that regardless of the artists working on it ultimately its up to management to decide how far artists are able to push etc.
You’re forgetting that Concord was going for being another Overwatch and Apex etc.. it’s a carbon copy hero shooter. Leaving this context out is dishonest.
@@bannedmann4469 its a tac shooter with hero elements moreso than a hero shooter hence the focus on more retro futurist cyber militant designs for a lot of the characters. The gameplay and kit is more important than what YOU believe the game should be
Thanks for the nuanced take on character design.
@@bannedmann4469 Just because it's in the same genre as Overwatch or Apex doesn't mean that it should look the same. You're not adding context by saying this, quite the opposite. Paladins is also in the same genre and goes into a different direction with the design, more cartoonish and fantasy powered compered to your examples, and it works out for them. Overwatch itself didn't try to copy the direction of TF2 and has its own identity.
This was so cathartic to watch. I was going crazy thinking seeing people harp on the designs so much.
Absolutely right that “it’s a miracle this got made at all”
this was seriously the most annoyingly stupid thing to gather the focused hatred of hundreds of thousands
Most redesignes have been horrific. And completely lack creativity and understanding of the original influences and setting. It's as if they're never seen retro scifi before. This is the best take on the topic to date, ty.
Let alone missing the point
How many redesigns out there take the trans chick in the red coat and redesign her as cis because "she kinda looked manly"
I appreciate seeing more discussion around the concord designs swinging back against the first wave of videos. Here’s actual paragraphs of my own contributions to the discussion:
I for one definitely still found the designs ugly regardless of the discourse around the game, and I would attribute this to the uncanniness of their animation and facial construction, and color grading. I feel like you’re undervaluing the concept of readability here: I’m pretty sure everyone making that argument was assuming an audience who understands the language of videogames (a large audience which probably everyone who saw the trailers belong to), so it’s sort of a strawman to bring up the typical mom in her 30s-40s, who has more important things to do than even look at videogames. And it’s so unusual to say that this game specifically should either communicate to every layman, or shouldn’t bother communicating to anyone at all.
Even if unsaid, I’m sure we all realize a major reason for the designs having backlash is that a large number of outspoken players see it as “social-justice coded”, and the mere thought of that drives them into an irrational frenzy. Of course, I’m NOT making the case that this is necessarily a failing if the design, but I would say this reaction annoying anti-progressivism gamers is the main reason the conversation has gotten so big.
It’s probably for the best that you didn’t get into this, but the thing that annoys me the most about the redesign videos is that they just show skin and tits and say “fixed!” And then when you ask how it’s better everyone just goes “Uhmmm…sex SELLS, idiot. Everything should have SEX, literally every game SELLS because SEXY”, often dropping their own criteria in favor of giving a woman tits. I’m not sure why people seem to think that there is a conspiracy to force them to accept unattractive characters, but it is very sad to see that in some ways (though not all), the stigma of gaming has become even worse over the course of the last decade, thanks to people who are proving the stereotype right by whining about this.
Another thing of "the key to iconic logo design being Balance, Versatility, Simplicity" not being true is the Windows 98 and Windows 7 logos being so much more iconic than Windows 10 and 11s.
I'm also more and more convinced that 1. the designs didn't really translate that well to the realistic style. 2. nobody's talking about how this is yet another one of Sony's poor decisions in publishing.
8:24 It's crazy how I think of blue potions as health items because I've played Doom so much. You are so right on how playing games for a long time influences someones associations.
pfp checks out
my notification sound on my phone has been the doom multiplayer item respawn item for so long that i freak out when playing doom multiplayer now lol. it used to be the opposite when i had just changed: "wtf is spawning next to me?"
@@GraveUypo HAHAHA, I had something similar but with super mario 64 slider song. I used to have it as an alarm in my phone, it was crazy loud and it traumatized me so bad that every time I hear this music I feel stressed out.
Honestly glad to see someone bringing this up. It was mindblowing how so many artists out there 'fixing' the designs didn't recognise the influences the game was drawing on. My first thought on the failures of the art style was mostly on the actual engine itself and how the world and characters are rendered in-game. An undersold aspect, honestly.
And I'm glad you mention the importance of time. People talk big game about things like 'simplicity in logos = good' but nah it's just whatever is trendy and associated with successful brands. Could be complicated as hell just as much, makes no difference in the end. We're pattern recognition machines
If the influence was Mobeus they certainly landed the designs, but... Who really cares about that? Artists certainly do, but consumers? Did they really think that those type of designs would be appealing to the general masses? I refuse to accept that and I still believe that the concept artists got fucked over because of the higher ups pointing to the worst of the designs.
@@chok1169 Yeah those designs 100% have acceptable mass appeal, though certainly needing some tweaking.
I mean even dirty bomb was a game with no surface level appeal but I actually quite liked its character design (the writing & va didn't hurt) for its first so many years of life and the game did quite well for itself.
I do think a big element of the financial success of the project comes down to putting it at a $40 price tag when they don't have the respect and brand recognition that someone like Blizzard or Valve would have (and even they both have conceded to the importance of the f2p market)
And the thing that failed with the art style is merely the undercommitment and lack of confidence, something not uncommon in development hell games
@@chok1169 Yes, people would like a lot more of these designs if the aesthetic was better executed.
Make them more cartoony, and stylized, exagerate the characters more, go for a cell shaded aesthetic to lean into the moebius style more.
By going with hyper realism in most aspects of the characters and design they made the entire thing less appealing
@@HOUROFPOW3R Give me the name of a popular game that has those types of designs and I will believe you. Because the whole roster of Concord was really unappealing except maybe one or two.
If the game has a good rooster and is fun to play most people don't care about putting 40 bucks to play it. So I don't think the price tag was the reason for its downfall.
Finally, what do you mean with "lack of confidence"? I think they went really deep with the modeus brief. Wanna know your opinion.
Concord only has 2 designs that look anywhere near appealing. And I don't mean sxually. And then there's the weird obsession with gut imagery which is even more ugly and macabre. Ruins the pieces. A 70s post futuristic world is a bad idea overall imo. At least for a hero shooter. It just looks ugly. Somethings are not meant to be man.
a good example for how little design can matter in a games success is Gigantic. Gigantic is a Moba-esque 3rd person hero shooter with great character designs and fun art direction, but its still a game trying to compete against the likes of League of legends and overwatch. sometimes all it takes for something to fail is a few bad decisions in spite of how beautiful it may be.
and it still didn't fail as hard and fast as Concord. You're not making an equal comparison.
