Do you work on turn based SRPGs? Because someone, somewhere out there hopefully one day is going to bring in a spiritual successor to Shining Force, or recreate Dark Wizard.....Two cult classics that have very large cult followings and yet neither has been messed with in over 25 years.....Such a shame. Maybe, just maybe a post like this might intrigue a talented creator like you. Its a longshot but hey.....
finally! someone who took this opportunity SERIOUSLY 7/10 redesign just for understanding tonal values would be higher if u redesigned or added to the armor/ accessories as well.
Lmaooo this is so real! I feel bad even though its not my work, but then again with that amount of budget... I can give my first year friends and can do so much better lol
Haha I took a whole digital arts course and would sometimes turn in what I thought was a banger of a project, and would get the metaphorical red ink corrections all over it from the instructor.
I think I've found a unifying theme across all these character designs: "janitor." Think industrial cleaning products, heavy duty rubber gloves, dirty plastic buckets, gray water, etc.
I got that feeling too and tbh if they genuinely actually tried to play into that visual theme it could have worked but so many of these designs seem to play into that overall theme while also insisting on being something else.
look at what videogames and Sungrand Studios is doing on google and tell me if he is qualified to judge what it is good and bad....and 1 million people trusting what he is saying.... feel bad for the humanity and the videogame industry
I didn't think it was possible for characters to be so overdesigned, yet completely underdesigned at the same time. Props to Concord for pulling that off, I guess.
Can you blame him? I cannot fathom a character design that plain and devoid of any interesting detail being approved by any competent designer. IMO that was the worst design by far. Absolutely nothing made sense. Everything was one tone. Zero detail. A big heavily armored helmet would indicate a soldier or militaristic character, but the entire rest of the body is some sort of skin tight dense plastic-y spandex... But they have a rocket launcher. No tools, no gadgets, no extra rockets, NOTHING interesting on the character's design. Complete nonsense. That character looks like it was a default placeholder one of the designers found in the depths of UE5 and someone colored the faceplate red. Even the pose the character is in makes no sense. Heavy rocket launcher on one side, but the character's weight is on their opposite back foot? The weapon isn't even resting on their shoulder, it looks weightless as it's being held with one hand. Their shoulders are turned to face the camera, but the hips are pointed more forward, and the head is out of alignment with both the shoulders and hips. Wtf.
This was a murder. No malice, no obvious clowning, just subtle jabs and genuine critique that are made harsh solely by virtue of Concord's lack of quality.
It's no surprise the only design that really stands out or appeals to most people is the "kinda hot catgirl", because she's got some vague aesthetic appeal.
@@Cabazorro0 You know when you get a talking to by your boss about a job he’d like you to do better/improve at? That’s what he’s doing here. I know Gen Z has an issue where they take everything personally because they are incapable of understanding nuance, but try not to make it so obvious.
The guy looks so normal, He looks like the most normal person in the world, he's so normal he looks weird, he looks like he's gonna tell me a bedtime story, he looks like a famous 50s writer being interviewed, he looks like south american socialist revolutionary intelligentsia, he looks like he greatly supported the development of some random field of medicine,
What struck me was that the overall design philosophy was also incoherent where 3/4 the cast is maintenence crew with guns and 1/4 being first year fashion students making the most out of 1 fabric And "toad" They call it a "hero shooter" but they show us "public works shooter" Now im imagining a cartoony construction worker arena fighter game and that sounds more appealing.
Honestly yeah, they should've embrace this "stylistic suck" approach and instead make an absurd game where you play as bunch of bored 9-5-ers using available stuff around them as weapon & armor akin the likes you see at r/bossfight.
19 year old ipad kids making armor out of 3d printed parts only to discover that if you lift your arms your shoulder pads squeeze your head off like a zit. Literally just look at the giant womans shoulder pads, she physically should NOT even be able to lift her upper arms more than 2 inches. So dumb.
i think if they did them just like a bunch of janitors or random working class people with comon things as weapon would have been more fun but this is like let's make a fun idea the most boring thing posible.
@@figureviews when I look at Twitter users and their activities I just ask myself "How tf do you mfs just spend all day arguing and making thread of why you find this problematic over some really petty stuff"
btw, author's character designs are ugly too, but in their own way. it looks like author learned just one design principle and lives and dies by it. your chars are boring and coockiecutter. extremely uninteresting. at least author of these abysmal characters from failed game know, what "form" is.
I remember after WW2, in the cold war, a man wanted to win monet selling a plane to the soviet army and to win money he name the plane after Stalin, Stalin being a dictator live it, and the plane was fast as hell but was so badly design the plane literaly disarm itself as fligth, the engine was so big and powerful it vibrate and damage to plane, the plane landing gear could not retract and were so small that the propeler hit the land, and it was so bad that they put it in the disgn unniversity and said these is how you dont design planes. They should do these at the start, first year these is what not to do and be tree classes dedicated to show how bad these was
The fact that every single character has the same flaws tells me that either they kept making the same mistakes over and over without knowing, or they knew but decided "this is my style" and ran with it. It's like a writing student creating an incoherent mess and going "you just don't get my writing style".
Whoever is the art director is clearly the culprit because like you said, all characters have the same flaws in their design. It means the culprit had a hand in the design of every character and the power to enforce their choices.
@JaimeDuendeDeGongora sometimes. There are things that you can point to that are generally liked or disliked. It's subjective but there are patterns that you can turn into principles to work with.
When the problem repeats itself so often, it's not a problem with the artists, it's a problem with the art direction. I feel sorry for those who worked on this.
