As an artist, the designs look very unique... as a person though? These characters are fugly as hell LOL. They look terrible in their 3D world and that's not good. People want characters they stare at the entire time to be appealing. These characters are *NOT* appealing.
And let me tell you there these characters were different in different styles one of them being in their short lived animated series and even then they'd still look ugly.
i think the... "unappealingness" comes from their choice in textures, they look like a cheap 80's Scyfi show and it doesn't help that the characters lack anything to make them stand out much. it doesn't deserve the hate it's receiving but it doesn't deserve praises either
@@Soulxstar i agree with you! The retro scifi inspiration could have been a banger, if they didn't go for the hyper realistic route. I also think that the characters don't need huge redesigns, just some adjustments here and there with colors and shapes
same here, now it's just gonna be well known for the memes about how badly it failed and how few people bought the game, 8 years of work and a ton of money gone to waste, if that's not meme material, I don't know what is
Although I personally don't like Concord's designs at all, I think it's less about the design that made it suffer, and more of the 3D translation + context of what they're supposed to be in, etc. I've seen this happen a lot to my favorite games where concepts look great as concepts but the choice of how they're rendered, stylized, translated, etc. is the major downfall, even if it was a 1-to-1 copy. I personally think Concord's design can somehow work if it were more stylized than realistic. And I don't even like them. edit: just like your stylization at the final product, they look MUCH better with how you stylized them even though you kept the original designs.
Yea, im 100% sure these designs were made in a more stylized look in mind (think the semi realistic look of owerwatch or just more cartoonish stuff) + upper managment might have dictaded the more realistic look of the final game.
That's the vibe I've gotten: They're interesting designs, given a questionable presentation. If you were to take any given character and run them through the "Draw in X Style" test, they'd mostly turn out really good. The game, meanwhile, interprets them realistically, while also keeping them very clean and bland, which creates a kind of uncanny valley effect. In a way, it's kind of an interesting concept--taking these highly cartoony elements (like big shoulder pads, purple hair buns, unique aviators, etc.) and asking "What would it look like if real people dressed this way?" Unfortunately, keeping within the restraints of realism also means they can't push extremes on their designs, which greatly lessens their impact. They end up with all of the drawbacks of both cartoony and realistic renders, with none of the reward.
I thought the same too. The silohettes in the concept art could have been great but once transferred over to 3D art everything might of gotten lost in the process. Guess we'll never know. Crazy how much better this game could have been if the characters had a minor style change.
Yeah, Pikat drew it in stylized way and drawing looks much better, because it has more appealing body proportions and better colors. In game 3D models are desaturated and are very-very ugly
Tweaks artstyle, Tweaks shape language, tweaks colour values, accidentally tweaks a few parts more. All the problems I've heard about when it comes to the designs xD
Concord failed because it was a $40 game that looked pretty much identical to a million other games that are free to play, it's really as simple as that
That's part of it, but it didn't even have a niche audience (because some people don't care as long as the game is fun and attractive for them as a new game), if only for a few months, but Concord could not even do that. Chinese/Korean games can literally get away with making some of the worse games (i.e. MMOs and gacha games) by using tits, ass, etc. This game could not even attract a niche audience with it's gameplay and character designs.
@@DD-fs7pg yeah that's true, its just the reality that cuteness and sex appeal sells and concord seems to have none of that, maybe if this was built off of some established property like starwars it might have found an audience but unfortunately nobody cared about concord's universe until was already too late
I would still consider what you did a redesign. The small edits to the coat and body style better accentuate the intended role for the character, and speaking of, your illustration actually looks like it *has* character. The ingame model's coat muddles a lot of the body language and form of the character, so the player has a harder time gleaning it, especially with the... underwhelming... selection voice line and facial expressions.
Yeah Bazz's main issue was her tank-like proportions in general, it's not just style issue. The bulkiness of her character (Mainly how the jacket loom over her body) can be fixed without changing style. Another girls in concord have their clothes hug their body more, so it's not game engine issue either. Her glasses was small and awkward like a crazy mad scientist. The way she present herself in game with that pose is super awkward like a retired psycho, rather than femme fatale like Pikat present her, it's not style issue.
Ngl I have watch like 5 different redesigns of the concord characters on youtube and all of them ended up looking boring and worst that the original. I think people just want to hate something.
hmm i'm not so sure about that, personally. It's just little tweaks to the design taking into account the original character. I just think that the 3d rendition did the characters dirty (even though some of them I do think they need actual tweaks to shapes and color placement), because I've seen the concept art of the characters and they have cool shapes and contrast
it is indeed funny how small adjustments changed the design quite significantly, thus defeating your point, but some comments here are a bit mean ngl. Also, the style the game chose being the reason why they look worse is actually a good point, overall, I dig your redesign, but yeee, I still think concord designs are quite bad
The designs are bad, but they're also badly implemented. I think that's an accurate summary. The overall style of the game doesn't suit the designs, and they're struggling to work to begin with.
I don't like when people say that they need appealing designs, aka sexy designs. I don't mind it, but is kinda sad because usually I see this complain more with woman (that case with a character that got "uglier" in a game, I don't remember what game). You can have designs being ugly but cool or just not convetional. (Btw, not a problem liking sexy designs, but usually get a bit repetive and usually restrain the design of womans)
@@lssjgaming1599 simply not true, concept art includes earlier versions of character designs and that's one of the earliest part of development. The problem is that it seems like they just stick with the first draft. Look at the video, even some minor tweaks like not making the glasses so small, helps the character a lot
@@Winterfang The development of a game is the responsibility of many different departments, the design and art department was subjected and limited by the rest of the departments that did not do their job well, I would dare to say that most of the 8 years was wasted time between executives and the production team, I would not even doubt the programmers.
Deadlines are placed by producers at every stage of development i don't like when people act like a long production time means the devs were goofin around
Pikat is just very polite and people in comments try to keep up to her politeness to her opinion. However concord deserves to be clowned upon, cuz toxic positivity was bring to the development process by immature insecure people who don't know how to work with constructive criticism. And whoever owns the project shoots themselves in the leg by hiring such people to execute said project.
@@Genghis_of_Swanstoxic positivity and putting herself down, that’s basically it imo. I feel pikat is (or is acting) too positive to the point it’s getting kinda toxic… like with other stuff it made sense but this??? The thing that was so bad it ended 8 days later and lost the company 200 millions dollars I feel like this just… is a bad look imo
@@weebmaster exactly. Not to be an armchair psychologist, but she seems to be downplaying herself. I think she knows her art is good but is trying to be humble about it. Which is great! Just not in this case. I’ve drawn stick figures with more character than Concord
The issue is... No one has given any empathy to Concord. I feel like its weird to say "sometimes negativity is warranted" when the entire situation has been ONLY negativity. And contrary to internet belief... There are real human people watching their work be not only criticized but excitedly bullied. Talk about the budget and time, but don't forget that some of the designers and artist were more likely than not mistreated. They likely were very talented after all you need to have things like a resume to get jobs on projects with this much money involved.
@@weebmaster It's definitely teetering on the edge of toxic humility
День тому+27
As a game character artist and animator, I actually like your drawing much better, fore me, the adjustments you mentioned as "mistakes" to me are a huge deal on fixing her design actually, How you increased the glasses makes them look waaay better than the original and also the changes to the body shape (before, she looked downwards squashed like if she was struggling to live with gravity in her life) even though you said the hourglass body shape wouldn't sell speed much, it does help a lot portraying hip/torso rotations, associated to change in direction of movement, and necessary for air flips and such (Which she does a lot in game)
@@dakotawylde6407 maybe one or two but the ms eggman is all over the place anyone that understands character design can see the contradicting forms and mismatched color themes
Personally I only like the Red-Blue guy kinda, everyone else sucks. Edit: You know what actually I think the artstyle being too realistic was the problem you did a great job here!
Says the person with corazon on their pfp 😭😭 sorry like yeah they're not the best designs but somehow i think if they had a cool backstory people would love them (like one piece 🤩🤩🤩)
@@kikoslemonsyea did One piece get cancelled after 8 days and lose 200 millions dollars? It didn’t? Wow I wonder fucking why it must be that people like the design and it drew them in the anime dumbass
@@kikoslemons this just proves one of the points of the video even further for me. if i see the design of corazon in a realistic setting with a more "grimdark" artsyle, yeah that shit would suck, but he is in one piece, and he is introduce as the brother of doflamingo (fucking banger of a design), so you only focus on the parallelisms with him and it works, it does the job, its not one of the best designs in one piece, but it doesnt has to be.
I Respectfully disagree. I think if you look at the rules of character designs like storytelling,shapes and Gesture (and many more) you can see that concord has done a terrible job in implementing them. I'm mean you can easily tell the flaws if you compare it to games like overwatch and even Apex Legends wich has a Realistic artstyle too(Because you mentioned it in you Video). I like that you want to spread more positivity but I also believe that Artist schould take concord as an Bad example and a way to know how to not do it. Love you videos though they really helped me to become better.❤️
I agree, though minor nitpick that design has principles rather than rules because they describe art which is inherently subjective and contextual (just to be clear, I’m not saying that any design is valid but that different goals can benefit from different philosophies). Concord’s visuals to me feel like the art was pulled in a lot of different directions, preventing it from really excelling at anything
More than a little weird to try to explain the rules of character design to a character designer. I don't believe the purpose of this was to spread positivity exactly, but actually being fair, which frankly most people have not been towards Concord as a whole. The designs aren't the reason the game failed, whether someone likes X design or not is mostly irrelevant, but this has easily been the most prominent thing people point to for why it all went to crap and those arguments are almost never made in good faith. Not a fan of the art direction for the game by the way, but really importantly: Not liking something doesn't mean it's bad. There's no meaningful lesson for an artist to learn from Concord. The problems started and ended a hell of a lot higher up the food chain than the character artists.