@@DoctorPhileasFragg i don't see how fast it failing has to do with anything. It's not really a comparison. It's an affirmation of one of the videos points, despite gigantic's GOOD designs and art style, its incredibly stupid hard to compete with something as monolithic as others in its genre like league of legends. Especially at an upfront price like gigantic (to my knowledge) has.
@@DoctorPhileasFragg and have you heard about Gugantic? no?
Ironically, one of the artists who worked on designing Concord characters, Vinod Rams, was a main character designer in Gigantic
Their designs for the Concord characters look dramatically different from the final product and imo so much better
I think that in no small part had to do with very little marketing.
Something Concord had in stupid ammounts considering they are even getting an episode of Secret level.
Even when Gigantic was comming out I only heard about it from some specific youtubers.
You obviously will have a hard time making an audience if the potential audience doesn't know you exist
FINALLY a good take on this whole thing, ppl are so quick to blame the people who arguably have the least control over the final product
Honestly I've seen TONS of people going at the executives and the higher ups rather than the artists themselves. At least from what I've seen.
That's another thing about the whole thing; it's like the thing what each other has seen a lot is right contradicting what the other has seen. Like how Chroma says one of the most recurring complaints he heard was how people can't "jork off" to the designs when of all the times I've seen these designs critiqued, I've never heard of that statement once.
The artist didn't exactly respond to the public in the best way
@@Notabear6810 That's true, the lead character artist vehemently defended the results - therefore either making himself a part of the crime at best, or revealing his total control over this aspect at worst.
@@DoctorPhileasFragg Exactly people ALWAYS wanna blame the execs but the artists signed on in the end and doubled down on the designs that were approved. They attacked people and literally called them UNtalented HACKS.
And you want me to fell SORRY for them!? Nice joke😂
Although it wasnt ALL of them that did its just sad the main voice happened to be the creative director
Finally someone on this site speaks sensible things about concord's design, thank you.
ah i miss the 90's, when the justification for putting things in the game was "we thought this was some cool shit, so we put it in".
I totally agree with you. I've seen sooo many bad and generic redesigns with willfully wrong design directions, and I always find myself wondering if I'm wrong about how I think about concept art, since so many other concept artists are going toward the basic academic concepts only, not thinking about the context of what the end product should look like. There's a reason a concept artist should be more of a designer, while lead artists and art directors still exist. This whole Concord thing has made me rethink a bit on how I teach concept art, since I've been doing the same thing with my students about the basics (shapes, colors and meaning) and I think a more brief and style oriented approach should be taken, and artists should start taking in consideration there's an art direction that needs to be taken in account, and without knowing the basics about that everything else won't come together.
I was just amazed by seeing how many of the redesigns missed the base style landmark (retro 80's sci-fi) and kept on picturing the same modern stylized silhouettes and shapes.
really good comment, i will think about "style landmark" forever
You seem to reverse the cause and effect of Pharah's design. They went from "we want a character that flies and shoots rockets" through "so she should look like a bird" and "what nation would a bird-like design fit" to "let's make her Egyptian and adjust the design to that". They weren't like "hurr we wanna make an Egyptian character so let's make her a bird lol". The readability of the design (and its overall quality, as in "looks cool") is the starting point, not some random need for a country token.
The "context" of the game's lore, overall design style and whatever is just a vehicle to allow such designs and help them make a coherent cast. It helps them be good designs, not limits them from being good. When judging Concord's designs, the context is at best just another hint to why they are bad, not some kind of justification for them being bad.
To be fair, the fact everyone ignore the art direction of the game may be testament of how little the art direction was communicated by the final designs-
Like I love moebius' style and when I saw concord I did not for the life of me thought of that style for a single second... When you put specific characters side by side with a moebius one you see the ressemblance of the design, but the style itself isn't really there and so ironically enough the context that made the design work disapear
Mobius is way softer with very desaturated colors, detailed linework and smooth gradients. And even design wise, it feel like concord's designs are attempts to copy existing designs they saw but a little worse to not be exact copies instead of making a trully original spin on them, it'd diluting the style not elevating it
Excactly, the game really could've looked great if the execs didn't force those uncanny and disgusting graphics onto the game for the sake of high fidelity. Ironically for them that decision ended up backfiring spectacularly. I feel sorry for the dev team, they worked hard on a project which was doomed to fail
I am not a game designer, but I can say 100% that character design can and has steered me away from buying or playing games. Something was definitely lost in translation from the concept art to the final product however n this game, and that's very unfortunate.
I mostly agree, but people were not buying the character looks before the game ever released. I don't say that to denigrate the artists. Things just don't always work out in business and art. In this case, the art may have deterred rather than attracted. I don't understand the sensitivity about it, personally. Take the L and do better next time.
For Firewalk, I don't even know if there will even be a next time
@@ARStudios2000 There very well may not be. I am thinking more about the individuals and what they will work on next. One of them said on X that a bunch of them are considering quitting the games industry because of what people are saying. That seems very strange to me for professional artists, but failure is never easy.
This is the best and most authentic Concord redesign video I have seen so far. It’s honest, critical and technical. Well done. Thanks for publishing
I agree completely. We've seen the opposite in videogames and film, where you have something extremely beautiful but with no substance. Those also crash and burn. Videogames are a whole package of things, including setting, story, character development, character and world design, coding and many other things. If it depended exclusively on character design, Minecraft wouldn't be a thing.
The goddamn problem was that it was photorealistic slop, instead of something more original. TBH OW works because it dosen't want to push photorealism, it has a clear "cartoony" art direction and stylisation.
FUCKING FINALLY someone gets it. I was stunned at these self-proclaimed ''professional'' artists with their template ABC approach to ''character design''. I thought I was going crazy with how popular those videos were. AMEN to you Chroma Moma.
I'm not a fan of the Concord final designs either but my biggest gripe about this is how this discussion will probably push back against trying new things.
fr, crazy how the mainstream didnt get it whatsoever, im was starting to think i was trippin. (im not saying the concord designs are neccessarily good)
@@Literature4343 agreed, I think that game was just a perfect storm for people to pile on it. It feels like these youtube artist channels are just capitalizing on a trendy topic but are completely wrong with their takes (or at the very least super misleading).
@@hoxtom3663 like honest the number of them are essentially just saying that they're not seeing enough "flesh" is mind boggling, all the while in a condescending demeaner, smh, like what do they know, they got a whole lotta coom but little design/fashion sense in their brains. And im a straight dude btw. And the other ones are just like "oh the proportions are too realistic and/or the colors are too bland (ie not akin to Overwatch aesthetics lol)" im like how is this critique?? and their redesigns have nothing to do with the theme/context of the game. its like saying a plane is objectively better than a car lol.