It’s definitely the manager or at least the person who decides what design is good and bad. The artists probably tried hard to curve the design while management gave them a straight
As a former fashion designer, these costumes pained me SO MUCH. DID THEY NOT CONSULT A N Y O N E ABOUT THESE FUCK-ASS LOOKS???? Almost NONE of the colors go well together, the silhouettes aren't interesting/unique, there's almost NO patterns (do they only have hobby lobby solids in that world??), the fabrics all drape with the same "weight", and worst of all they have absolutely nothing to say, a true nothingburger with a side of apathy 😭😭
Thanks for chiming in and sharing your thoughts. I wondered what fashion designers would have thought about these and now I have an idea. I absolutely feel your pain. They had so much funding and 8 years and this is the result. At least we can share the pain with other like minded people online who understand how frustrating this is and then let it go.
It seems almost like they're trying to go for a sterilized look as if many of them are members of some kind of science team. But even then the visual design for that is extremely disjointed and leaves me very unsure.
@@CrizzyEyes Daw's lab goggles & chem-resistant gloves give me that vibe too, same with tupperware head daveers, but then they throw in a random puffer trench coat and weird metal shoes 😭😭
Character designers that just don't understand the BASICS. Colour theory, unique silhouettes, communicating a character's role, strengths and weakness through their design, making a COOL character that people actually like. They get it all wrong. Humans dressed by a bad fashion designer not designed by a game designer.
The lizard guy should have had a lizard snout . The problem is all the characters are humanoid . And the abuse or orange and teal and leather in all chars .. not to mention everyone is in a jump suit no mech suit at all
You really hit the nail on the head about everything being flat. My art teacher has a great saying about this: "Value does all the work, color gets all the credit."
My high school life drawing teacher was ALWAYS encouraging us to use more contrast to make our drawings pop. The artists at Firewalk should have taken his class. 😂 Thank you, Mr. Love!
I believe they do know that because they have many talented designers who perfectly avoid all designs that leave a lasting impression on characters. This is their goal, and they have been very successful in their work
Another thing you haven't mentioned is the shapes of these designs. The short characters aren't short enough. The tall characters aren't tall enough. The old people aren't old enough. The fat characters aren't fat enough. The male and female features of the characters aren't exaggerated. Most of them look like really, really tall 12 year olds who haven't gone through puberty. It's like they went for ultra realistic body shapes while forgetting that their artstyle is more suited to make super exaggerated cartoonish characters. There is a serious case of incompetence going on here where everyone involved is super obsessed with being accurate to reality but forgetting the first rule of drawing stuff is that you gotta exaggerate what's real.
Yeah, this. It's frustrating to me because I WANT more characters that break conventions by having a wider range of body types and gender expression and such... And I know you can do that and still have compelling designs because I've seen it done in everything from D&D OCs to Webtoon characters. But I'm starting to wonder if some people are hearing "we need more diversity and less unrealistic body standards" and so throw out those conventions with no understanding of why they're there or what needs to be adapted to suit the new versions.
There's really only two ways to go with designing characters. Either you don't go for photo-realism and exaggerate, or you go for photo-realism and don't exaggerate. These people went for a Disney 3D animation style, yet didn't exaggerate...
I've been realising the new sensibilities make characters mush together. Everyone is a pansexual genderless chubbo with an ironic nasty attitude and mental agony.
I've seen someone describe this game's artstyle as plumberpunk and I think that's the perfect word for it Design elements that should be metallic such as robot parts, cybernetics, armor plates or weapon paneling are all covered in tubing material or rubbery plastic The characters in this game don't look like scifi heroes, they look like a gang of plumbers making the streets unsafe in some fucked up future scenario
They look like they're cosplaying characters from another game but only had access to cheap materials for the costumes lol But then the game renders those cheap costumes in bizarrely photorealistic super high detail. It's so jarring how bland it is.
I think the real problem is that Concord clearly took their inspiration from the Guardians of the Galaxy movies where most of the characters are realistically proportioned and the costumes are not too outlandish except for the aliens. That aesthetic is great for the movie but not really good for a hero shooter. Almost all great hero shooters have stylized or exaggerated designs that help sell each character's personality and visually communicate their role. They all have strong silhouettes and striking colors that help you recognize them.
by far the biggest issue with almost all of these character designs is that if you removed their weapons, youd have almost no idea what role the character is supposed to do in game. compare it to classics like TF2. take away the guns and youd still be able to pretty much figure out what theyre about
This, this is the nail in the coffin. If you showed me the silhouette of sniper I would immediately panic. If you showed me the silhouette of a friendly heavy it makes me calm that I have protection (he's a spy disguised)
I just realized something . . . you know what the Concord characters really look like? It's like you had a character creator with all the options and you hit "maximum randomization". They appear to be barely "designed" at all.
It's not mentioned much in this video, but I also think they are conceptually just so ugly. I look at the old lady character at 28:25 and nothing about her design makes sense. She's clearly older, but she's wearing a jumpsuit which is a style of clothing associated with being physically active. It's not a contrast, it's a contradiction. You compare her design to Ana from Overwatch, and Ana is also an older lady but her concept is as a talented sniper, past her prime but still heads above everyone else. Ana's design is complimentary to her concept, while the designs in Concord don't feel like they have a concept to begin with.
No actually you would get better characters out of a randomizer. These have to be intentionally bad. 😅 They are the most bland and boring characters I've ever seen in a game where the characters are everything. I get it if the characters aren't important but a hero shooter is a game that relies on good character designs. Similar to a fighting game.