@MrsMetronome I am aware that she knows about all of the principles of character designs, but she literally made a video 2 weeks ago about character design where she explained how you're characters don't end up Boring. She said that The whole purpose of character designs is to express information about the character. Concord has non of that the characters just seem soulless, like there are just some random characters. If you look at other games like the ones I mentioned than you can clearly see that they did a better job in implementing storytelling in their designs.
@@Bubble-Foam When I mean "Devs", I don't mean the entire team itself. A majority of them did a decent job despite the attention they got. It's just the very few outliers had some "Less than savory" words to say about the Game's Failure and Critique. I'll edit my comment if that helps.
"I'm gonna try and draw her without changing her character design at all." ... "I think I could make some very minor adjustments." "Now I'm going to start making bigger changes." "It's not like I didn't make any changes at all." "I accidentally ended up making the glasses quite a lot bigger." "I also changed her body shape quite a bit more." "...even with my changes." Pikat, I respectfully suggest that if you wanted to create a video that generates empathy, perhaps this should have been a "I'm going to draw a concord character while discussing the video game business/the right and wrong way to criticize." Maybe do some research into video game character design, the hecticness of a production schedule, how producer oversight affects design, etc. Though to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure that would have helped generate empathy in this case either. They had 8 years, $400 million, and have rejected any and all criticism, blaming their audience for everything.
@@AmiMonev Insane? They wanted to charge $40 for a subpar game, in a genre where their more experienced competitors are free to play. Concord, and mostly Sony, deserved the hate. They have far too little respect for their potential consumers.
The photorealism / uncanny valley probably helped made people not like the design. Slapping cell shading shadder, like what you did, over the entire game would have made it less uncanny. This game should have been a single player or coop game. The character designs would be fine if that was the case. One of the game's selling point was weekly narrative cinematic to further the story, if that is a hook they were trying to use, then it should have been a single player narrative driven game in the first place. The animations, especially in the face, look so good. I'm guessing part of the 8 year development was executives demanding whatever the original game concept to be turned into a multiplayer hero shooter.
Yeah no The character designs are bad and not only looking really boring (that's my opinion tbf) but also being bad in a gameplay sense I mean yeah the realistic style makes them look a lot worse than they actually are but a lot of the designs are still really boring
While I agree about the sentiment on needlessly dog piling the artists who made these, given that we dont know the circumstances, I do think some criticism is warrented. The designs are ugly. If we have to change the fundamental art style to get them to look good, that means they failed in the character design aspect. When consumers are paying (now) $70/a game and these companies boast about their AAA (sometimes saying they're AAAA) and then give you something that looks unappealing like this, people are going to get mad. And I think the companies need to be held accountable for these decisions. Again, I dont think we need to rage over these designs and gang up on the artists. But the designs are not good. And there's an expectation (and a fair one) that was not met and the game suffered. Im happy people are learning to voice their opinions with their wallets. This is how Capitalism is supposed to work. Companies lose when their products arent good because the consumer makes the judgment.
I feel like if anything this video proves why the designs in concord were bad. In a stylized setting where contrast and proportions are pushed more, the characters don't look that bad, but the problem is that's in just a vacuum, within the greater context of the game that has a more realistic style, the designs were very conflicting with the overall art direction. The goal of character design isn't necessarily to just making a appling looking character, it's to serve a greater function within its context, and to that I think concord objectively failed.
As you commeted in the video, at least the most serious thing about their desings is that they dont convey the role they play in the game. Un like Overwatch that without playing it I can get an idea of what role each character plays
The stylization is definitely off, but I think the biggest problem with these designs is that they don't really tell you anything about what the character does. These are for a video game, so if a character can rain bombs on you from above, you have to be able to tell at a glance during the game. As they are, they don't really do that. Anyway, great video, and I definitely agree that we shouldn't be dogpiling these as hard as we are, especially considering the kind of environment the artists were potentially working in. We should just take our lessons from these, and move on!
Concord has some good element of concept but very poor execution. Their problem is not "design is not good or unique" their problem is "lack of coordinate in each element" as we can see here when you have a minor tweak in the design to make it connected with the personality and role. I'd say that's a redesign .
I think pikat's iteration was the best level of stylisation where the characters looked similar in realism to valorant and where the proportions look believable whilst still seving the shape theory of their playstyles. But then again ive seen the original and pikat's designs and none more
Concord Designs look a lot better with a style shift, the realistic approach they took doesn't emphasize the traits of the characters, and generally comes across bland in execution. The style you chose breathes more life in the design, and conveys the skills more clearly.
Personally, I love the designs of Haymar and It-Z, but as you also said yourself, I think the main issue is that the designs don't convey the characters' gameplay styles very well.
In It-Z's case, after doing some research, I can say there are good ideas and reasons for her design, but they also don't work for a hero shooter (like you said, doesn't convey her playstyle). She's based on lynxes or caracals, so fair, she's a cat, she's fast, agile, etc.. She's wearing freerunner/parkour clothes, again, fast and agile. That's good. Problem is, she kinda looks like an NPC rather than a hero, and nowhere in here design we can see she's a trickster with crazy cosmic powers (teleport, illusions, stealing others' strength).
@@Klaymoor Yes! Exactly! I don't think she looks like an NPC though, she's the most colorful of the cast, so I'd say she's the most stand-out in this case.
@@Badguy292 Ah, sorry, I meant to say her clothes look NPCish. They make her look like a civilian of sorts instead of the mercenary kind of things the "Freegunners" are in the game's lore.
I'm not going to change anything! Proceeds to change quite a lot. Proving that the designs were poorly done/executed and the criticism still stands. Also I 100% agree with you on the shape language. A lot of the designs are fine, just not executed well. I took fashion design and doing Interesting things with fashion is kinda hard in reality. I think shows like The Fifth Element show how this kinda of cartoony over the top fashion can work Really well. But you still gotta understand proportion and bodytype when designing. They gave a stockier, athletic body type some BIG draping shapes, that end up making her look shorter, than said she was fast. And I still think they should have made the main guy just a lizard. His too human features were creepy and temu Yandu. lol Just, make him a bipedal alien lizard. So much better.
I'm glad I'm not the only one seeing Yandu whenever I look at him. I honestly don't understand how that design made it through, that's literally all I see.
Pikat "I'm not changing the design" also pikat "I'm gonna change a "little bit of design" such as proportion and basic shape" dudette THAT'S a whole problem from chara design of concord ! it's boring because they design it like "ladder" and you fix it with simple change shows the character designer (at least on 3D since I heard that the 2D one is badass) they don't consider the proportion and basic shape silhouette when it's translate to 3D hence it's becoming ugly
Consider opening with this statement: 'So maybe let's just not be so quick to dogpile onto hate trains and add fuel to the fire, just because it's trendy to do so.' This clearly states your main point right from the beginning.
I am under no moral obligation not to laugh at a massive company flushing millions down the toilet with their clueless decisions. In fact I will continue to laugh at such things for the rest of my life.
@@mechadekaSure laugh at Sony... But the artists who worked on this aren't a billion dollar corporation individually with no emotional state. And as someone whose looked into lots of these similar horror stories a common issue is the mistreatment from the top down. It was fun admittedly to laugh at the designs but there should be some point where we try to have empathy for other people.
@minedantaken1684 let's not forget the bottom line here of the designs of the characters are BAD- B. A. D. (Ba-Ahh-Da) Toxic positivity is a thing an I have no enthusiasm for mediocre at best- nor is calling people names something i find mature because; "oh no, my fe-fe's were hurt"
This still feels like a redesign. I feel like you made some good points on how to improve the designs and how it should've been more stylized, but I feel like you contradicted the main point you were trying to make. I also get what you mean about empathy, but we know that this game had a ludicrous amount of money and time poured into it and some of the devs have lashed out at people for not liking their game. They kind of killed any empathy they were going to receive themselves. There's also the fact that this is a hero shooter game. They kind of live and die by their characters. I feel like the reason why this game received so much vitriol is because it was just one of those "perfect storm" type situations. I don't think the hate just came out of nowhere.
Its more of a style thing, the design remains about the same. I think the problem of the designs was more of arstyle/proportions thing. The designs just dont work too well in a realistic 3D style.
@@kaisla7423 she got a waist, her hair is now separated from the shoulders, improving the silouhette, glasses are not so stupid, changing the perception of the face.
As a gave dev who does character design and hasn't stopped for about 10 years, yes. The character designs are definitely one of the problems. Last time I saw was so much beige was when I looked at mom's on tiktok. And I don't even use tiktok.
really cool concept! Honestly i think you did a good job. I may be a bit less positive than you toward the concord's design, but i agree that they could have been pretty great if they were framed differently and if the art direction was leaning a bit more in the retro comics/Möbius vibe
Or maybe, maybe, the studio was plagued with negative positivity that if you dare to say the design was bad, then you will be shut down by everyone?! :O
"Bad" artists don't get hired by billion dollar companies. I'm sure that the art team was full of great artists, but were stifled by awful direction the art director and others in power.
@@xiiir838 I'd rather she went the cheap route of "I'll fix the Concord characters too" instead of baiting with "it's good actually because: ᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠ. Thank you for coming "
@@weebmaster it's as bro said, bait. Not even "toxic positivity" just bait so homegirl could show herself drawing something better but being low key and not just doing what everyone's doing with death by a thousand cuts and say "I'll respect this design and sitll make it look good"
Great video! I agree with you and can appreciate it more since you pointed out the 70's sci-fi inspiration. I think if the official style was slightly better executed it would have read more clearly.
I once read a comment that said the Concord designs look like cosplay or bad live action adaptations of fun, iconic cartoon designs and your 2D redraw proves this to me. They really feel held back by the more realistic art style attempted by the game. I would love to see more redraws of the characters like yours, that keep the game's influences in mind, rather than redesigning from scratch just to dunk on the artists.