@@hoxtom3663can you guy give name example of those ‘popular’ artist youtuber here ? So I can avoid or at least take a grain of salt on their videos
Sorry homie, but the end designs were shit. They were not appealing at all and I ain't blaming the artists, because from the beginning I said that concept artist that work in the industry know their shit and specially if they work for a big project. So I know for a fact that the higher ups had to have fucked up the end designs or what was the type of design they wanted which most of them are horrible and unappealing. I see a lot of drafts of the designs that look a lot better compared to the end designs by miles, so yah It was probably the higher ups, because I don't believe for a second that the concept artists didn't notice that the designs looked horrible.
However, most redesigns on the platform didn't give that much attention to the context or brief on which the artists were working on for the designs of the game. And some of them focused too much on the rule book about the fundamentals of design... But, while it's true that rules are meant to be broken when you understand them, in the case of Concord none of the end designs are able to transmit that lmao.
Okay its fine if its supposed to be based on Mobius. But it has failed epicly at that. It looks like people in costumes cosplaying Mobius while missing the entire tone and mood of that art style and only focusing on the shapes and colors
It's like the concept/character artists never got told they were working on a realistic 3D game and the 3D artists completely missed the Moebius style.
That’s the point of the video, I think. People aren’t criticising it for failing at its art style, but rather using very formulaic methods that’s are used in modern designs. Not that these methods are bad, but they don’t actually know why these work under each context.
If people wanted to redesign concord, it would be more accurate if they also attempted to use inspirations from Mobeus and retro sci fi. And hey, maybe make a design which follows the same design brief, and be better
Seeing so many artists post their work on concord these past weeks it's truly insane how much work just went down the drain here
Glad someone's bringing this up cause it's been bothering the hell out of me that almost every redesign i've seen for concord is just "ignore almost every trait from the original designs and give them big boobers". Like cool redesign dude i can totally see this woman in a sci fi bikini as the tank that eats damage.
thank you so much for uploading today...you saved my career . honestly..i was thinking of dropping out of art school but your videos keep reminding me of my love for drawing..especially your sketchbook tours..thanks
Why would you quit art school? i really want to know
The designs are made for something like Moebius,Scavengers Reign, Fantastic Planet or Heavy Metal.
If you look at the art directors portfolio, you see she is massively influenced by Moebius.
The designs are good if not great, slap a cell shader over the designs and simplify some of the shapes to make them less realistic, and that aesthetic would kick ass.
What killed this game (and a lot of the AAA games) is the focus on hyper-realism, let games be art, stop making every game look the same.
I have been begging my favorite arttuber to do a redesign of concord characters and i am glad that they didn't took my advice
I think you’ve perfectly explained why I dislike redesign videos. Applying basic design principles is easy enough, but without any focus it ends up looking cookie cutter. Not exactly bad, but not as great as it could be.
YES FINALLY
Concord designs are a conplete miss, but ALL redesigns I've seen are equally if not of WORSE quality than Concord's final designs.
They all completely ignore intent, context and inspiration.
If you have a bad hamburger and "fix" it by making it a hotdog, bad news: you didn't fix crap, you made a hotdog.
Me : Concord designs are bad
This guy : they're inspired by Moebius
Me : ...Concord designs are even worse
yeah like
idc about the context
it's just bad
THIS 😂
EXACTLY💀. Knowing where the designers pulled inspo from just tells us how BADLY they represented the inspiration🤣
Which makes the redesigns people have made even worse.
Intent is the first thing you learn in order to give critique, otherwise your critique goes nowhere and addresses nothing, as demonstrated by dozens of redesigns being straight up worse than the original designs when actually applied in context.
@@ranzu3138 I could throw a handful of paint at a canvas and say I "intended" for it to look like a Deer, doesn't make the end product any less off-putting. Stop apologizing for companies that want to shove their weird propoganda everywhere.
I agreed with the points you were raising right up until you started saying individual contributors can’t affect the overall quality or direction of large projects.
That is 100% wrong.
The most successful teams and projects rely on every member to be committed to excellence, and to have the courage to point out when work is not up to snuff.
Every single person, 100% of the time.
That’s where Halo came from.
I wish Team Fortess 2 was the gold standard for character archetypes in online shooters. I think OW1 characters do not read well to people who’ve not played the game much - the designs are good but so busy. The characters you referenced, aside from Mercy, do not read the way you describe them to a casual player like me. Lucio does not read as a healer nor support as readily as Reinhardt as a tank. It’s only until you play and begin to know the character archetypes do you begin to make associations with their designs.
preach
@@MistaMocha I think that was literally the point though , its further exemplified later when he says ana is clearly a medic " because of her gun". It's unlikely anyone instantly recognizes some of the OW characters in a manner consistent to their gameplay roles. So judging Concord against overwatch on those terms would be a little logically inconsistent, yet its what several redesigners have done.
While TF2 is indeed quite readable, I personally think clear distinction between characters is sufficient even if they are individually quite complex. Though I only say busy when the details are excessive and uncontrolled, which I don't think is the case for most OW characters.
TF2 is the OG and still the best in this aspect.
here is the thing about the tf2 character, there designed as archetype not as characters. you can project any character onto them and it well fit just fine. Only reason you think of the characters character how you do is because of how popular the game and the characters are.
Also the writing for tf2 characters blows every single ow character so far out of the water it's not fair. The artists designing the ow characters are absolutely stellar at their jobs, but ain't nobody writing home about how much they love the personalities of ow character and writing fanfic for reasons other than their incessant need to goon.
it reminds me how some people though way of making better designs were either make then more "sexier" like some femine chars give em more breats and exposed areas instead of rly focusing of making the concept better, and it rather looked more like a fanservice redesign
The fact that concord supposedly will have style from meobius and means that whoever in charge of art and animation did a shit job doing it and deserved it's downfall
Two things can be true at the same time. Many redesigns misunderstand the point behind character designs. True. Concord's character designs are bad. Also true. This video makes a good point about the context of character design, and how "readability" figures into that. A lot of these redesign videos make the point that a character should be instantly recognizable as their role, for instance. And this is wrong. But a character SHOULD be instantly recognizable as themselves, because players will be familiar with said character and their abilities in the game. And then their design should also be linked to their function in a gameplay context. For example, the Heavy in TF2 is large. It serves the function of being able to recognize and target him easily, because he is a character with a large health pool and enormous damage output. Not recognizing the Heavy for what he is will kill you in two seconds. He is also large so the other characters can hide behind him while the Heavy soaks all damage as the Medic is healing him. This is why Overwatch has a huge character pool of large tanks. In short, part of their design is dictated directly by their function in the game. Even if all characters were reduced to just squares, the tanks would have to be big. This is also where things like abilities and effects come into play, which redesigners have admittedly been largely sleeping on (but some haven't been). For instance, in Overwatch when a character is hovering over the battlefield, you know it's Pharah. You don't need other context clues.