The worst examples to me are the designs that are the opposite of that, the characters where you get where they were coming from but are made so bland that it's actually hard to actually understand that they were trying to do something. Case in point : the lizard dude. They toned it down so much to the point of just making it a green human with random spikes on his arms that I would never have guessed that it was supposed to be a lizard man in the first place, they probably just slapped some add-ons on the face of their mocap actor and called it a day. At least the terrible designs that have no cohesion, I can let slide because at least it's sort of funny, but those are just sad
It even has that effect when you wear 2 pieces of clothes from separate sets so your character just looks weird Like the fat guy for exemple because of his "chest armor" it just looks like he is wearing his pants all the way into his belly button when in fact that is just a one piece suit
I am also a Character Designer and I was shocked as to how the character lacked color that says anything about the character. Color isn't just a paintjob. Dante's red tells us he is hotheaded, Virgil's blue tells us he is calm and collected. Mercy's white tells us she is virtuous, Tracer's orange tells us she is vibrant. It's ingrained in our psyche to recognize these colors. I don't know of their purpose was to break the norm or sth but making all the characters flat, pastel colored was a horrible choice.
There's a character in this game that is basically a Pharah, she flies and has a weapon that does splash damage with an explosion, there's nothing, NOTHING in that character's design that tells you she can fly, she has no Jet-Pack, her propulsion are her shoes unlike Pharah that not only has a Jet-Pack that yells "SHE CAN FLY", but also her outfit resembles a bald eagle and her Jet-Pack has the shape of wings.
It feels like they wanted to try to avoid stereotypes in their character designs, but also in turn decided to avoid ANYTHING that could be considered normal. It tries to break the rules without understanding what the rules are in the first place.
@@cubetamalvada893ow1 is truly the pinnacle of character design, you can tell what each character's role is just by looking at them and their weapons. Then in ow2 we get Kiriko, illira, and whatever venture is...
I really like "Cyborg 99"'s design too. Having a noncomplicated robot design in a business suit tells a lot of story. Usually we expect robots would be used for menial or dangerous jobs, so having one in a suit tells you straight away that theres something unique about them on the inside. Maybe they gained higher inteligence and decided to do something more with themselves, for example. Its a deaign that benefits from the very "low key" trend in all the designs.
this is one of those times in gamedev where the actual advice to fix issues basically boils down to "build a time machine, go back in time, fire whoever decided this was a good idea, and don't make these mistakes in the first place." Once it hits this point your game is well past the point of no return lol. The whole thing needs to be redone from almost scratch
It's also highly uncanny that the characters (base model) are highly detailed, made to look photo realistic - yet, not one of them (save granny magi with her gold trim) has any detail at all - to the point you cannot identify what any of the material is...or might be. There is no texture, no wear and tear, no contours, no insignia, no flair, no patterns, nothing. It looks like, if you were to reach out and touch any of them, they would all feel like room temperature plastic. There is no character there, no personality...it's all very "born yesterday".
That's an astute observation. Though, the Pink character does have tears on her shorts he seems born of fashion and not necessarily battle. The new Avatar Netflix show also had the issue of costumes being absolutely pristine.
@@poorlymadeproduction It's actually something most people don't really think about, but you do notice it. You can see it in a LOT of movies and tv shows. Not considering that the costumes are still clothing, often they are way too "clean" for the scenes and characters wearing them so it creates a kind of "clothing uncanny valley" effect. It's definitely the kind of thing where you go "this just doesn't quite look right" but you can't really figure out why.
@sungrandstudios a lot modern movies and tv shows have this problem: characters that are supposed to have "lived in" clothes and gear and yet everything looks pristine, like straight out the packaging. Same thing can be applied to the sets.
Totalitarian ideologies dislike the idea of history, as it isnt easy for the ruling class to control. "Born yesterday" is the go to, and history is continously rewritten.
Your professionalism is refreshing I’m not in game development but i find these types of videos interesting it’s like getting a glance behind the curtain I miss back in the early 2000s when it was regular for devs to release diaries to break down the tech side of designs and mechanics of games
Thanks for sharing your comment, and I'm so glad you're not the FBI. I remember seeing those small dev diaries years ago too and always found them so interesting!
There's a reason Goku resonates with so much kids around the world and stood the test of time. It's so iconic and not just Dragon Ball, Shonen Jump takes those silhouettes very seriously because if your character isn't even cool looking by the bare minimum, then what's the point?
Most famous gaming example is probably TF2, Valve stated they wanted to make every class identifiable by just silhouette alone, to which they succeeded at
It kinda reminds me of that episode in Gintama. Gintoki explained that if you want to make a titular character, they need to be recognizable by silhouette alone. Cue Gintoki presenting Goku and Vegetta silhouette's and then revealing it's actually Gintoki and Hijikata ( it's still part of the joke of course 😅). However it still proves that there is a reason why they take these fundamentals to heart.
I mean irl a lot of military and technology is desaturating like cars that are mostly grey and black and things like McDonald’s are staring to turn grey. A lot of corporate products are grey and in a futurism world like this, desaturation might just be a as common I guess. It’s unappealing which is why I sorta like it. This could mostly could work irl compared to the other games
I mean irl a lot of military and technology is desaturating like cars that are mostly grey and black and things like McDonald’s are staring to turn grey. A lot of corporate products are grey and in a futurism world like this, desaturation might just be a as common I guess. It’s unappealing which is why I sorta like it. It looks pretty bland like most cars and suvs too. This could mostly could work irl compared to the other games.
Concord is to video games what The Last Jedi is to movies. Both titles could be used to teach future developers and directors about how not to create games or movies.
at any point in the progress of their work, a game designer must compare their work with Concord and if there are any similarities they must be removed immediately at all costs.
These designs felt like the creators went with the very first concept art of each and every character. Practically each of these characters would have benefited from a re-design.