Unfortunately, the problem with the game's failure is far from character design. What puzzles me most is that we are told that we can't judge the finished game, and the experience in it, this is really not fair🧐
I don't like any of the character's designs, but after seeing your version while respecting the original concept, the change is suddenly a lot more appealing. You did an awesome job🎉
The title misled me a bit, but I'm impressed, you actually managed to make the design work just with your changes. Now I kinda wish you made your take of more characters
Designs are objectively garbage, but if you draw them in a good artstyle they can be semi-saved (some of them) because you edit how body and clothes look a bit. This small difference because of stylization changes a lot. Some of them are ugly beyond saving, good clickbait though xD
I feel like using arguably the best looking character in the game aside from wizard grandma for this video is sort of cherry picking. Bazz’s only major flaws are her shape design and silhouette, both of which you fixed. I think it’d be much more interesting to attempt the same with one of the “less appealing” characters or even one of the ones no one seems to talk about.
I wouldn't say it's cherry picking, not entirely. The entire roster has received loads of criticism, some more than others, but to the point that any of them is a valid choice for a rework. Personally, I think Bazz's design flaws are bad enough to push her off the "best looking character" spot. Not the worst, but not the best either. That said, I agree wholeheartedly that Pikat should've used one of the more hated designs. Proving that the "weakest link" of the roster can still work would've been a great way to prove her overall point.
@@philcoast1031but then it would’ve just proved how awful the designs are since she already had to change the design on a mediocre character design.
While the style change helped, I don't think the base designs are all that great in general. As other redesigns have shown, Baz can be salvageable with some changes (although still not great), not so much with all the other characters.
@@DD-fs7pg thats fair, but i would suggest you look at the entire cast of valorant, apex, OW and similar games. I would not deny that those games have some great designs and overall a much clear art direction (at least for the untrained eye) but you cant also say that they are all great, i would even suggest the mayority are just fine, okay, not really something it would inspire you or motivate you to have in the wall. At the end of the day, character design just have to be something that you dont notice, as every element that benefits the inmersion of someone in a product. if concord would have been made with another artstyle, i still wouldnt be a fan of the deisgns, but i garanty you they would not have receive so much backlash and toxicity (and the game would have still fail catastrophically)
@@treiz. Apex's designs are really good. Not sure why you listed that one. Now the actual role of the character may not be all that, not a big fan of Rampart, but their looks are good enough to be content with the base skin. And I like a lot of their paid skins.
this lol 8:36 seriously yall either didnt watch the whole thing or just skipped to each points until the final design. Comments goes "oh, You dont have defend this" but they didnt realize that the video implies "You dont have to like or hate this" As much as Style being a part of the character design- No its not. See both star wars movies and cartoon shows. Someone like, say, vader has roughly about the same design in both, but looked pretty much different when comparing both cartoon and movie version. THE STYLE is dictated by the product's whole visual indentity, NOT THE CHARACTER. I love the stylized design. Theres almost absolutely no changes on the actual character aside from the shoulder pad. Realistic games always had weird unapealling posing too so the new posing just fits so well. Every other changes people LOVEEE to point out is indeed DICTATED BY STYLE, not the character design itself. This is a style change. Not a redesign. Never was. Never Will. Love the final art!
I suspect they hit one of the issues with "retro-futurism", which is that people made some of those designs real. There is a train station near me that was so futuristic when built it was used as a set in THX 1138 (1971 film). It just looks like a dull grey building to me. The robots and space suits feel a bit like appliances, as people have tried to make appliances look futuristic. The characters that look more like they're wearing new fashions seem a lot stronger.
You say you don't like all this "negativity" but apparently, one of the main issues during development was the atmosphere of Toxic Positively, so maybe some "negativity" would have helped.
Must confess, I'm not really a fan of hero shooters, even if some of them have rather intriguing characters (like Overwatch). But, about the Concord characters, can't say they are well-designed. It feels very haphazard, as if someone just grabbed some random ideas to put into the game. This is my impression. But Pikat is just calling for some nuanced discussion in this video. And the many hissy baby comments here is just more proof of how it is needed. Thanks, Pikat. Keep being your awesome self.
Thank you for this video and I think it was very wonderful to hear your opinion! I loved your redesign of the character though and your thought process to getting there. Also the ending of the video really felt like an ending to a video game with the big speech and lesson learned type of vibe. ❤
The animated shorts really did the designs and colours way more justice, and with the 8 years of development, I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up changing art styles somewhere along the way. They had bold design choices that got softened into mush by style they went with. Something about that softening and how they did the performance capture just makes everything seem super uncanny and ingenuine to me, even in motion with animations. Like how if you have a cartoon character being super exaggerated, it's fine, but when you meet the person doing full kawaii anime mannerisms in person it instead ends up awkward. Even if for some reason that's how they genuinely act, it seems forced. I feel bad for the devs, because what they made still seems at least competent. Gameplay feel and netcode were all apparently smooth. Sadly, for a saturated genre that people have a lot of fatigue for, and with a business model that people have even more fatigue for, you need to be more than just competent to actually stand out and be noteworthy.
I believe many people are upset and trying to understand how such a large budget (8 years of development money) was spent on a product that was supposed to be a major attraction for PlayStation but went kaput immediately. The designs are not the biggest issue as you mentioned. However, the sales heavily rely on whether people are interested in playing a new concept (just another hero shooter) or connecting with the characters through the story or appealing designs. Personally, I didn't even consider the game as something fun to play. It seems like they knew that their target audience was limited due to one of their decisions, so they took the game down (temporarily?). After you expressed your thoughts so well, it made me think it would have been nice to hear from the team on why they made their decisions before the game faced such backlash. The fact that the art style was realistic makes me wonder if the artists had their designs forced to be more diverse. I also wonder if the artists were proud of their characters. Was the feedback the team received productive? Hey, I like your redesign and I think you did a great job. The fact that you made the glasses larger looks nice, and the more triangular look with certain features made me realize they were close to something that didn't quite hit the mark. The kneepad is really distracting and, in my opinion, it hurts the design by disrupting the flow of the body and drawing attention away from the cool jacket. I think there could have been more elegant choices made... TLDR: I like your slight redesign and think it communicates better visually.
0:03 pikat jumpscare I think your interpretation really helps the character’s personality shine a whole lot more. I was always a bit jaded about these designs but your insight really helped me see the potential of them in a different art style. good work pikat :)
Girl, you don't have to defend everything. It's normal for you to not like the designs of some characters, and to say that you don't like them, you shouldn't pretend that there is no problem with these designs.
I feel like you super avoided mentioning the "intestines" and minimized them in your drawing without commenting on them. They are EXTREMELY prominent in the OG design and they contribute to making the character look pretty off-putting and chunky.
Y’all maybe she just likes the designs a bit more there’s nothing wrong with having a different opinion not everything with align with yours. Personally the 3D version of the designs are not for me but the movements and personality added to them adds a lot more for them, makes the characters a bit more appealing. The 2D version is really nice I like how bold it was with clip that was shown it was cute. But that just me, had to add my two cents and I will defend my opinion 😩.
I think your artwork looks great, and it made me appreciate the design, but it does not make the in-game model look any better to me personally. The realism applied to these designs do not mesh at all for me. Kind of feels similar to how comic book superhero suits look completely wacky in live-action adaptations. I appreciate your positive message as well, the internet is real annoying with this kind of thing.
I think they just took too many departures at once. Going with a pre-Star Wars sci-fi style is a big departure from the norm. The low-budget costumes are also very different from what we’re expecting. Then the extremely low-contrast rendering is also very different and unfamiliar. Breaking the mold and being different is good, but change too many variables at once and it’s hard to form an attachment. I don’t think any of that is why the game failed, but when most of us hadn’t even heard of it until it failed spectacularly we tend to examine the remains to decide if it failed because it was bad or if it was cut down unfairly. We all decided there wasn’t much there because the characters aren’t likable.
I usually agree with ya but, I think you contradicted yourself a bit. I think maybe you mean the fashion style is fine, because the character designs don't fit with the style as you expertly demonstrated- like genuinely the game's visuals you showed here? The character looks so weird and off. The focus on realism really just made everything seem off. But your drawing of the same character with exaggerated proportions and the comic style shading? Looks fantastic! There's a lot that's wrong with the games designs. I'm not trying to be negative and certainly not trying to sass you Pikat! I just think that this game suffers from what a lot of games have been for a bit. They want realism over a stylized look for one reason or another and the designs just don't translate to real very well. I want to say it's because devs are trying to help sell the hardware, something we've seen a lot through gaming history. Sony not wanting 2D games on the PS1 or PS2 for one. Apparently similar things happening with the other platforms. But again I want to be positive and I think your revision/critique is a lot more pleasing to the eye. Those hard shadows are brilliant. I guess I just disagree with the wording chosen.
But the quality of the design is determined by how the artist can manage the shape language . All your small changes just say that you did more work on the design than was done by the game developer. That's why everyone says that the character design in the game is simply nondescript. This is also determined by the choice of general stylization of the game and understanding the connection between the character's specialization and his design.
I agree with most of your points about how the designs aren't THAT bad and what people need to be more forgiving towards the designers who had to work with what they were given. My main problem (And one shared by many other people) is what all popular hero shooters do visual design miles better than Concord. So considering what the game is pay to play and a huge money sink in terms of budget, people had a lot of expectations which were not met
Yeah, discourse over this game has been a disaster. People who don't know how to spot what is working nor how to spot people trying to just grift off a topic that fits the speakers usual dead horse. Design is different from presentation , style, or dialogue and animations. Its the details of her look and those details can then be changed into various styles or adjusted slightly. Her hair, glasses, outfit, purpose, and character did not change. It's how you can tell who someone is drawing regardless of what style they are using. The character design is a constant be it a snes game or some unreal engine zelda disaster. What Pikat did was lean into the design the character already had working. That is not a redesign. This video is more call to reconsider the rut the masses have fallen into than a blanket defense of the game. The game has a lot of problems, its just that hyper fixation has not only made people look past the bulk of why this game failed but also misunderstand what they're looking at and what making these designs work would look like.