OK, on to Moebius. I'm not seeing it. And I think Moebius is over-cited on the internet, particularly because he's one of the few Eurocomics artists Americans are familiar with. One could easily cite Juan Gimenez as inspiration for some of these designs. But people don't, because people only know Moebius. Well, I'm not seeing Moebius in the concept art. And arguably, neither does the maker of the video, because he only uses the Dune concept art as an example. I'm not seeing any Blueberry panels, here.
Why are you skipping past the gooning, exactly? You people discounting "sex sells" as the reason for games sales is wild to me. All of Riot's most successful skins are just skimpy ladies... or Jhin. Marketers knew for decades that sex sells, now suddenly it's not in vogue to acknowledge that? Why exactly?
I don't think you argued your case very well for a multitude of reasons. But I'll stick to three.
1. The in‐game designs do not reflect the influence of Jean Giruad very well. And there's a question of how many people are familiar his work.
2. Concord costs hundreds of millions of dollars. With a budget that big, designs have to appeal to a large audience. These designs just don't.
3. Plenty of people have tackled the pricing and genre oversaturaion issues. But the design issues are more meme-worthy and thus more popular.
Also, dismissing artists who want characters to have some visual appeal as gooning really put me on the opposite side of his argument right from the start. Especially when the next thing he does is list out good character design traits… like being visually appealing 🤦♂️
Edit: I just got to the part where his defense of concord is an example… of how overwatch *doesn’t* have “instant readability” because… your mom couldn’t figure out what’s happening on screen???
Who makes an argument against character design based on gaming literacy? Why would they cater to people who don’t play games?!? Yes *we* know red potions heal, *we* are the ones going to buy these games, *we* are the people they’re designing this for.
While You're right that there's been many factors to Concord's downfall which don't have anything to do with the design, I have to disagree when it comes to the inspiration factor and it nullifying the need for readability and good colour palette of the designs - I've seen a good breakdown that looks at the designs taking their inspiration and art direction into account, and they came to the conclusion that unfortunately the designs do not invoke the aestetics they are supposed to, and they definitely could be constructed better, taking into account the basic designs principles, the characters' presentation and the interpretation of the source material.
It's true that certain silhouettes, shape and color language are all tropes that don't have to be religiously followed, but when they're broken intentionally and the end result looks good nonetheless, most people don't even notice. Also as You said, one has to take the context into account - and the context is that the characters exist in a fast-paced video game, and a very specific genre that is a hero shooter. These designs could do well in an open-world game, with a variety of textures and details, but look a bit out of place in a genre known for pushing proportions and expressions to create larger-than-life, exaggerated figures. It's not only Overwatch, TF2, a staple of the genre did it too.
Interestingly, in case of Concord the 2D and early concepts look way better than the final versions, so probably something went wrong on the decision/art direction level. I'd assume that most people who actually do redesigns do not intend to demean the artists who undoubtedly worked hard to create the game (some even state it outright that it's not their intention) - this should never be the goal of critique. It's however hard not to acknowledge that something went wrong with the designs, and probably in multiple aspects.
Great Video most people don't actually go in-depth and properly on the Concord character designs issues, also your mechs are sick, ALSO MOEBIUS MENTION
Impossible to miss if you're an artist
@@ChromaMomaActually, I'm a big Moebius fan but I didn't clock the influence in the designs :(
They look nothing like moebius...
@@hannahdeards9652 maybe because concord desing are just bad
@@hannahdeards9652 I think really the saturation and pallets, since concord just has really saturation and feels kind of muddy when the colors are define pared with some pretty weird overly design things you can see where it diverged and then kind of went wrong...
Sex sells for sure. Probability a big part of overwatchs relevance (even though ppl complain about it often) is from how attractive all the characters are, where when you look at all the characters they all seem to be mostly legs (looking like models with attractive proportions) also 73 vs 100k on r34
Absolutely this! I’ve been wanting to make a video in a similar vein where people judge a design completely devoid of context of the visual language surrounding it. The designs can be critiqued but you need to do that in the context of what they’re trying to communicate and achieve with their visual language
I'm not sure. Moebius looks pretty good for a SciFi story, but that art style doesn't necessarily translate to a game in the way Firewalk used it.
Making a coherent setting isn't the same as making characters you want to play as.
Anyway, it had other problems.
Great video, I think you made some great points. I agree sometimes things are iconic because of time, not because they have a magical designs. To often in the online space we dog pile onto things that are trendy even if that means kicking fellow artists while there down. I’m glad you put out a nuanced and thoughtful point of view.
The reason why critics of that game hover above "design" like a vulture over a dead carcass, is precisely because Concord tried so hard to be Overwatch, the uncontested gold standard of hero shoooters, and failed miserably at it. So everyone has a readily available way of making comparisons to explain why they think Concord looks bad. Sure, most people are not completely in the know about design concepts and all the theory that backs it up, but the theories are based on experience and what people learned over time, so they try to explain the "feeling" by using the comparison, to the best of their abilities. And yes, time is a key factor. Heck, the characters outlived the game because of, well, certain adult websites.
I've also seen people compare Concord with Guardians of the Galaxy, a take that I agree with, and it might give a clue as to why people didn't like it. It borrows from GotG, but it's not it. It tries to copy Overwatch in structure and gameplay, but it doesn't have some of the elements that made it work. It is based on the Moebius designs, but it's poorly executed and falls short when brought to the actual game. Concord tries to be many things, and fails at all, with a price tag to make things worse. Couple all that with the MCU Hummor, the millenial writing, the Current Year-isms, and it's no surprised why it flopped so hard. Most of those issues are likely due to managerial interference from the higher-ups, and to that, I have no solutions aside from working your butt off with limited resources but greater creative freedom, the path of indie game devs.
If it was launched back then, I still think it would flop based solely on the price tag, but probably not as much. When you get a trend setter game, people naturally gravitate towards it because it's the bigm popular one. Think League of Legends and DotA for MOBAs, Overwatch and TF2 for "hero" shooters, CoD and Battlefield for FPS. Most people probanly never heard of Smite, Paladins, and maybe if they're older, they played some Killzone and Counter Strike. PUBG or Fortnite, pick your poison. If there's a lesson to be learned here is that companies like Sony, who acquired Firewalk, apparently lost touch with the player base and doesn't know what interests players anymore.