I'm gonna guess they're gonna do a cyberpunk refund and release the game in a year or so. It's their only shot unless they wanna lose 200mil or whatever it was
@orcishh it's jover. Too many negative reviews on the game already exist, people are always gonna be prejudiced even if they fix the game a year later
imma critique the critic for a moment here: All he did was talk about tones. Yes, they're a big problem with these designs, but tonal contrast and color theory make up only a fourth of character design at most. What about the shapes? The themes? The narrative? It's not that hard to say some notes about those things as well. Yes, he made a few quick remarks, but it came across as him believing that tonal contrast is the #1 most important thing. Also, I'm not buying his character designs. They're bland. Designing normal people is one thing, but the IT factor is missing. They look like random people you'd see in the grocery store then promptly forget about. Why should I care about his characters? They could be the most fascinating, well-written characters on the globe, but nothing draws me in. BTW, I'm not defending Concord in any way. Honestly I forgot it existed until this video popped up.
@@Modusiticate thank you for bringing up those points. You are absolutely on point here. I wanted to keep the video from getting too long so I focused on aspects I could quickly modify and explain in a way that would be helpful to artists and designers. Certainly the topics you discussed are astute and deserving of full video all their own. Thank you for taking the time to share your perspective.
@@sungrandstudiosNot knowing how the game is themed and the classes of the characters didn't help. The game is supposed to be retro-futuristic sci-fi, and the characters do not read as that; The only one that even comes close is "lieutenant Tupperware". It's also impossible to read their class through their design (the medic reads as a gunslinger, the wall builder reads as a magic user). They are fundamentally not fit for purpose designs.
@@sungrandstudiosthey made thy rounds last year in international news (read: outrage) when they unveiled an ad for a collection with very blatant references to CP. It was pretty disturbing and I assume that was the point of the whole thing. They're basically a fashion label for real life Bond Villains.
They should have taken a page from games like Team Fortress 2 character design. Their design process is something else. To put it short, they basically started out with the silhouette, then for color it's purely in black and white ONLY (colors were added in the final stage). The reason is because readability in a class-based FPS is important. You must be able to glance at the character from distance and tell what they're capable of, and distinguish them from the rest of the cast, even in the middle of a busy team fight. They also ditched all the unnecessary details (for example pockets), not due to limited technology at the time, but because when a character moves, all those details blur and you won't see them. To them, those details are just icing on the cake, cool if it's there, but should not be the main focus. They prioritized on details and vibrant colors from the torso upward, to guide your eyes to the important clues, such as what weapon they're holding out, and where they're looking. They only add colors last and built the universe to compliment the colors of the characters. It's just a shame that now the game is pretty much abandoned by Valve, and the community-created cosmetics all seem to ignore these design philosophy, making the characters more confusing to look at with certain cosmetic combination.
As someone who spends a little bit of time painting Warhammer miniatures.. I've struggled to figure out why my Miniatures don't look as vibrant or good as the other Miniatures I see and in about 20 minutes here I've learned more about my mistakes that I keep making compared to other people who are probably instinctively doing it at this point.. I feel like I should go home and sit down with my brushes a little bit and experiment more. This is some really good educational stuff
At least you know you are missing something. Imagine painting bland, trash miniatures and submitting them to a contest thinking they were amazing and trying gaslight the judges into pretending they are the best. That's basically what they did with this game.
@@ARStudios2000 He's referring to the viral sensation that was a black and blue dress that in the picture of it that was taken caused a large amount of people to see it as white and gold. It's been heavily discussed and studied and there are extremely complex explanations of why it worked that way. Google "viral dress color meme"
That rule about the character needing to look interesting while blurred is interesting. I've always noticed that any character with good visual design always has a a good looking silhouette, from just about any angle, especially the front and profile of the silhouette. Every character in Overwatch has a great looking silhouette and profile.
Well, not really. Grayscale just helps pinpoint lighting and values more easily. A lot of concept artists, including me, work directly in color. Working with grayscale isn't the standard for concept art
@@frankzappa3156 I've been working in the art industry for quite a while, so I know what he's trying to do here. But as long as the art is aesthetically pleasing to the investors and 'most' of the player base, it's good to go. In the case of Concord, though, it's just straight up ugly because it's not what the player base wants.
I took a beginner's drawing course (and I mean absolute beginner), and from time to time there were events for people to draw original characters, these concord designs look exactly what some students of this course made, people who've never drawn before in their life or aumateurs that didn't even knew what fundamentals were.
The diffrence is, those people were there to learn. If they took the lessons to heart, then those failures meant something. This? This is just a waste.
What bothers me about Daw in particular isn't his weight- it's that he actually IS coded quite well to having ice powers. Cold blue, thick jacket that looks well insulated? Check. Goggles? Check. And yet no, he's the... medic?
Wait, that's not an ice-based character? So what, somebody liked Mei from Overwatch, but they already had a design for that character archetype, and they went with "OK, what's left?" Shockingly awful. And I say this as a person that really avoids being negative on the internet.
You know it's bad when everyone agrees that "this is a award winning game" is used as a insult. Andrew Tate's flavorless rice with salt and pepper have more flavor that whatever that slop is.
The silhouette of these characters are non-existent. Everyone's either just round or blocky. And the issue is made even more evident by the lack of dynamic poses. They all look like awkward dorks trying to pose in a cool and badass way but are secretly embarrassed by what they're doing.
"This is a Nightmare Design!" "It's a little bit annoying that the same design flaw are appearing over and over" "It's hard to salvage this" "It is so frustrating, it is disheartening, to see this, because I do not want to see people fail THIS bad" LoL DAMN it felt like it was seriously just character after character where he was genuinely describing blatant errors that you would not expect from a team with as much experience as the developers at Fire Walk Studio to make... over and over again.