Pikat, toxic positivity is just as bad as toxic negativity. Idk why you're running defense for obviously bad design. And, you said in the beginning of your video that you won't be changing the design, yet you've clearly changed, or at minimum refined it to be better by the end of it. Concord's character designs are NOT fine at all and it 100% deserved it's commercial failure.
How is it toxic positivity ? Have we watched the same video ? She tells it's okay to dislike the game. Toxic positivity would be to say we can't say anything negative about it. She even acknowledge the shortcomings of the character designs and turn it into a character design lesson.
Honestly, making the glasses a wee bit bigger actually made them better looking to me lol. Concord would definitely be a lot nicer to look at if it used a style similar to how you drew this over the more realistic, MCU-y style they went with. And personally I think the more hourglass shape would look fine if the whole cast had more of those kind of lightly exaggerated proportions.
I personally disagree. If the designs were meant to work within this realistic context, then they should be designed to work within it. If they were so deadset on this realistic style, they should have changed the designs. Also, a lot of the designs make it hard to tell what they do. Maybe better shape language in an exaggerated art style would fix some of those elements, but it doesn't mean that the character designs aren't bad.
A reoccurring thing that I saw on my side of social media during the brief time the game was alive was that the characters looked significantly better in cinematic form where the overall art style was different, so it really comes down to how they were rendered in-game.
That's pretty ballsy, pikat. Respect. But considering how most of the discourse surrounding concord has massive anti-sjw sentiment, I wouldn't exactly be optimistic about trying to make the discussion more nuanced or reasonable.
I think you'll find, with a bit of research, that it's Pikat who's being unreasonable, and lacking nuance. You see, the character she chose to redraw is MtF trans, lorewise, that's why they look so stocky and masculine. Pikat then said she wouldn't change the design, but proceeded to draw the character as a biological female, with an insane hourglass figure... And that was just the tip of the iceberg, Pikat gave the character edges, where they're supposed to have circles, made them too skinny, and hid the repulsive intestinal design on the shoulderpads by using a flattering angle. Pikat completely changed the design, AND hid the rest of the flaws of the design! :P Essentially, Pikat said "the design is fine" and then tried to show us how it's fine, by HIDING OR REMOVING EVERY DESIGN FLAW, AND REDESIGNING THE CHARACTER! Pikat is the one being completely f**king unreasonable here... And at the end of the day, the game failed to bring in players, it was shut down 12 days after it launched, it didn't even last 2 weeks... Saying the design if fine, at this point, is like burying your head in the sand. Was the character/art design the only problem? Hell no... But it was a Huge part of it art design is the main, primary advertisement for the game, if people see cool and pretty art for a game cover, it prompts them to learn more about the game, Concord had ZERO appeal, i saw ads for it, TWICE, and i didn't remember the game until like the third time i saw an ad for it... The game wasn't appealing to most people, so, nobody showed any interest. And before anyone goes and tries to make the excuse that Concord didn't have enough publicity or advertisement, let me remind you, it got 5 times more publicity and advertisement than Valve's DeadLock did, and Deadlock is CRUSHING it, and it isn't even released yet, it's still in closed alpha... heck you couldn't even search for DeadLock on steam, until after Concord died, valve only added DeadLock to steam recently... You can't go to the deadlock page, and install the game though, it's still in closed-alpha phase, you can only play the game, if someone who's got access to the closed-alpha, invites you to the closed alpha... And yet it has like 300 000 concurrent players, and RISING. Concord has ZERO excuses, none, whatsoever. DeadLock is a PERFECT example of why games don't need advertisement or publicity, to become popular, it just needs to be a GOOD GAME that APPEALS to players... it will become successful, by word of mouth... That is all it takes. And Concord had A LOT of word of mouth going too, a lot of NEGATIVE word of mouth, which is why it failed, Concord was a bad product that nobody wanted, so it failed, simple as that. I could go off about more intricacies and nuances, but i think i've already made my point... Pikat failed her own challenge... End of story... She's the one who lacks nuance, she's the one who's unreasonable, burying her head in the sand like that...
The way you talk about "not understanding why there's so much hate towards the design" is simple, due to a set of problems such as the closure of several studios and the amount of money invested, it gives people even more reasons to hate the project. It's nice that you try to feel empathy for the people who worked on the project, but the attack isn't necessarily directed at them, they did what they were paid to do, the problem is who ordered this monstrosity to be made
All you've proven with this video is that you can do better at their own game. don't put yourself down so much. We don't have to always come to the rescue of every piece of media that gets thrashed online, sometimes it happens because it actually was bad. negativity can be vile but forcing positivity can also become toxic.
i think long tern videos of you rumbling about art or whatnot would do good, ur voice is so relaxing that people will play it in the background for sure
even though i was unfamiliar with the topic before i watched your video i really appreciate that you stay kind and don't support strong hate even if the designs objectively don't look very good i really appreciate your empathy for other people's work
Hot take: I think this video seems to actually agree with most of the criticism of the Concord character designs, but 1) it's doing so in a much nicer way (kudos!) and 2) it's using a different definition of "design." For Bazz in particular, I've seen videos talking about how her pose doesn't hint at her role at all, her color values are all over the place, and her glasses do this weird thing where they seem to just point at her forehead. The Pikat Redesign(TM) shuffles the colors in a few key places to add appeal, changes her pose to be more of a bolt-upright situation that suggests she could burst into motion at any moment, and even the shape of the glasses makes the "arrow" look more like a dynamic zigzag that suggests unpredictability and freedom of motion. The added anime influences instantly give Bazz a real Redline vibe. It has _soul._ And that's the problem with the Concord designs as-is! This is a game that spent years in development hell, and what should have been their big blockbuster announcement - a trailer at the Game Awards - was forgotten almost immediately because the designs were... actually my fiancée just phrased it as "Wal-Mart Guardians of the Galaxy," which I think is perfect. It looked like a marketing department exec commissioned something really creative and dynamic, but kept complaining about it being too weird (ie. interesting) or unrealistic (ie. distinct), forcing the artists to pull back further and further until arriving at this weird uncanny valley rubber-forehead thing we ended up with. The market absolutely didn't need yet another hero shooter, but I still mourn the loss of whatever Concord could have been.
As an artist, the designs look very unique... as a person though? These characters are fugly as hell LOL. They look terrible in their 3D world and that's not good. People want characters they stare at the entire time to be appealing. These characters are *NOT* appealing.
Glad someone acknowledges the obvious. >_>
And let me tell you there these characters were different in different styles one of them being in their short lived animated series and even then they'd still look ugly.
They were not meant to be appealing, they were meant to display an agenda of "this is X, accept X".
i think the... "unappealingness" comes from their choice in textures, they look like a cheap 80's Scyfi show and it doesn't help that the characters lack anything to make them stand out much. it doesn't deserve the hate it's receiving but it doesn't deserve praises either
@@Soulxstar i agree with you! The retro scifi inspiration could have been a banger, if they didn't go for the hyper realistic route. I also think that the characters don't need huge redesigns, just some adjustments here and there with colors and shapes
Pikat just being nice to the dead. I wish I have the same courtesy.
Considering how badly they treated their consumers i just laugh at the gravesite
@@Zero-no5vf Oh yeah the talentless freak tweet, almost forgot about that
@@Zero-no5vfwhy were yhe consumers treated so badly?
This is so poetic for a concord video lmao
@@Feedback72 One of the people that worked on the game called consumers "talentless freaks"
I didn't even know this game existed until I heard it was getting shut down.
Fr it's our generation's ET
same here, now it's just gonna be well known for the memes about how badly it failed and how few people bought the game, 8 years of work and a ton of money gone to waste, if that's not meme material, I don't know what is
Although I personally don't like Concord's designs at all, I think it's less about the design that made it suffer, and more of the 3D translation + context of what they're supposed to be in, etc. I've seen this happen a lot to my favorite games where concepts look great as concepts but the choice of how they're rendered, stylized, translated, etc. is the major downfall, even if it was a 1-to-1 copy. I personally think Concord's design can somehow work if it were more stylized than realistic. And I don't even like them. edit: just like your stylization at the final product, they look MUCH better with how you stylized them even though you kept the original designs.
Yea, im 100% sure these designs were made in a more stylized look in mind (think the semi realistic look of owerwatch or just more cartoonish stuff)
+ upper managment might have dictaded the more realistic look of the final game.
That's the vibe I've gotten: They're interesting designs, given a questionable presentation. If you were to take any given character and run them through the "Draw in X Style" test, they'd mostly turn out really good. The game, meanwhile, interprets them realistically, while also keeping them very clean and bland, which creates a kind of uncanny valley effect.
In a way, it's kind of an interesting concept--taking these highly cartoony elements (like big shoulder pads, purple hair buns, unique aviators, etc.) and asking "What would it look like if real people dressed this way?" Unfortunately, keeping within the restraints of realism also means they can't push extremes on their designs, which greatly lessens their impact. They end up with all of the drawbacks of both cartoony and realistic renders, with none of the reward.
I thought the same too. The silohettes in the concept art could have been great but once transferred over to 3D art everything might of gotten lost in the process. Guess we'll never know. Crazy how much better this game could have been if the characters had a minor style change.
Yeah, Pikat drew it in stylized way and drawing looks much better, because it has more appealing body proportions and better colors. In game 3D models are desaturated and are very-very ugly
I will say though, I did look up some of the inital concepts on Artstation..I can't say they don't look much better either but that's only my opinion.
Tweaks artstyle, Tweaks shape language, tweaks colour values, accidentally tweaks a few parts more.
All the problems I've heard about when it comes to the designs xD
I just think choosing hyper realism was the first mistake, probably a very corpo thing "so it looks AAA" or smt
Concord failed because it was a $40 game that looked pretty much identical to a million other games that are free to play, it's really as simple as that
This is said 2 minutes into the video!!!! Neither is it even the topic!!!!!!