While I love the style of Mobius, I can't really picture it being used in a pvp shooter game. I see it in an open world game like breath of the wild. The only way for it to work is if they really heavily leaned into it, like weapons that are designed based on the style seen in Mobius or retro future aesthetics, reloading animations, terminology, and just totally going all in 100% on the theme. Super niche, totally weird, but fully immersive. It's entirely possible that this was the intent in the beginning, but 8 years later and you don't really see any of that in these designs. Someone overhead definitely had a foot in these characters looking as bland as they do, possibly trying to appeal to a bigger audience, and ranking up the 200m dollar bill. As 'strange' and unique as Mobius is, not even they broke the fundamental principles of design the way you see in these characters.
But appeal is a big part of marketing, and I think that's were they failed. It 100% wasn't because the character designs were flawed. There are TONS of games and media out there with characters that don't have good designs and look like shit, ngl, but are popular because they're still really good without it. In fact, I'm sure this game could have gotten a lot of people who just wanted to check out how bad the characters look. But no one wanted to pay $40 to do so, not in 2024. It just wasn't appealing enough to buy.
Man this is such a true click bait. Like i clicked on the video by the thumbnail wondering if there's any substance in it or is it just a roast video but man he's so true. Good one bro!
God thank you, so many people were acting like the only way a design can be good is if it visually spells out what the characters ability is when thats not the only way to make a good design
I think there's more nuance than that, and it's kinda naivé to replace one reductive opinion with another. That's just lazy. Yes, stereotyping to communicate a character role/behaviour/skill/purpose isn't THE only way to make a good design.
But one could argue it is at least ONE of the best ways to make good design FOR a hero shooter. We are not talking about character design for a comic here. I think that's why the Moebius inspiration doesn't work either: That artstyle and design language only really looks appealing as illustrations with bold lines, not with a realistic 3D graphics.
I never said it wasn't a good way to make a design, of course tying a characters ability to how they look can make awesome designs, and it works well for hero shooters. My problem was with people saying its the only way to make good designs. People act like if a healer isn't in doctors scrubs then it's a bad healer design inherently, for instance
Plus id argue it's still not the only way to make good designs even for a hero shooter. As long as each class/hero is visually distinct from each other, it's fine.
Overwatch has characters that communicate what they do through their design but it also has several characters that don't, like Ana. Since they still look distinct from each other, however, you'll know who does what at a glance once you've learned about them. Same with TF2, characters like Medic and Engi say what their ability is through design alone well enough, but without his sniper rifle nothing really screams sniper about Sniper. That's not a problem though since every single merc still looks visually distinct from each other
As long as the classes in a hero shooter are distinct from each other then you'll know who does what at a glance the same as if their designs clearly communicated the ability
@@MaeIsOkay "As long as the classes in a hero shooter are distinct from each other then you'll know who does what at a glance the same as if their designs clearly communicated the ability"
Concord did this and the designs suck and failed. And you are still holding this opinion regarding to hero shooters despite your point being proven wrong in the exact thing we are discussing? You used Overwatch as the good example, but isn't Concord the bad example? And would you consider your examples as the "best" designs in Overwatch?
I don't think calling your opinion "wrong" is the right word here thought. It's more like "stubborn" and "unself-aware". It's like you forgot what your were even arguing for in the middle of the comment.
Dude the point of the video is that the designs sucked in ways besides the fact that they didn't have visual communications for character abilities. They sucked because they didn't have many interesting details and were generic, not because the fire mage wasn't red or the healer wasn't wearing doctors scrubs.
My point with overwatch is that it's often pointed to as something with designs that communicate powers and look good, and it is. But it also has characters who's appearance don't communicate what they do and are still good. Ana is a good design despite the fact basically nothing visually cmmunicates her as a healer.
I don't know why you think I forgot my point or that it's unselfaware? My point is that while visually communicates a characters ability through design makes for good designs, it's not the *only* way to make good designs. Again, Ana from Overwatch proves my point exactly. Nothing communicates her as a healer, a new player seeing her wont realize what she does through visuals alone. Even so, she is distinct from other characters to where once someone knows what she does, they'll see her and immediately know there's a healer on the field. Overwatch has both characters that visually signify what they do and characters that don't, because one way or the other is not the only good way to make character designs
This video is truly the lone wolf in a sea of sheep. I don’t think I ever once saw someone critiquing the game actually reference the intention of the designs. It’s sad to see a game fail but saying the sole reason was the characters is really just willingly being blind to the real issues.
Yes, characters design is not the reason why the game faild. It's however one of many reasosns.
Oversaturated/burn out genre, hero-shooters today are like Superhero movies, people are tired of them.
Plus Higher-ups poor judgment choices.
You're right that trying to compete among free games but then charging for it makes the gamd destined to fail. My beef with the character designs is that the game was supposed to compete with hero shooters full of superstars and recognizable characters that you want to pick up. But they then proceed to design character, which are mostly on a mediocre frame, muted color schemes, and just to be plain uninteresting to face less risk. Staying away from risk is an issue I've been griping about with virtually every large company that exists because everything is boring or predatory to consumers now.
This is a giant tangent of a video with a point that doesn't make itself. Doesn't present itself. A viewer has to assemble it, like an IKEA furniture.
IF, IF I understand this correctly, your gripe is that the design was flawed because... marketing was flawed? because the jump from old retro fugly space art design haven't been applied correctly? because people allegedly (and the one alleging is you, in a hostile, antagonistic and downright unlikeable manner) want easier designs?
What an elitist asshole 10:44 :/
Whatever point you had, your presentation shouldn't be like this
It's their fault and those are their designs.
How the hell would you say otherwise, unless you professionally deformed and simply fear getting same treatment later on if or when you fail as hard as them? 11:31
@@SunDry_Marchy He mentions at the end of the video the design pipeline that these characters go through before being put out in production. A lot of artists that knew what they were doing made good art for the game (see 11:13 for examples), they're not the problem. Poor management and a lack of consistent artistic direction ended up with the flawed designs that ended up in the final product.
Finally someone with a sensible opinion in this debate! I hate seing people start their videos with “I really dont want to insult anyone who worked on Concord, this was more of a studio effort” and then proceed to blame the character designers and only them for the downfall of not only the game, but the whole studio…
it's a literal meme how you can share any design and people will prefer it over concord
like fan service > concord
1:13 LITERALLY. I saw soooo many people give Roka a bigger chest in their redesigns, one guy even said he did it because her actual chest "wasn't realistic". So many redesigns-done by men especially-just made them "sexier" in the most conventional way possible.
How dare they.
“Wasn’t realistic”???????
Clearly never met a real life woman before of they think she's unrealistic
@@battleframestudios8989 there's nothing wrong with doing a sexy redesign. The issue is when people equate standard issue sexiness to good design. Imagine if I "fixed" Roadhog's design by just giving him abs and claimed my design was superior because he's more attractive now. That's how these "boob job" redesigns can come across to people who are looking for some substantial character design work.