I would not put the blame on the designers, at the end of the day they just execute what has already been approved. These designs all feel like the 8th revision of the characters after the executives told them to remove all signs of character,fun and interesting design to appeal to ""Everyone"" And by trying to appeal to everyone they appeal to no one.
@JMDAmigaMusic Which is an amateur problem that activists run into because they have a great disdain for centralized leadership. The greatest games we have are all coincidentally done under the vision of a unified leadership, usually under one man.
It finally clicked for me halfway through the video that these designs were supposed to evoke the 1970s. It's just that they took all the wrong lessons from the 1970s.
@ARStudios2000 he's sort of right. Sci fi in particular during the 70s had a lot of puffiness, tubes, etc. You'd have to look at things like star wars (lots of drab colors, tubing, etc), zardoz, dark star, alien. It's membrane thin but I think the reason it's so hard to see is how poorly it was executed.
Came here to say this... Their 'jackets' reminds me of how "Back To The Future 2" 'futuristic fashion' was designed... So many puffs. Soooo round. Soooo insignificant. It's literally a 70s interpretation of how the 2000s would look like.
In what way though? It certainly wasn't in color choices. The physical design is vaguely reminiscent of a particular kind of 70's sci-fi/futurism that you'd see in films like The Andromeda Strain or Logan's Run - but there's no cohesiveness to their application. It looks like a blind stroke victim was trying to dress themselves out of a box of old 70's sci-fi wardrobes... but it's even worse than that, because each individual piece is mixed and matched. Like they took bits and pieces of various outfits and stitched them together with other pieces of outfits they had no relation to or had any mind at all to color matching. Even Bethesda got closer to that aesthetic mark with FO4's Institute and Starfield.
As an interior designer I will tell u that everything this man said is 100% accurate, it might seem like hes memeing but hes opinions of the characters is pretty much on point.
He did well with what he was given. But honestly, as a designer the root issue here is further up the chain/ earlier in development: lack of clear identity & art direction. The char designs give no indication of the setting, story or game-play. All your fave games have clear identity: Fallout = retrofuturism, Skyrim = medieval/ Nordic + Tolkien, Cyberpunk = cyberpunk, Witcher = medieval/ Polish + Tolkien, etc.
I feel like early in development they had that animated flat retro 1970's look but then they were forced to make it 'realistic' and that's how this happened.
It's clearly obvious they're trying to go for that campy sci-fi pulp look mixed with Gunn's "quirky" Guardian of the Galaxy reimagining. But the choice for the photo realistic look just clashes badly.
I think you're all on the money, the game takes many inspirations from 70s culture and sci fi which gives all the colours and the Chris Foss style ship design
My theory is that they were trying to make the game colorblind friendly. For one thing, forced accessibility to the detriment of all else would totally fit wit the DEI motivations this game is clearly infested with. And, I have noticed that color blind mode in other games look similar to this. They usually shift reds to be either more yellow-orange, or pink-purple, to make them easier to distinguish from green and blue. And that's exactly what I see here. There are very few characters with red anywhere other than small details. But orange, yellow, and pink are very common. That kind of color balance tends to look unnatural to most people, because its not how the real world looks. It makes everything feel dead and desaturated, because the most common vibrant hot color is missing. And here it looks even worse, because they also use shades of pale green as the base for like half the color schemes in the game. So instead of anything looking red and full of life, everything is dead and decaying green. And while that might be helpful for some people, forcing everyone to deal with it is awful. So if that was the reason behind their color choices, they are idiots.
There's no saving Concord, but I think that these character designs can be improved with the right tweaks and possibly an entire art style change. I appreciate what you've tried to do here.
Nah bro this game is cooked. They want to do storytelling through "weekly cinematics" instead of incorporating it in their character designs, voice lines and the environment designs
Well dressed game designer: “I’m going to make concord’s characters look visually better” Blurs the photos of characters “Now you don’t have see these nightmare designs again, thanks watching” 🤣
The character designs adhere to the leftist ideals of "Nobody is allowed to be beautiful or normal looking" and "Paint yourself in random colors to warn the rest of nature". 😂
Something tells me this is an art director problem. The artists do know what they're doing, it's just that their boss is forcing them to make terrible, terrible decisions consistently
I heard the game used to have a more cartoony cell shaded style but towards the end some higher ups decided the characters should be more realistic and high fidelity. Of course a lot of the issues would still persist, but it wouldn't have been quite so egregious and obviously bad as it is in the realistic style. That being said it's clearly bad, I don't know why they approved of this art direction for the character designs realistic or not.
@@dragon_nammiSomehow I never thought of this possibility. Because it makes SO MUCH sense. Obviously the characters look dogshit regardless, but an artstyle that mimics some old cartoons or comics where the designs are kept minimalistic seems like it would work. Thinking about it, they start reminding me of 3D renders of anime characters except with horrible lighting, texturing, rigging and no cel shading with a painful lack of any detail.
The character designs, to me, are the epidemy of trying to be different and unconventional while failing to understand why conventional designs are what they are. Also, I believe the reasoning for Javier Bardem lacking one shoulder pad is because you butt your gun to your shoulder when aiming, so having a big ass pad like that would get in the way, and the designer is correct. Maybe that's why real life contemporary shoulder armor isn't stupidly oversized and gaudy.
What i hate even more than characters centered around gender, is characters that are centered around weight. Like, i dont mind fat people, BUT HOW THE FUCK ARE THEY IN A MOVEMENT FOCUSED, RUN AND GUN HERO SHOOTER WHERE PEOPLE JUMP AND DASH AROUND. Doesnt it make sense that the characters are fit??? What the fuck
Your left side also tends to be presented more towards the enemy if you’re right handed, so if weight is a concern, you armor that side more than the other.