That's part of it, but it didn't even have a niche audience (because some people don't care as long as the game is fun and attractive for them as a new game), if only for a few months, but Concord could not even do that. Chinese/Korean games can literally get away with making some of the worse games (i.e. MMOs and gacha games) by using tits, ass, etc. This game could not even attract a niche audience with it's gameplay and character designs.
@@uhoh7545 don't care bozo
@@DD-fs7pg yeah that's true, its just the reality that cuteness and sex appeal sells and concord seems to have none of that, maybe if this was built off of some established property like starwars it might have found an audience but unfortunately nobody cared about concord's universe until was already too late
8 years in development, shut down in 8 days
Uuum, 12 akhtually.
It's not like ive accomplished much in the past eight years either
@@kara-uppercuttbf you’ve lived a longer life than Concord
Go woke go broke
Outlived by a house fly, lmao.
I would still consider what you did a redesign. The small edits to the coat and body style better accentuate the intended role for the character, and speaking of, your illustration actually looks like it *has* character. The ingame model's coat muddles a lot of the body language and form of the character, so the player has a harder time gleaning it, especially with the... underwhelming... selection voice line and facial expressions.
Yeah Bazz's main issue was her tank-like proportions in general, it's not just style issue. The bulkiness of her character (Mainly how the jacket loom over her body) can be fixed without changing style. Another girls in concord have their clothes hug their body more, so it's not game engine issue either.
Her glasses was small and awkward like a crazy mad scientist. The way she present herself in game with that pose is super awkward like a retired psycho, rather than femme fatale like Pikat present her, it's not style issue.
Ngl I have watch like 5 different redesigns of the concord characters on youtube and all of them ended up looking boring and worst that the original. I think people just want to hate something.
hmm i'm not so sure about that, personally. It's just little tweaks to the design taking into account the original character. I just think that the 3d rendition did the characters dirty (even though some of them I do think they need actual tweaks to shapes and color placement), because I've seen the concept art of the characters and they have cool shapes and contrast
"Fine" is really the furthest you can push them.
It's still a stretch as long as the Walls of China
it is indeed funny how small adjustments changed the design quite significantly, thus defeating your point, but some comments here are a bit mean ngl. Also, the style the game chose being the reason why they look worse is actually a good point, overall, I dig your redesign, but yeee, I still think concord designs are quite bad
It's not too dissimilar to the iterative process some artists go through to refine their designs by making minor tweaks.
The designs are bad, but they're also badly implemented. I think that's an accurate summary. The overall style of the game doesn't suit the designs, and they're struggling to work to begin with.
@@lssjgaming1599 and thats how overwatch or disney designers make cool concepts that are way worse in the end lmao T_T
I don't like when people say that they need appealing designs, aka sexy designs. I don't mind it, but is kinda sad because usually I see this complain more with woman (that case with a character that got "uglier" in a game, I don't remember what game).
You can have designs being ugly but cool or just not convetional.
(Btw, not a problem liking sexy designs, but usually get a bit repetive and usually restrain the design of womans)
"maybe the were extreme deadlines"
The game was 8 years in development 😭.
The finalized art isn't the first thing you work on when developing a game, that's done much later
@@lssjgaming1599if only they had 16 years...
@@lssjgaming1599 simply not true, concept art includes earlier versions of character designs and that's one of the earliest part of development.
The problem is that it seems like they just stick with the first draft. Look at the video, even some minor tweaks like not making the glasses so small, helps the character a lot
@@Winterfang The development of a game is the responsibility of many different departments, the design and art department was subjected and limited by the rest of the departments that did not do their job well, I would dare to say that most of the 8 years was wasted time between executives and the production team, I would not even doubt the programmers.
Deadlines are placed by producers at every stage of development i don't like when people act like a long production time means the devs were goofin around
Concord would look better if instead of realistic graphics it had a unique art style like OW2, Valorant and TF2
Lets be honest.
hold on let him cook
oh absolutely. The attempted realism did not work in favour at all.
Cold take! 👍
The unrealistic artstyle wouldn't save the game either. the designs are bag, it being realistic or not wouldn't make a difference.
@@roberto8442 never talked about saving. Just looking better
Oh, maaan. This surely isn't gonna be a fun comment section with such a hot take and title, hahahahaha.
Pikat is just very polite and people in comments try to keep up to her politeness to her opinion. However concord deserves to be clowned upon, cuz toxic positivity was bring to the development process by immature insecure people who don't know how to work with constructive criticism. And whoever owns the project shoots themselves in the leg by hiring such people to execute said project.
@@darkvulpes4826 👑
While I appreciate the sentiment, sometimes negativity is very much warranted.
For whatever it's worth, your re-design is at least better.
The thing is, pikat can ABSOLUTELY do better than the artists at Firewalk. I don’t know why she even said that.
@@Genghis_of_Swanstoxic positivity and putting herself down, that’s basically it imo. I feel pikat is (or is acting) too positive to the point it’s getting kinda toxic… like with other stuff it made sense but this??? The thing that was so bad it ended 8 days later and lost the company 200 millions dollars I feel like this just… is a bad look imo
@@weebmaster exactly. Not to be an armchair psychologist, but she seems to be downplaying herself. I think she knows her art is good but is trying to be humble about it. Which is great! Just not in this case. I’ve drawn stick figures with more character than Concord
The issue is... No one has given any empathy to Concord.
I feel like its weird to say "sometimes negativity is warranted" when the entire situation has been ONLY negativity.
And contrary to internet belief... There are real human people watching their work be not only criticized but excitedly bullied. Talk about the budget and time, but don't forget that some of the designers and artist were more likely than not mistreated. They likely were very talented after all you need to have things like a resume to get jobs on projects with this much money involved.
@@weebmaster It's definitely teetering on the edge of toxic humility
As a game character artist and animator, I actually like your drawing much better, fore me, the adjustments you mentioned as "mistakes" to me are a huge deal on fixing her design actually, How you increased the glasses makes them look waaay better than the original and also the changes to the body shape (before, she looked downwards squashed like if she was struggling to live with gravity in her life) even though you said the hourglass body shape wouldn't sell speed much, it does help a lot portraying hip/torso rotations, associated to change in direction of movement, and necessary for air flips and such (Which she does a lot in game)
they're really truly not
She’s coping 😂
they are actually
@@dakotawylde6407 maybe one or two but the ms eggman is all over the place anyone that understands character design can see the contradicting forms and mismatched color themes
@@michaelp1923 no, they're good actually
@@dakotawylde6407 I'm just going to assume you're trolling at this point
Personally I only like the Red-Blue guy kinda, everyone else sucks.
Edit: You know what actually I think the artstyle being too realistic was the problem you did a great job here!
Says the person with corazon on their pfp 😭😭
sorry like yeah they're not the best designs but somehow i think if they had a cool backstory people would love them (like one piece 🤩🤩🤩)
@@kikoslemonsyea did One piece get cancelled after 8 days and lose 200 millions dollars? It didn’t? Wow I wonder fucking why it must be that people like the design and it drew them in the anime dumbass
@@kikoslemons this just proves one of the points of the video even further for me. if i see the design of corazon in a realistic setting with a more "grimdark" artsyle, yeah that shit would suck, but he is in one piece, and he is introduce as the brother of doflamingo (fucking banger of a design), so you only focus on the parallelisms with him and it works, it does the job, its not one of the best designs in one piece, but it doesnt has to be.
I Respectfully disagree. I think if you look at the rules of character designs like storytelling,shapes and Gesture (and many more) you can see that concord has done a terrible job in implementing them. I'm mean you can easily tell the flaws if you compare it to games like overwatch and even Apex Legends wich has a Realistic artstyle too(Because you mentioned it in you Video). I like that you want to spread more positivity but I also believe that Artist schould take concord as an Bad example and a way to know how to not do it.
Love you videos though they really helped me to become better.❤️
and if you do the simple "put everything black and white" their is nothing on all of these character that stand out, so even the coloring is bad.
@@Goudlock Isn't black and white meant to show values? So not only are their colouring bad, the values aren't that good either
I agree, though minor nitpick that design has principles rather than rules because they describe art which is inherently subjective and contextual (just to be clear, I’m not saying that any design is valid but that different goals can benefit from different philosophies). Concord’s visuals to me feel like the art was pulled in a lot of different directions, preventing it from really excelling at anything
More than a little weird to try to explain the rules of character design to a character designer. I don't believe the purpose of this was to spread positivity exactly, but actually being fair, which frankly most people have not been towards Concord as a whole. The designs aren't the reason the game failed, whether someone likes X design or not is mostly irrelevant, but this has easily been the most prominent thing people point to for why it all went to crap and those arguments are almost never made in good faith.
Not a fan of the art direction for the game by the way, but really importantly: Not liking something doesn't mean it's bad. There's no meaningful lesson for an artist to learn from Concord. The problems started and ended a hell of a lot higher up the food chain than the character artists.
@MrsMetronome I am aware that she knows about all of the principles of character designs, but she literally made a video 2 weeks ago about character design where she explained how you're characters don't end up Boring. She said that The whole purpose of character designs is to express information about the character. Concord has non of that the characters just seem soulless, like there are just some random characters. If you look at other games like the ones I mentioned than you can clearly see that they did a better job in implementing storytelling in their designs.
A few devs of this game calls their audience "Talentless Freaks" for criticizing their games. Then, to hell with their character designs.
Was it the artists specifically saying that, or was one dude or something?
I find it hard to believe that the entire dev team was talking smack lol
@@Bubble-Foam When I mean "Devs", I don't mean the entire team itself. A majority of them did a decent job despite the attention they got. It's just the very few outliers had some "Less than savory" words to say about the Game's Failure and Critique. I'll edit my comment if that helps.
all the things your changing are part of character design imo, so i think youre still proving that Concord's character designs weren't great.