@@appended1 Roadhog isn't exactly an iconic design though, is he? If all the characters looked like roadhog, the game would've sold less no doubt. The "smart" thing they did was sneak a roadhog in with all the other characters that are mostly heroic/attractive/interesting
The fact that “not being able to jork it” is even a factor to be taken into consideration when thinking about “good character design” says a lot more about the critics than it does about the artists who worked on the game. Like I’m all up for being down bad but damn….
I recently heard this term "gooner" I was shocked that some kids unironically used being a porno addict a character trait - sexy characters are fine but holy crap...
It's not a real factor, that's just a strawman. The reality is that the characters unappealing to the majority of people who saw them and most people just don't have the vocabulary necessary to describe how they feel about it.
@@diemes5463 I "Concord", there is also the issue that people get together in a herd and the arguments are only repeated within the herd, no one will communicate differently so as not to offend the group, there is the same criticism with the added benefit of limited vocabulary.
The characters are UNDERWHELMING AND FIT BETTER IN THE BACKGROUND than playable character@@diemes5463
that's the strawman that's been using to discredit the criticism that these characters are really ugly and unappealing though.
You bring up a very important point, but I watched quite a few of those redesign videos, and I don't think any of them tried to make world fitting, moebius inspired characters, or claimed to do so. I think the main point they tried to make, was that it is not that hard to make more appealing designs with far less time, money and effort than concord devs had.
RUclips deleted my comment...
Yeah, your comment doesn't make any sense. You can't just critique a game's art and not consider the original intent behind that art, just to claim yours as being better when it isn't even satisfying the original intent. The fact that these people doing redesign videos didn't even try to make their designs match the game's aesthetic and instead went completely into a different design style that they personally find more appealing is exactly the problem with these redesigns. You can't just take a Spartan from Halo and change it to look more like a Stormtrooper from Star Wars just because they both take place in space. They have completely different design philosophies that don't match. Character designs need to make sense and feel coherent with the world they exist in. Most of the redesigns don't. That isn't how constructive critique works. If your critique aims to completely change the design without care of what the original intent was, it's objectively bad critique.
And the whole question of trying to prove that "it is not that hard to make more appealing designs in far less time, money and effort" is disrespectful and also completely misguided. The artists doing redesigns are 2D artists. They aren't 3D artists. They don't understand the process of translating 2D to 3D. Critiquing a 3D design by drawing it in 2D is not "fixing it." The original 2D designs for Concord were fine. The issue occurred when they were turned 3D, which was likely a result of executives stepping in and rushing the final 3D models. These "redesigns" would have the exact same result if they were in the same scenario. It isn't an accurate comparison.
@@thewatcher7940 I don't think you understood my comment. My whole point was that they're not critiquing these designs as Concord characters designs, they're critiquing them as characters designs in general, by separating the character from the world. And the point of those videos is to teach people about FPS character design in general, by highlighting different parts of it, explaining what they are and giving examples on how they would potentially improve it. So what they're saying is not "my design is better suited for this Concord character", they're saying "my design is more appealing for the intended audience", the audience being people who look for online hero shooters. If you showed a picture of Daw next to Mercy to them, and asked them who's design they prefer more, most people would pick Mercy. Some designs resonate with people more than others, It is not a matter of personal taste, and the redesign videos highlight all the reasons why some designs work more as hero shooter designs, and some do not work that well.
The point about 2D redesigns not working well for 3D characters is something I partially agree on, but you can just compare the redesigns to some of the concept art that the guy shows in this video, like the sniper lady at 11:16 for example, the design looks pretty much the same as the ingame model.
this video is the best one i've seen about concord, i agree with all you said.
those concept art and designs at the end made me realize how good this game would have been if sony didn't decide to remove all the soul from the game
I had no idea that concord supposed to be inspired by mobius. I can usually look at something and say thats ibspired by mobius. I dont think their final character designs reflect that very well
Really good points made here. Design unique to character backstory, and not just general principles of association, is so important to the depth of the characters
The knowledge when character designers put enough thought to connect and give reasoning for why they have their designs made the way it was is so reassuring
The issue with Mobius's art direction is that it feels other worldly in a way that makes me feel like I'm not the character, but Concord is a third person shooter with a tight third person camera. A tight third person camera as well as a first persona camera both try to make you feel like you are the character and rely on that working to make the game feel, uh, groovy, to vibe... Hold on... To make the game experience feel more cohesive. Had to think of a better phrase, but basically to not feel like it's repulsing you out of the experience by breaking immersion.
Anyway, the way to implement something like Mobius's style is to implement it into a third person video game with a free motion camera, or maybe a side scrolling game or a game with a 2nd person style camera like Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, and 3 where the camera is fixed or on rails but moves to new fixed locations or rails as you pass to new areas of the game world. Take the Odd World series as an example of doing this right in both 2D and 3D. Odd World does not use Mobius's style, but it uses a similarly disruptive art style to the game's immersion because it looks mildly repulsive in an other worldly and almost disturbing kind of way just like Mobius's, which is also an appeal to both of them. The way they make this work is they let you control the camera which works in a number of ways to help with strange art styles like these. Let me explain below.
The first and most important effect that these other camera angles provide is a feeling that you are the camera and not necessarily the character. You can look at the character and scrutinize their designs and not feel averse within the realm of the "wierd but good" art style because you're the camera that's viewing them rather than being tied to them as closely as games like Concord. You have the freedom to examine. When you're playing as a character that feels too other worldly, being able to examine their details and take in the art style during gameplay and at your own will makes it easier to accept them as your character stand-in within the game world. It's the difference between being the Master Chief or Samus and feeling like you're them, vs playing as Link or Marcus Phoenix and feeling like they are them and you're getting to step into their shoes for a moment (in Link's case being the reason Nintendo ultimately gave up their failed attempts to make him a player stand-in and ultimately just accepted he is a stand alone character with a dedicated name like in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom). There are likely other ways this helps. I feel like I had a third to add here and forgot it in typing these two up, but this is enough to explain it, I think.
This is all also why video games have had the freedom to make more varied and wierd art styles than film and those games still become extremely popular rather than remaining a small cult classic as in film. Players being able to explore the world at their own digression in games rather than being forced to view the world as the director sees fit is a massive part of why video games have some pretty wierd art styles that might otherwise be a turn off. It comes down to control of the camera in relation to the characters, and the cinematography of the video game landscape. Sure you can turn your character to turn the camera in a sort of free camera control sort of way in tight 3rd person and all first person games, but you can't turn your character separately from the camera. The game acts like a movie director in those games and controls the shot for you. It may seem subtle, but it's absolutely applicable to player psychology.