It's funny how proud the developers are that they made a diverse cast in their game, but you, the player need a perfect eye sight just to see them normally
I despise the "keep forced diversity out" crap, but this is pretty damning evidence for how lazy and bad it could be. It really does feel like they just rolled a dice to figure out the skintone values for every character. Having a diverse cast is a great thing, but only if you actually _care_ about diversity and aren't just filling out a freaking checklist. Further supported by the fact that shortly after launch Sony quietly removed the "Political" and "LGBT+" tags from the steam page in hopes to somehow improve sales-- their lack of support for the queer community is blatantly insulting. We're a crowd to market to, until we don't buy their shitty uninspired designs, then they just quietly try to backtrack from that. It's really dumb, and I hate this game for giving ammunition to that crowd :/
I COULD NOT POSSIBLY IMAGINE the different possible skins they could make for these characters other than color variations and VERY MINOR detail changes. For a game like Overwatch, the devs have the ability to be so creative with their skins because their characters are so easily recognizable and unique. If what they did was translated to Concord, it would be IMPOSSIBLE to differentiate the characters. They really shot themselves in the foot with these designs
Every single character from Overwatch is unique in their own way, even though Blizzard and Overwatch get clowned on a lot and rightfully so but they ARE good at character designs. Each character is just bursting with personality in their design and animations...yes, even Bastion! If you put different skins on the Concord characters, you wouldn't know who they were anymore cause they're so indistinct and boring. They just look like random people at a cosplay convention.
What got me was the stealthy assassin character had the most vibrant and colorful outfit outta all the characters. Im sure big hair and a big ass red jacket will not interrupt my stealth.
The thing that aggravates me the most is these designs don't tell you ANYTHING about their roles in the game. I played the beta for 2 hours or so and outside of the 3 characters I used I have NO idea what these characters do or what their playstyle is.
@shishkebaba I will never stop simping over the superior vanilla tf2 designs, just at a glance in the heat of battle you know who is who and what color they are. It really is a shame seeing cosmetics approved that ruin the visual aesthetic and team recognition these days.
The thing that really stood out to me was trying to guess the characters name. Like, yeah, they look generic, but the fact that you had nothing to latch onto really gets me. I'm not a character designer, but I get a lot of Baldur's Gate 3 stuff in my recommended.There's one video about Karlach that I think gives you an idea of what I'm going for. They spoke about how the character's design tells you a story about who they are. In Karlach's case there are burns and scars, showing you that she's been through things, but also how she ornaments her hair with these silver medallions showing that she still cares about her appearance and takes the time to do some basic self care. There's also the glow of the engine in her chest, and the exhaust ports on her shoulders. Tough but caring, has an engine in her chest. You know that about the character at a glance because of those details. All I learn about these characters when I look at them is that they're derivative of pop culture characters like Peter Quill from Guardians of the Galaxy, or that for some reason fashion in that setting incorporates a lot of tubes that look like a digestive tract. There's nothing here that gets someone interested in who a character is as a person, or their role on the game. I think the only thing that lets you distinguish anything is that some characters are larger, and presumably can take a hit or two at the cost of moving a bit slower. Which is super basic.
baldur's gate is also great with the names thing because a lot of the time new players get into the name knowing about characters names or feats, like the first time they see halsin they go "oh he0's the bear sex guy!" or the first time they meet karlach FROM AFAR they can go "yup, that sure is karlach" and shadowhert? just a look at her in the illythid vat tube and you already know it's her. names don't necessarily bring visual flair to them, so it's fine to mess a name, but even in real life we have things like "the karen" who you know is likely a middle aged blond woman, or "the spike" who is likely someone straight outta the 90s sporting a guy fiery hairstyle and who likes hot rods or something like that, names still carry a *feel* to them and being able to see a design and go "imma give them this name, i can just see it" is a sign of good design choices, i mean, just look at the kiki and bouba experiment, it's a real thing.
@@sungrandstudios woops I said big little small 😂, I meant big medium small. Either way, using the basic rules of 3 can get designs far. Like you mention, make an armour piece used in 3 pieces of equipment per character to add cohesion etc
How bad the entire design is overall is how little he can make a workable example out of the characters. If he must improve anymore problems than just the colour schemes, he better recreate the entire characters altogether from scratch!
It wasn't until you mentioned tonal values that I understood why I felt the characters were so off putting or uncanny. Everything, all the characters were dull and even "vibrant" colors were greyed or washed out. Even in real life you'd see clothing with contrast or brighter colors in a crowd, and even faded clothing would be contrasted with something else.
I believe the characters were given the washed-out look for gameplay purposes. The game environment has brightly colored materials, and putting the characters a tone lower would make it easier to see them and wouldn't clash with the line silhouette you see occasionally in the game around the characters. Otherwise, during cutscenes, the characters have sharper colours with stronger tonal values. While the video is no doubt educational, I feel a lot of people are going to interpret this video the wrong way because of their sentiments surrounding the game.
@@ManganizationWhich is so strange considering saturation usually has more visual weight to it and draws the eye more than desaturated colours. Why would they want your eyes pulled away from the characters and towards the environment if the whole point of the saturation contrast is to make the characters stand out more? The art for this game is fascinating.
@@libertyquest Woah, did me jokingly pointing out you don't understand a simple definition was enough to upset you and made you go straight into personal attacks? Apologies my dear sensitive snowflake, I won't point your errors next time.