"I'm gonna try and draw her without changing her character design at all."
...
"I think I could make some very minor adjustments."
"Now I'm going to start making bigger changes."
"It's not like I didn't make any changes at all."
"I accidentally ended up making the glasses quite a lot bigger."
"I also changed her body shape quite a bit more."
"...even with my changes."
Pikat, I respectfully suggest that if you wanted to create a video that generates empathy, perhaps this should have been a "I'm going to draw a concord character while discussing the video game business/the right and wrong way to criticize." Maybe do some research into video game character design, the hecticness of a production schedule, how producer oversight affects design, etc. Though to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure that would have helped generate empathy in this case either. They had 8 years, $400 million, and have rejected any and all criticism, blaming their audience for everything.
Yea this video was quite… a horrendously bad take honestly
@@weebmasterhorrendous is dragging it 😭 it’s way more tolerable than the insane hate train against this game
@@AmiMonev Insane? They wanted to charge $40 for a subpar game, in a genre where their more experienced competitors are free to play. Concord, and mostly Sony, deserved the hate. They have far too little respect for their potential consumers.
@@AmiMonevInsane? It's pretty fucking tame
Poster Boy of the game Bazz looks like a tawdry drag queen
The photorealism / uncanny valley probably helped made people not like the design. Slapping cell shading shadder, like what you did, over the entire game would have made it less uncanny.
This game should have been a single player or coop game. The character designs would be fine if that was the case. One of the game's selling point was weekly narrative cinematic to further the story, if that is a hook they were trying to use, then it should have been a single player narrative driven game in the first place. The animations, especially in the face, look so good.
I'm guessing part of the 8 year development was executives demanding whatever the original game concept to be turned into a multiplayer hero shooter.
Yeah no
The character designs are bad
and not only looking really boring (that's my opinion tbf) but also being bad in a gameplay sense
I mean yeah the realistic style makes them look a lot worse than they actually are but a lot of the designs are still really boring
While I agree about the sentiment on needlessly dog piling the artists who made these, given that we dont know the circumstances, I do think some criticism is warrented. The designs are ugly. If we have to change the fundamental art style to get them to look good, that means they failed in the character design aspect. When consumers are paying (now) $70/a game and these companies boast about their AAA (sometimes saying they're AAAA) and then give you something that looks unappealing like this, people are going to get mad. And I think the companies need to be held accountable for these decisions. Again, I dont think we need to rage over these designs and gang up on the artists. But the designs are not good. And there's an expectation (and a fair one) that was not met and the game suffered. Im happy people are learning to voice their opinions with their wallets. This is how Capitalism is supposed to work. Companies lose when their products arent good because the consumer makes the judgment.
I feel like if anything this video proves why the designs in concord were bad. In a stylized setting where contrast and proportions are pushed more, the characters don't look that bad, but the problem is that's in just a vacuum, within the greater context of the game that has a more realistic style, the designs were very conflicting with the overall art direction. The goal of character design isn't necessarily to just making a appling looking character, it's to serve a greater function within its context, and to that I think concord objectively failed.
As you commeted in the video, at least the most serious thing about their desings is that they dont convey the role they play in the game. Un like Overwatch that without playing it I can get an idea of what role each character plays
Their massive debt disagrees.
The stylization is definitely off, but I think the biggest problem with these designs is that they don't really tell you anything about what the character does. These are for a video game, so if a character can rain bombs on you from above, you have to be able to tell at a glance during the game. As they are, they don't really do that.
Anyway, great video, and I definitely agree that we shouldn't be dogpiling these as hard as we are, especially considering the kind of environment the artists were potentially working in. We should just take our lessons from these, and move on!
Idk how else to say it, but the character design feels like a bunch of 3d background characters cosplayed as their favorite niche 80s anime characters
Concord has some good element of concept but very poor execution.
Their problem is not "design is not good or unique" their problem is "lack of coordinate in each element" as we can see here when you have a minor tweak in the design to make it connected with the personality and role. I'd say that's a redesign .
I think pikat's iteration was the best level of stylisation where the characters looked similar in realism to valorant and where the proportions look believable whilst still seving the shape theory of their playstyles. But then again ive seen the original and pikat's designs and none more
If we were to put these characters in a gacha, how many people would pull for them?
They lack appeal, enough for people to completely miss this game.
Who the hell cares about gachas?
@@obsiangravel it's a good litmus test for how appealing a character's design is.
@@Tharros95 it's most definitely not.
@@obsiangravel 60-500millon people my dear sir
It’s also a test for character design.
@@obsiangravel Alright let’s put it this way
If the concord designs were outfits for a game, would you buy them?
Concord Designs look a lot better with a style shift, the realistic approach they took doesn't emphasize the traits of the characters, and generally comes across bland in execution. The style you chose breathes more life in the design, and conveys the skills more clearly.
Personally, I love the designs of Haymar and It-Z, but as you also said yourself, I think the main issue is that the designs don't convey the characters' gameplay styles very well.
In It-Z's case, after doing some research, I can say there are good ideas and reasons for her design, but they also don't work for a hero shooter (like you said, doesn't convey her playstyle).
She's based on lynxes or caracals, so fair, she's a cat, she's fast, agile, etc.. She's wearing freerunner/parkour clothes, again, fast and agile. That's good.
Problem is, she kinda looks like an NPC rather than a hero, and nowhere in here design we can see she's a trickster with crazy cosmic powers (teleport, illusions, stealing others' strength).
@@Klaymoor Yes! Exactly! I don't think she looks like an NPC though, she's the most colorful of the cast, so I'd say she's the most stand-out in this case.
@@Badguy292 Ah, sorry, I meant to say her clothes look NPCish. They make her look like a civilian of sorts instead of the mercenary kind of things the "Freegunners" are in the game's lore.
@@Klaymoor Ohhh, that makes more sense, yeah.
I'm not going to change anything! Proceeds to change quite a lot. Proving that the designs were poorly done/executed and the criticism still stands.
Also I 100% agree with you on the shape language. A lot of the designs are fine, just not executed well. I took fashion design and doing Interesting things with fashion is kinda hard in reality.
I think shows like The Fifth Element show how this kinda of cartoony over the top fashion can work Really well.
But you still gotta understand proportion and bodytype when designing. They gave a stockier, athletic body type some BIG draping shapes, that end up making her look shorter, than said she was fast.
And I still think they should have made the main guy just a lizard. His too human features were creepy and temu Yandu. lol Just, make him a bipedal alien lizard. So much better.
I'm glad I'm not the only one seeing Yandu whenever I look at him. I honestly don't understand how that design made it through, that's literally all I see.
Pikat: I'm not gonna change the design at all
- Proceeds to change legs, placement of coat, shape langage and everything about her
Yeah she's trying too hard to sound like a real pro i wouldn't take much of anything she says seriously
Pikat
"I'm not changing the design"
also pikat
"I'm gonna change a "little bit of design" such as proportion and basic shape"
dudette THAT'S a whole problem from chara design of concord !
it's boring because they design it like "ladder" and you fix it with simple change shows the character designer (at least on 3D since I heard that the 2D one is badass) they don't consider the proportion and basic shape silhouette when it's translate to 3D hence
it's becoming ugly
Consider opening with this statement:
'So maybe let's just not be so quick to dogpile onto hate trains and add fuel to the fire, just because it's trendy to do so.'
This clearly states your main point right from the beginning.
I am under no moral obligation not to laugh at a massive company flushing millions down the toilet with their clueless decisions.
In fact I will continue to laugh at such things for the rest of my life.
@@mechadekaSure laugh at Sony...
But the artists who worked on this aren't a billion dollar corporation individually with no emotional state. And as someone whose looked into lots of these similar horror stories a common issue is the mistreatment from the top down.
It was fun admittedly to laugh at the designs but there should be some point where we try to have empathy for other people.
@@j.f3448 the artist literally called other people dumb for saying the character design is bad
@@rd3munna812As many people do when they spent time and effort on something and people laugh at them. Does it really need an answer?
@minedantaken1684 let's not forget the bottom line here of the designs of the characters are BAD- B. A. D. (Ba-Ahh-Da)
Toxic positivity is a thing an I have no enthusiasm for mediocre at best- nor is calling people names something i find mature because; "oh no, my fe-fe's were hurt"
Your thumbnail chibis are getting sooo cute lately, you're killing it
This still feels like a redesign. I feel like you made some good points on how to improve the designs and how it should've been more stylized, but I feel like you contradicted the main point you were trying to make.
I also get what you mean about empathy, but we know that this game had a ludicrous amount of money and time poured into it and some of the devs have lashed out at people for not liking their game. They kind of killed any empathy they were going to receive themselves. There's also the fact that this is a hero shooter game. They kind of live and die by their characters. I feel like the reason why this game received so much vitriol is because it was just one of those "perfect storm" type situations. I don't think the hate just came out of nowhere.
"I'm not going to redesign her." Proceeds to redesign her.
Its more of a style thing, the design remains about the same. I think the problem of the designs was more of arstyle/proportions thing.
The designs just dont work too well in a realistic 3D style.
@@kaisla7423 that's changing the design...
@@genin1541 maybe a little, but an artstyle change is not a design change. Maybe i worded my point a tad incorrectly
Part of Design is the style. Designing with/for the style in mind, and designing the specifics of the style itself are all hugely important.
@@kaisla7423 she got a waist, her hair is now separated from the shoulders, improving the silouhette, glasses are not so stupid, changing the perception of the face.
As a gave dev who does character design and hasn't stopped for about 10 years, yes. The character designs are definitely one of the problems. Last time I saw was so much beige was when I looked at mom's on tiktok. And I don't even use tiktok.
really cool concept! Honestly i think you did a good job. I may be a bit less positive than you toward the concord's design, but i agree that they could have been pretty great if they were framed differently and if the art direction was leaning a bit more in the retro comics/Möbius vibe
Or maybe, maybe, the studio was plagued with negative positivity that if you dare to say the design was bad, then you will be shut down by everyone?! :O
Exactly.