LT;DR: If the player doesn't have control of the camera angle distinctly from the character, then wierd art styles like Mobius's don't work as well due to player phycology and cinematography.
i really love redesign videos because it's fun to see different takes on a thing, but concord's redesigns were something i didn't feel too much like watching because it only seemed about making the characters pretty/cool and it felt kinda empty?????? I don't know how to explain why i got these vibes from it.
Nice video! This was a interesting perspective to hear
Pretty and cool is what sells, see: every successful piece of media ever
Yeah, the few of the redesigns I've seen didn't try to even understand what the inspirations where or why they were like that
Aside from the ugly designs, I just hated how the characters just said nothing visually. I've played pretty much ... all hero shooters that were available on the market, I'm a huge FPS gamer and Concord was just sooooo confusing. At some point I pick a character at random and turns out that she has an animation where she equips a rocket launcher when I select her. So I have a vague idea of what she's going to be about AFTER I pick her, that's stupid.
I picked Bazz once, the character looked flashy as hell and ..... it's supposed to be stealthy ? Same goes with the garbage taker robot, for some reason the garbage bags are explosive and I never quite understood what his vacuum was supposed to do.
Ugly and confusing, I really did not spend a good time on this
Magic the Gathering didn't become popular because they had a lightning bolt on a card or a drawing of a black flower. Good or bad art is a nice catch, but it won't keep anyone.
Your premise of "character design is just one small piece of the puzzle" is flawed: 1) even when they had an open beta for free (no $40), no one showed up. 2) the gameplay was well done. Nothing wrong with the execution. It was not a bad game (mechanically) by any stretch of the imagination. 3) people attach themselves to characters so if the characters are meh, no one will play it. The character design in Concord was poison - people wanted to stay away from it.
Finally someone points it out! The characters may not be to appealing to a mass audience but these guys changing them without considering the intention at all and just do their standart procedure of improvement over it ha been bothered me a lot. They all seem so smug about it.
I've been avoiding most of the critiques where they have their own idea and be like "There, I fixed it". There's stuff you could critique and learn from the failings but the idea of improvements should keep in spirit with what they're going for. The push for realism cluttered the design and prevents choices of exaggeration and contrast.
While there is a cynical side of needing to make characters appealing in order to incentivized purchasing skins to keep the game afloat, the real issue is that I couldn't get a sense of how these characters play. Even after reading their skills. If there was a character in most other games whose gimmick I never immediately got, it would at least make sense after it was explained to me.
I appreciate the points made in this video and completely understand them. People have made the argument that the complete reason that Concord flopped was purely because of the mediocre character design. Not true. It was not the fault of individual artists, as it was obviously mismanaged by those in charge of art and gameplay design.
However, no matter how you spin it, concord's characters were a major factor in the game's unpopularity. They were ABSOLUTELY NOT the main reason, but one of, I believe, the biggest issues that drifted the game away from the public eye, alongside its shoddy marketing.
The game didn't do well because it was another hero shooter dominated by a select few games (Overwatch, Team Fortress 2, Paladins, and now even Deadlock), cost $40, which made people more skeptical, had generic-looking gameplay that was clearly based off Destiny's crucible mode (some Bungie devs worked on this game), and tries to be both an arcade shooter and a tactical shooter, then failing at both. The maps were forgettable and abilities were not too well-balanced. Despite this, the gameplay was okay. It was fun, but not amazing, simply okay. Being okay, whilst costing money to access, whilst competing against one of the biggest hero shooters on the market, was suicide.
So your point about the other reasons I listed being much greater problems than the character designs is a good point. BUT, having characters that either looked as generic as humanly possible or just completely unappealing did not do the game any favors. The last thing it needed was people making fun of the trash robot, the "white guy with green makeup" alien man, or the Blade ripoff with kneepads and Nike Air Jordans. Having no marketing, an unappealing cast and serviceable gameplay was what got only 2k people to play it WHEN IT WAS FREE during an open beta.
I remember the first time I saw Overwatch's trailer and I saw Tracer for the first time and I remember thinking "Wow, she looks really cool!" and seeing Winston and thinking "That's a talking gorilla with a lightning gun - I gotta see what Overwatch is". Not once did I get that impression seeing any of the characters in Concord's trailer. Maybe the trash robot - but I can barely remember any of the characters' names as is. And a lot of people who had watched the game's trailer during that State of Play expo shared the same opinion I did, they barely cared about the game and how they presented the characters, and when they revealed it was a hero shooter, it was as if you watched the life leave someone's body in real life. The game was essentially dead from there. The game did not look interesting to a large collective of people, they did not vibe with the generic-looking characters having obnoxious "Guardians of the Galaxy-esque" personalities, AND it was a hero shooter.
Hero shooters are made to have appealing characters, or what the hell is the point? Why would I want to play someone who looks stupid? It's the reason why you boot up Tekken 8, see a character like King and think "Oh damn, he looks really cool" or play League of Legends, see Riven and think "I want to main her and buy all her skins". I think that's why people grasp onto this idea that the character designs are what failed to the game even if it was a lot more complex than that. It's the most surface-level answer to give to someone who asks you "Why did Concord fail?" It's easy to respond with "Well, you have eyes, right? Look at it."
This is where I'm at. Like yes, a lot of the redesigns don't necessarily understand the vision of the game itself, but it's still true that the designs just don't seem to resonate with people. I've heard that the worldbuilding in Concord was actually super robust, which is something I'm interested in, but then I look at the cast of characters and none of them look like someone I want to play as, so why would I bother?
It's astonishing the way everyone in this comment section is trying to cope. People complaining about people making female characters. Conventionally attractive are completely missing. The point is as if there are offended that a character can be attractive.
I like how we're also critiquing the redesigns😂 They also need to learn the lesson HARĎ
I would love to blame the higher ups of the company for poor character design but at 4:23 you can see side by side 2 very similar designs and the one in 2d has more complexity (a bit too complex but it can be simplified), more variety in patterns and looks more like a badass tank than what artists at firewalk came up with in final design. The concept art from the game you show at the end is a very different style compared to what the final 3d needed to be in the end, their designs look good but they are too stylized leaving the 3d artist doing too much translations from 2d and 3d instead of having a more realistic 2d design from the get-go with better rendering of materials and more realistic proportions that would allow the 3d artist to just bring whats on 2d to 3d with minimal adjustments.
EDIT: Also I just remembered that in 2023 firewalk wanted to launch the game but sony didnt like how the game looked at all so they outsourced all of 3d to other studio, it would explain why 2d designs look the way the look and it's because the game looked more stylized initially and then it was converted to more realistic 3d direction by sony and outsource artists had to work from stylized 2d concepts and turn them more realistic? Maybe?