It's not just the color compositions that are off, many of these designs have very boring and uninspiring shapes as well. Nobody will want to draw fanart of these characters.
the yellow robot is the only one i can remember, and i can only remember it becuase i see "skyrim cheese wheel on legs" i don't even remember he has a minigun, just "skyrim cheese bot"
My brother is one of the 17 active players on PS5. One of the first things I asked him to do when showing me the game, was to show me all the alternate skins and costumes, because I thought "surely the BASE COSTUME sucks... because there'll be loads to unlock!" WRONG!!! They have 1 "Legendary" skin and a couple of palette-swaps, and the legendary on practically most of the characters is somehow worse than the base skins we're ALL mocking.
I am sorry but unless your brother was trying to platinum the game and get the "living legend" achievement need to be charted to a evaluation because no way he spent 40$ on that objectively bad game
When you can't tell if your characters are pandering to an audience or mocking it, then you failed as a character designer. A satire mocking modern politics would look the same.
A lot of these recent "woke" games look like they were supposed to be satire. Dustborn and Concord especially. The character design in dustborn is so bad you almost can't believe it is real.
You've managed to put the off-putting feeling I get from Concord's character design into words. It's so bad that it feels like it's parodying the people it's trying to include.
It really is the worst of all worlds. You look at games with a diverse cast like Apex Legends, Overwatch, Rainbow 6 and they all do a solid job of making their characters fit the world and look cool individually. Meanwhile this game couldn’t be bothered to give any of their characters outfits or designs that were flattering to their body shape or identity in any way. Even the skintight outfits somehow don’t look properly fitted.
these devs forgot the rules of game character design: 1) Make them attractive 2) Don't make them unattractive 3) Don't be racist to your customers on social media
You don't really have to make them attractive, a lot of characters people like aren't really attractive or not even meant to be a huaman in the slightest, you just have to make them look nice to look at. For example I could take Ben Bigger from the new game made by Hoyoverse which is literally just a big bear and people love him
I learned a lot from this and even had your feedback in mind while I’ve been drawing now and I already see an improvement in my character drawings. So thank you. The whole Concord thing has inspired me because it gave me confidence that I am able to draw characters better than they can apparently lol
I am glad to hear from you and am grateful to hear the video was able to help you. You will do great work and keep improving. I'm certain. I will keep up regular uploads to share more insight with artists and developers.
Your version of One-Off(?) looks amazing, because the darker bits looks like battle damage while the brighter bits are replaced, factory new parts. It looks like a walking trash can, and it has this synergy of being clean and dirty at the same time. Not to mention I THINK he uses what is effectively a vacuum? A little on the nose, but I think that one would benefit far better as a recyclable bin-blue color scheme, so it's a robot made with recycled parts which plays into the theming of the robot being a recycle bin model and cleaning up trash. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a combat unit but having it be a maintenance unit modified for war would make this design pop off more. That's my observation after seeing your before/after. I've no clue about art design, I just thought that he was the biggest misstep for having the simplest, yet could have had the most expressive design of the roster. I had to make this comment after seeing the comparison
your poppin off. id like to think you put more thought into it than tbey did but im 100% sure the people making this game for 8 years probably had the exact same thoughts but some weirdos said "No, make it boring."
I do more stylized design for games/ film, but I can tell you the #1 problem here is lack of cohesion/ specific art direction. When you look at concord’s designs you’ve got no clue what the setting, gameplay or story is. An Art Director on a project MUST make decisions. We cannot include everything. If you want to go bright & stylized, that’s a decision. You cannot then try to make everything realistic, or you’ve got multiple visions battling one another & it looks like a watered down mess. If you want to go future or modern, you’ve got to be careful with the “retro” vibe. Yes there’s a specific style called “retro futurism” which is what you see in Fallout and to some extent in Borderlands (& that was ripped straight from Disney World’s Epcot of the 1970s, btw). But that’s quite over-used atp. When we do blue sky design at the beginning of the project we make those major overarching choices. Retrofuturism? Cyberpunk? Modern? Victoriana? Gothic? Punk? All your fave well-designed games have clear identity. Cyberpunk is cyberpunk. Borderlands is retrofuturist space opera. Fallout is straight up retrifuturism. Skyrim is medieval Nordic. Blizzard games, for all their faults, are fusions with the common thread being a high degree of charm. In Blizzard’s classic age, every char was either cute, powerful or attractive. Nothing was blah. WoW is a fusion of Tolkien + Western comics with anime flair. Overwatch is a Western/ Eastern comics hybrid. These games are all beautiful in their own way.
I can understand not wanting to be negative, but i can say that it is very appreciated. This game closed in 2 weeks. It was an enormous failure, and it needs to be learned from. Despite there being pretty much all negativity, it needed to be said, and while the gamers could say "these characters look bad", i think it takes a professional designer to be able to put into words WHY they aren't good, and to have enough weight to those words to really make people listen. As a somewhat professional miniature painter, I really enjoy discussions on color theory and enjoy putting it to use and i teach a bit on miniature painting as well. So, while I can only imagine how frustrating this was, it is very much appreciated to basically have a lesson on what not to do that i can share with my own students that is calm, clear and professional.
Check out a breakdown of MY "Leatherpunk" characters' designs to see more of my character work: th-cam.com/video/IJPnYxM1ct8/w-d-xo.html
1:03:36 did you mean concord or overwatch?
Do you work on turn based SRPGs? Because someone, somewhere out there hopefully one day is going to bring in a spiritual successor to Shining Force, or recreate Dark Wizard.....Two cult classics that have very large cult followings and yet neither has been messed with in over 25 years.....Such a shame. Maybe, just maybe a post like this might intrigue a talented creator like you. Its a longshot but hey.....
this is the way to talk.
finally! someone who took this opportunity SERIOUSLY
7/10 redesign just for understanding tonal values
would be higher if u redesigned or added to the armor/ accessories as well.
30:21 well said
POV: You are in a Zoom call with your graphic design instructor being live graded on an assignment the whole class failed.