"Bad" artists don't get hired by billion dollar companies. I'm sure that the art team was full of great artists, but were stifled by awful direction the art director and others in power.
"Let's talk about what Concord character design gets right" proceeds to not make an arguemnt. Wanting to defend it, accidentally roast it.
Yeeeeaaaah, I don’t know what she was trying to do here either…
@@toaster227 it's a bait video. For views, talking about a hot topic and at the same time showcasing her art skills
@@xiiir838 I'd rather she went the cheap route of "I'll fix the Concord characters too" instead of baiting with "it's good actually because: ᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠᅠ. Thank you for coming "
Yea this video reeks of being toxically positive and a contrarian for views man… how disappointing
@@weebmaster it's as bro said, bait. Not even "toxic positivity" just bait so homegirl could show herself drawing something better but being low key and not just doing what everyone's doing with death by a thousand cuts and say "I'll respect this design and sitll make it look good"
No, they're not
Great video! I agree with you and can appreciate it more since you pointed out the 70's sci-fi inspiration. I think if the official style was slightly better executed it would have read more clearly.
Yeah. You changed the design
I once read a comment that said the Concord designs look like cosplay or bad live action adaptations of fun, iconic cartoon designs and your 2D redraw proves this to me.
They really feel held back by the more realistic art style attempted by the game. I would love to see more redraws of the characters like yours, that keep the game's influences in mind, rather than redesigning from scratch just to dunk on the artists.
What Concord? There is no "Concord".
Unfortunately, the problem with the game's failure is far from character design.
What puzzles me most is that we are told that we can't judge the finished game, and the experience in it, this is really not fair🧐
I don't like any of the character's designs, but after seeing your version while respecting the original concept, the change is suddenly a lot more appealing. You did an awesome job🎉
The title misled me a bit, but I'm impressed, you actually managed to make the design work just with your changes. Now I kinda wish you made your take of more characters
Designs are objectively garbage, but if you draw them in a good artstyle they can be semi-saved (some of them) because you edit how body and clothes look a bit. This small difference because of stylization changes a lot. Some of them are ugly beyond saving, good clickbait though xD
I feel like using arguably the best looking character in the game aside from wizard grandma for this video is sort of cherry picking.
Bazz’s only major flaws are her shape design and silhouette, both of which you fixed.
I think it’d be much more interesting to attempt the same with one of the “less appealing” characters or even one of the ones no one seems to talk about.
I wouldn't say it's cherry picking, not entirely. The entire roster has received loads of criticism, some more than others, but to the point that any of them is a valid choice for a rework. Personally, I think Bazz's design flaws are bad enough to push her off the "best looking character" spot. Not the worst, but not the best either.
That said, I agree wholeheartedly that Pikat should've used one of the more hated designs. Proving that the "weakest link" of the roster can still work would've been a great way to prove her overall point.
@@philcoast1031but then it would’ve just proved how awful the designs are since she already had to change the design on a mediocre character design.
You made me like the design a lot more honestly.
More a style issue than design issue. Fair.
While the style change helped, I don't think the base designs are all that great in general. As other redesigns have shown, Baz can be salvageable with some changes (although still not great), not so much with all the other characters.
@@DD-fs7pg thats fair, but i would suggest you look at the entire cast of valorant, apex, OW and similar games. I would not deny that those games have some great designs and overall a much clear art direction (at least for the untrained eye) but you cant also say that they are all great, i would even suggest the mayority are just fine, okay, not really something it would inspire you or motivate you to have in the wall. At the end of the day, character design just have to be something that you dont notice, as every element that benefits the inmersion of someone in a product. if concord would have been made with another artstyle, i still wouldnt be a fan of the deisgns, but i garanty you they would not have receive so much backlash and toxicity (and the game would have still fail catastrophically)
@@treiz. Apex's designs are really good. Not sure why you listed that one. Now the actual role of the character may not be all that, not a big fan of Rampart, but their looks are good enough to be content with the base skin. And I like a lot of their paid skins.
HOW DARE YOU BE REASONABLE AND POSITIVE!
Great job!
Toxic positivity at the studio was one of the key reasons why the game flopped lol
@@gorohachi86 im glad i am not the only one realizing this
"How dare you not consume product"
@@gorohachi86not even positivity, if you had a comment on anything you were fired 😭 i feel so bad for the ppl forced to make this game
this lol 8:36 seriously yall either didnt watch the whole thing or just skipped to each points until the final design.
Comments goes "oh, You dont have defend this" but they didnt realize that the video implies "You dont have to like or hate this"
As much as Style being a part of the character design- No its not. See both star wars movies and cartoon shows. Someone like, say, vader has roughly about the same design in both, but looked pretty much different when comparing both cartoon and movie version. THE STYLE is dictated by the product's whole visual indentity, NOT THE CHARACTER.
I love the stylized design. Theres almost absolutely no changes on the actual character aside from the shoulder pad. Realistic games always had weird unapealling posing too so the new posing just fits so well.
Every other changes people LOVEEE to point out is indeed DICTATED BY STYLE, not the character design itself. This is a style change. Not a redesign. Never was. Never Will.
Love the final art!
???
It's Darth Vader in both versions. Stylizing him a bit doesn't change that his design give the same general, iconic impression.
@@mechadeka yeah i just call him vader, anyways
I suspect they hit one of the issues with "retro-futurism", which is that people made some of those designs real. There is a train station near me that was so futuristic when built it was used as a set in THX 1138 (1971 film). It just looks like a dull grey building to me. The robots and space suits feel a bit like appliances, as people have tried to make appliances look futuristic.
The characters that look more like they're wearing new fashions seem a lot stronger.
You say you don't like all this "negativity" but apparently, one of the main issues during development was the atmosphere of Toxic Positively, so maybe some "negativity" would have helped.
Lots of people making good points in the comment section here! xD
Pikat truly had a hot take!
Must confess, I'm not really a fan of hero shooters, even if some of them have rather intriguing characters (like Overwatch). But, about the Concord characters, can't say they are well-designed. It feels very haphazard, as if someone just grabbed some random ideas to put into the game. This is my impression.
But Pikat is just calling for some nuanced discussion in this video. And the many hissy baby comments here is just more proof of how it is needed.
Thanks, Pikat. Keep being your awesome self.
Thank you for this video and I think it was very wonderful to hear your opinion! I loved your redesign of the character though and your thought process to getting there. Also the ending of the video really felt like an ending to a video game with the big speech and lesson learned type of vibe. ❤
The animated shorts really did the designs and colours way more justice, and with the 8 years of development, I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up changing art styles somewhere along the way. They had bold design choices that got softened into mush by style they went with.
Something about that softening and how they did the performance capture just makes everything seem super uncanny and ingenuine to me, even in motion with animations. Like how if you have a cartoon character being super exaggerated, it's fine, but when you meet the person doing full kawaii anime mannerisms in person it instead ends up awkward. Even if for some reason that's how they genuinely act, it seems forced.
I feel bad for the devs, because what they made still seems at least competent. Gameplay feel and netcode were all apparently smooth. Sadly, for a saturated genre that people have a lot of fatigue for, and with a business model that people have even more fatigue for, you need to be more than just competent to actually stand out and be noteworthy.
I believe many people are upset and trying to understand how such a large budget (8 years of development money) was spent on a product that was supposed to be a major attraction for PlayStation but went kaput immediately.
The designs are not the biggest issue as you mentioned. However, the sales heavily rely on whether people are interested in playing a new concept (just another hero shooter) or connecting with the characters through the story or appealing designs. Personally, I didn't even consider the game as something fun to play. It seems like they knew that their target audience was limited due to one of their decisions, so they took the game down (temporarily?). After you expressed your thoughts so well, it made me think it would have been nice to hear from the team on why they made their decisions before the game faced such backlash.
The fact that the art style was realistic makes me wonder if the artists had their designs forced to be more diverse. I also wonder if the artists were proud of their characters. Was the feedback the team received productive?
Hey, I like your redesign and I think you did a great job. The fact that you made the glasses larger looks nice, and the more triangular look with certain features made me realize they were close to something that didn't quite hit the mark. The kneepad is really distracting and, in my opinion, it hurts the design by disrupting the flow of the body and drawing attention away from the cool jacket. I think there could have been more elegant choices made...
TLDR: I like your slight redesign and think it communicates better visually.
0:03 pikat jumpscare
I think your interpretation really helps the character’s personality shine a whole lot more. I was always a bit jaded about these designs but your insight really helped me see the potential of them in a different art style. good work pikat :)
it's okay pikat, no need to sugar coat it like this.
Girl, you don't have to defend everything. It's normal for you to not like the designs of some characters, and to say that you don't like them, you shouldn't pretend that there is no problem with these designs.
Girl,
God forbid someone likes something that you don't like
You when art is subjective and someone likes something that you don’t:
Blud didn't watch the video
@@obsiangravelYeah, she literally says that it's okay to dislike the designs
I feel like you super avoided mentioning the "intestines" and minimized them in your drawing without commenting on them. They are EXTREMELY prominent in the OG design and they contribute to making the character look pretty off-putting and chunky.
I like these designs a lot, but the realistic style is throwing me off
Y’all maybe she just likes the designs a bit more there’s nothing wrong with having a different opinion not everything with align with yours. Personally the 3D version of the designs are not for me but the movements and personality added to them adds a lot more for them, makes the characters a bit more appealing. The 2D version is really nice I like how bold it was with clip that was shown it was cute. But that just me, had to add my two cents and I will defend my opinion 😩.
I think your artwork looks great, and it made me appreciate the design, but it does not make the in-game model look any better to me personally. The realism applied to these designs do not mesh at all for me. Kind of feels similar to how comic book superhero suits look completely wacky in live-action adaptations. I appreciate your positive message as well, the internet is real annoying with this kind of thing.