That still isn't really the fault of the artists. The higher ups have to okay the designs. The artists are only doing what they're told, so if the higherups say that the cartoonish designs are good enough but the 3D artists struggle as a result, that's the fault of the higherups. Any situation in which the artist makes a "mistake" in the final design is the fault of the person whose job it is to decide whether that design is final. They easily could have allowed the artists to make changes. The artists can't make those decisions unless they are the ones in charge.
1. The problem with concord's character designs goes further than simple readability or goonableness or whatever. It's a hero shooter with no hero that caught anybody's eye. You can come up with hundreds of reasons why that is, but that is the core issue.
2. No, the $40 price tag is not the main reason the game failed. Concord had a free open beta that peaked at like 2000 players. It was clear since before the game even launched that nobody gave a shit about this game.
yeah this guy may know about desing
but does not understand too much about game desing
Team Fortress 2 already nailed character design almost 2 decades ago, the video game landscape would be in a better place if studios just made their game with thoses character only, no matter the genre, just put differents hats for the NPCs.
So reading the comments under this video, I am gathering some caveats that I want to criticise (trigger warning, I am giving you the harsh truth):
- Some people almost seem to think these redesigns are "problematic" or even some sort of an "attack" they are taking personally. There's stuff like "I feel crazy", or "I thought I was the only one" that follow them going against the curve and disagreeing with the redesigns. Also identity politics because naturally...
- Redesigns are inherently subjective and controversial to people. You have to sacrifice something, be it original intent or improvement. And both of those are subjective.
- People offer a spectrum of opinions of: Redesigns are good / they misunderstood the assignment / they are worse / they are total dogwater and I hate it. Many don't like the redesigns, stating they don't agree with their idea of "good design" or "aesthetics". It's kinda like disagreeing with the "rules", thinking they are not rules or just meant to be broken. Which they are.
- Many seem to take these redesign principles as attempts of "universal gospel", removing the context of the redesigns being a for a hero shooter video game where the designs HAVE to be not only clear for gameplay purposes so you can identify and separate them at a split-second glance, but also to be ATTRACTIVE to incentivise unlocking cosmetics for these character, via progression or by buying microtransactions.
- People seem to be yearning or at least demanding people to accept or do more "plain" or "ugly" characters. This is a weird modern take that stems from an obsession to "subvert beauty standards" by repeatedly hitting your head on a wall and then shaming people for not liking your ugly designs. It's like some people want every single design to be a political/philosophical statement about aesthetics and if they fail to do that, they somehow a bigot or something negative.
- This blatant disregard (and sometimes denial) of the context seems to be the main reason why people think the redesigns are even sometimes "problematic", like over-sexualizing or stereotyping. And to these people: Yes. You are right. That's the point. That's why they are professional designers who work on the industry and you are not. That's what is wanted and needed for vast majority of projects. It's not about making a political statement or representing reality. It's about making attractive designs for a video game. You just don't like it. You don't like that it works. You don't like that's what people want. And the worst part for you is going to be accepting that's going on and will go on. I know it makes you lose faith in humanity and get scared, but that's reality-- Not everyone likes what you like and dislikes what you dislike. Not everyone has your idea of looking things, of seeing how it impacts society or re-enforces some bias. Not everyone thinks like that. Not everything is a grand conspiracy to keep you down, some power play to spite neo-Marxism (which a lot of the ideology behind these philosophies on beauty standards stem from)
- And finally: Some try to remove all accountability from the artists. This is a recurring motif with game design, where execs and managers take all the blame. There is this stigma of thinking creative types are always oppressed and can actually do no wrong. That they cannot make a bad piece of art, especially in a team environment. This is just a childish way of thinking about it and shows utter lack of experience or insight into the industry or art as a job in general. Even if the artists didn't do a bad job at the art and weren't allowed to change them by the execs, they did a bad job at convincing the execs. This is no longer about the artists doing bad art, but just being bad at their jobs. And for MANY people, they absolutely hate the idea of creativity mixing with a job. They refuse the former to be impacted by the latter. And this almost always tells you they are not a professional and don't make art for a living.
TL;DR
Don't change your opinion just because you see bunch of people online agree/disagree with something. Don't just follow the herd because you think you have found the place where "all the people with authority on the matter gather around". Because 99% of those people have 0 qualifications to make the opinions they are making, but they still do it with utmost confidence, as if experts.
How do I know this?
I am doing it right now.
ChatGPT ass comment
8:19 this is so true, as someone who doesn’t play overwatch either, I was so confused with the ‘readability’ that they were glazing
MOBIUS' style just doesn't work in a hero shooter. It would've fared better in PvE centric game. Plus the realistic look just clashed with the stylized look of MOBIUS.
No, I think Spectre Divide proves that Moebius' style is possible in a shooter. For a hero shooter though, that remains to be seen.
For how much the game community clambers for “the best” games, it’s not often that they spare compassion for the people who try to make them.
Dude this video was SO spot on, thank you! I don't even care about Concord all that much, but the message you're getting across is just perfect. I love it when people are smart and have good explanations about these stuff. I hope it'll help general non-artist audience to have a better understanding of why things are perceived as "good" or "iconic".
As an artist myself, I started seeing a lot of Concord concept art posted after it flopped, some of it by my favorite concept artists, and I was really impressed. As you mention, a lot of that art is AMAZING! They just didn't translate well to the final 3d product because that's the industry for ya.
or maybe they were just doing a bad job making that concept art without thinking that it is for a videogame
@@leo5907 Ehh... they are professional concept artists that work FOR videogames, that is literally their job. Why wouldn't they think it's for a game?
Excuses I've heard:
"The game didn't have enough marketing!" - Deadlock had negative marketing.
"No one will buy a $40 live service in 2024!" - HD2 launched at $40.
"Diversity killed the game!" - OW has a literal monkey in the roster.
"Hero shooters is a saturated market!" - Marvel Rivals.
Maybe it was just a bad and bland game. Simple.
Its not that it flopped. People hated on this game when the first trailer came out. They said the game looked "fake and ugly"
On the contrary, overwatches designs like Winston, genji and tracer became instantly iconic through trailers and cinematics even before the game came out
There's a selection bias at play here. There's a very large overlap between people who liked the Overwatch character designs, and people who are at all interested in Overwatch all these years later, and are looking for something to scratch that itch again. There's a bit of an echo chamber, where everything Overwatch is iconic. For me personally, the Overwatch character designs were so off-putting that I was never able to properly get engaged in the game. I find the concepts shown in the video so much more appealing.