It looks amazing, just changing the style already makes it so much better
Disagree
Were*
The robot looks cool and that's it
I think they just took too many departures at once. Going with a pre-Star Wars sci-fi style is a big departure from the norm. The low-budget costumes are also very different from what we’re expecting. Then the extremely low-contrast rendering is also very different and unfamiliar. Breaking the mold and being different is good, but change too many variables at once and it’s hard to form an attachment.
I don’t think any of that is why the game failed, but when most of us hadn’t even heard of it until it failed spectacularly we tend to examine the remains to decide if it failed because it was bad or if it was cut down unfairly. We all decided there wasn’t much there because the characters aren’t likable.
I usually agree with ya but, I think you contradicted yourself a bit. I think maybe you mean the fashion style is fine, because the character designs don't fit with the style as you expertly demonstrated- like genuinely the game's visuals you showed here? The character looks so weird and off. The focus on realism really just made everything seem off. But your drawing of the same character with exaggerated proportions and the comic style shading? Looks fantastic!
There's a lot that's wrong with the games designs. I'm not trying to be negative and certainly not trying to sass you Pikat! I just think that this game suffers from what a lot of games have been for a bit. They want realism over a stylized look for one reason or another and the designs just don't translate to real very well.
I want to say it's because devs are trying to help sell the hardware, something we've seen a lot through gaming history. Sony not wanting 2D games on the PS1 or PS2 for one. Apparently similar things happening with the other platforms.
But again I want to be positive and I think your revision/critique is a lot more pleasing to the eye. Those hard shadows are brilliant. I guess I just disagree with the wording chosen.
8 years in development and it got shut down in 8 days. The characters were designed by committee and not actual creativity.
But the quality of the design is determined by how the artist can manage the shape language .
All your small changes just say that you did more work on the design than was done by the game developer. That's why everyone says that the character design in the game is simply nondescript. This is also determined by the choice of general stylization of the game and understanding the connection between the character's specialization and his design.
The whole, “Discount Guardians of the Galaxy” vibe didn’t even turn me on to the game.
But I also don’t have a PlayStation…
I agree with most of your points about how the designs aren't THAT bad and what people need to be more forgiving towards the designers who had to work with what they were given. My main problem (And one shared by many other people) is what all popular hero shooters do visual design miles better than Concord.
So considering what the game is pay to play and a huge money sink in terms of budget, people had a lot of expectations which were not met
Yeah, discourse over this game has been a disaster. People who don't know how to spot what is working nor how to spot people trying to just grift off a topic that fits the speakers usual dead horse.
Design is different from presentation , style, or dialogue and animations. Its the details of her look and those details can then be changed into various styles or adjusted slightly. Her hair, glasses, outfit, purpose, and character did not change. It's how you can tell who someone is drawing regardless of what style they are using. The character design is a constant be it a snes game or some unreal engine zelda disaster. What Pikat did was lean into the design the character already had working. That is not a redesign.
This video is more call to reconsider the rut the masses have fallen into than a blanket defense of the game. The game has a lot of problems, its just that hyper fixation has not only made people look past the bulk of why this game failed but also misunderstand what they're looking at and what making these designs work would look like.
your finished version is pretty rad! it's got that Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 rendering going on
Pikat, toxic positivity is just as bad as toxic negativity.
Idk why you're running defense for obviously bad design.
And, you said in the beginning of your video that you won't be changing the design, yet you've clearly changed, or at minimum refined it to be better by the end of it.
Concord's character designs are NOT fine at all and it 100% deserved it's commercial failure.
How is it toxic positivity ? Have we watched the same video ? She tells it's okay to dislike the game. Toxic positivity would be to say we can't say anything negative about it.
She even acknowledge the shortcomings of the character designs and turn it into a character design lesson.
they should've hired you
Honestly, making the glasses a wee bit bigger actually made them better looking to me lol.
Concord would definitely be a lot nicer to look at if it used a style similar to how you drew this over the more realistic, MCU-y style they went with. And personally I think the more hourglass shape would look fine if the whole cast had more of those kind of lightly exaggerated proportions.
Having a nuanced take on this topic ? Oh boy
I personally disagree. If the designs were meant to work within this realistic context, then they should be designed to work within it. If they were so deadset on this realistic style, they should have changed the designs. Also, a lot of the designs make it hard to tell what they do. Maybe better shape language in an exaggerated art style would fix some of those elements, but it doesn't mean that the character designs aren't bad.
A reoccurring thing that I saw on my side of social media during the brief time the game was alive was that the characters looked significantly better in cinematic form where the overall art style was different, so it really comes down to how they were rendered in-game.
They should've used more Stylized 2D art/animation like your concepts in the promotional material.
That's pretty ballsy, pikat. Respect. But considering how most of the discourse surrounding concord has massive anti-sjw sentiment, I wouldn't exactly be optimistic about trying to make the discussion more nuanced or reasonable.
Be careful, you're gonna be call woke(they don't even know what that word means)
A good 80% of these comments havent watched the video. Hot button topics in 2024 are so awesome!
@uhoh7545 it keeps happening :)))))
I think you'll find, with a bit of research, that it's Pikat who's being unreasonable, and lacking nuance.
You see, the character she chose to redraw is MtF trans, lorewise, that's why they look so stocky and masculine.
Pikat then said she wouldn't change the design, but proceeded to draw the character as a biological female, with an insane hourglass figure... And that was just the tip of the iceberg, Pikat gave the character edges, where they're supposed to have circles, made them too skinny, and hid the repulsive intestinal design on the shoulderpads by using a flattering angle. Pikat completely changed the design, AND hid the rest of the flaws of the design! :P
Essentially, Pikat said "the design is fine" and then tried to show us how it's fine, by HIDING OR REMOVING EVERY DESIGN FLAW, AND REDESIGNING THE CHARACTER! Pikat is the one being completely f**king unreasonable here...
And at the end of the day, the game failed to bring in players, it was shut down 12 days after it launched, it didn't even last 2 weeks... Saying the design if fine, at this point, is like burying your head in the sand. Was the character/art design the only problem? Hell no... But it was a Huge part of it art design is the main, primary advertisement for the game, if people see cool and pretty art for a game cover, it prompts them to learn more about the game, Concord had ZERO appeal, i saw ads for it, TWICE, and i didn't remember the game until like the third time i saw an ad for it... The game wasn't appealing to most people, so, nobody showed any interest.
And before anyone goes and tries to make the excuse that Concord didn't have enough publicity or advertisement, let me remind you, it got 5 times more publicity and advertisement than Valve's DeadLock did, and Deadlock is CRUSHING it, and it isn't even released yet, it's still in closed alpha... heck you couldn't even search for DeadLock on steam, until after Concord died, valve only added DeadLock to steam recently... You can't go to the deadlock page, and install the game though, it's still in closed-alpha phase, you can only play the game, if someone who's got access to the closed-alpha, invites you to the closed alpha... And yet it has like 300 000 concurrent players, and RISING.
Concord has ZERO excuses, none, whatsoever. DeadLock is a PERFECT example of why games don't need advertisement or publicity, to become popular, it just needs to be a GOOD GAME that APPEALS to players... it will become successful, by word of mouth... That is all it takes. And Concord had A LOT of word of mouth going too, a lot of NEGATIVE word of mouth, which is why it failed, Concord was a bad product that nobody wanted, so it failed, simple as that.
I could go off about more intricacies and nuances, but i think i've already made my point... Pikat failed her own challenge... End of story... She's the one who lacks nuance, she's the one who's unreasonable, burying her head in the sand like that...
The way you talk about "not understanding why there's so much hate towards the design" is simple, due to a set of problems such as the closure of several studios and the amount of money invested, it gives people even more reasons to hate the project. It's nice that you try to feel empathy for the people who worked on the project, but the attack isn't necessarily directed at them, they did what they were paid to do, the problem is who ordered this monstrosity to be made
All you've proven with this video is that you can do better at their own game.
don't put yourself down so much.
We don't have to always come to the rescue of every piece of media that gets thrashed online, sometimes it happens because it actually was bad.
negativity can be vile but forcing positivity can also become toxic.
Your compassion for this videogame (and the people who made it) is misplaced
i think long tern videos of you rumbling about art or whatnot would do good, ur voice is so relaxing that people will play it in the background for sure
even though i was unfamiliar with the topic before i watched your video i really appreciate that you stay kind and don't support strong hate even if the designs objectively don't look very good
i really appreciate your empathy for other people's work
The 8 people
Hot take: I think this video seems to actually agree with most of the criticism of the Concord character designs, but 1) it's doing so in a much nicer way (kudos!) and 2) it's using a different definition of "design."
For Bazz in particular, I've seen videos talking about how her pose doesn't hint at her role at all, her color values are all over the place, and her glasses do this weird thing where they seem to just point at her forehead. The Pikat Redesign(TM) shuffles the colors in a few key places to add appeal, changes her pose to be more of a bolt-upright situation that suggests she could burst into motion at any moment, and even the shape of the glasses makes the "arrow" look more like a dynamic zigzag that suggests unpredictability and freedom of motion. The added anime influences instantly give Bazz a real Redline vibe. It has _soul._
And that's the problem with the Concord designs as-is! This is a game that spent years in development hell, and what should have been their big blockbuster announcement - a trailer at the Game Awards - was forgotten almost immediately because the designs were... actually my fiancée just phrased it as "Wal-Mart Guardians of the Galaxy," which I think is perfect. It looked like a marketing department exec commissioned something really creative and dynamic, but kept complaining about it being too weird (ie. interesting) or unrealistic (ie. distinct), forcing the artists to pull back further and further until arriving at this weird uncanny valley rubber-forehead thing we ended up with.
The market absolutely didn't need yet another hero shooter, but I still mourn the loss of whatever Concord could have been.