Haha you made me laugh out loud.
pov: gordon ramsay turns you into an idiot sandwich
this is healing my art school trauma because its like I get to go back but not be the worst student in class
Lmaooo this is so real! I feel bad even though its not my work, but then again with that amount of budget... I can give my first year friends and can do so much better lol
Haha I took a whole digital arts course and would sometimes turn in what I thought was a banger of a project, and would get the metaphorical red ink corrections all over it from the instructor.
first character : "This is a nightmare"
second character : "This is a nightmare"
third character : "This is a nightmare"
Lmao 🤣 it's always a nightmare 😭😂
So you mean, the only game difficulty to play this game is "Nightmare mode." 😆
lol
IGN: iimmediately charming characters
correction "Catastrophic Failure of understanding of visual expression and art " I fucking need to print that and frame that quote on my wall
I think I've found a unifying theme across all these character designs: "janitor." Think industrial cleaning products, heavy duty rubber gloves, dirty plastic buckets, gray water, etc.
Even your average janitor in a jumpsuit looks like a men's magazine cover model by comparison.
I swear 😭👏
I got that feeling too and tbh if they genuinely actually tried to play into that visual theme it could have worked but so many of these designs seem to play into that overall theme while also insisting on being something else.
Speaking of plastic buckets the coloring used looks just like those old buckets that becomes pale with time.
"Garbage" maybe a fitting term 😂
So the design:
1. Don't tell you anything about character
2. Visually doesn't consent
3. Looks ugly
Negative Drip
look at what videogames and Sungrand Studios is doing on google and tell me if he is qualified to judge what it is good and bad....and 1 million people trusting what he is saying.... feel bad for the humanity and the videogame industry
@@ProjectIdeal graphics and character design are two different thing. Concord has impressive graphics but its wasted on shit designs.
@@ProjectIdealyou’ll live unc
@@ProjectIdealAll the people defending don't even played it hahahaha, pure hiprocrisy
I didn't think it was possible for characters to be so overdesigned, yet completely underdesigned at the same time. Props to Concord for pulling that off, I guess.
This is so absurdly educational that I feel like I accidentally found course video that a professor accidentally didn't mark as private.
Just found this guy thru Daddy Asmond yesterday. Love this guys dry humor!
Ah, those are the kinds of fun vibes when random people were jumping into zoom classes and meetings.
@@fwheels7776 same
@@holdenhodgdon3756 hey thanks for coming to hang out here on my channel!
@@fwheels7776 Thanks for coming to hang out!
5:35 Mistaking a main playable character in a hero shooter for a NPC is such an indictment.
Can you blame him? I cannot fathom a character design that plain and devoid of any interesting detail being approved by any competent designer.
IMO that was the worst design by far. Absolutely nothing made sense. Everything was one tone. Zero detail. A big heavily armored helmet would indicate a soldier or militaristic character, but the entire rest of the body is some sort of skin tight dense plastic-y spandex... But they have a rocket launcher.
No tools, no gadgets, no extra rockets, NOTHING interesting on the character's design.
Complete nonsense. That character looks like it was a default placeholder one of the designers found in the depths of UE5 and someone colored the faceplate red.
Even the pose the character is in makes no sense. Heavy rocket launcher on one side, but the character's weight is on their opposite back foot? The weapon isn't even resting on their shoulder, it looks weightless as it's being held with one hand. Their shoulders are turned to face the camera, but the hips are pointed more forward, and the head is out of alignment with both the shoulders and hips.
Wtf.
The design is the single worst one in the game. Its staggeringly bad. Ive seen better doodles in High School textbooks
Someone’s gotta say it, anyone who worked on or okayed that design should be out of a job. Any normal human can tell it looks like dogshit.
All the original design characters look like NPCs. And not even important NPCs, just one of those background NPCs with no voice lines.🥴
THATS THE MAIN CHARACTER?!
Overwatch: You can play the hero!
Concord: You can play the sidekick...if you're lucky.
Here's a trash can, that's the best we got
Concord: You can't play at all because the game didn't last even for two weeks
If you win as the sidekick you're not allowed to play as them.
JUMPSCARE WARNING: There are Concord characters in this video
1 hour of jumpscare
wait until you see his characters at the 45 minutes mark LOL
This joke was better than anything in Concord
AH! THE HORROR
Yipes, stripes!
This was a murder. No malice, no obvious clowning, just subtle jabs and genuine critique that are made harsh solely by virtue of Concord's lack of quality.
I love how he was trying really hard to be respectful but you can clearly notice the contempt he has for those designs 😆
He is clearly being sarcastic and demeaning about the game.
It's no surprise the only design that really stands out or appeals to most people is the "kinda hot catgirl", because she's got some vague aesthetic appeal.
@@Cabazorro0no, he’s genuinly giving criticism… like have you watched it? He’s actually TRYING to be helpful
@@Cabazorro0 You know when you get a talking to by your boss about a job he’d like you to do better/improve at? That’s what he’s doing here.
I know Gen Z has an issue where they take everything personally because they are incapable of understanding nuance, but try not to make it so obvious.
>I'm a normal human being
Guy comes out dressed as a blackjack dealer
The guy looks so normal, He looks like the most normal person in the world, he's so normal he looks weird, he looks like he's gonna tell me a bedtime story, he looks like a famous 50s writer being interviewed, he looks like south american socialist revolutionary intelligentsia, he looks like he greatly supported the development of some random field of medicine,
🤣😂
@@Berry-Urodo now thats real character design, really make me feel this guy has knowledge.
Looks more normal than a male feminist.
the vest contrasts with his sleeves so that if you blur him he still looks interesting
What struck me was that the overall design philosophy was also incoherent where 3/4 the cast is maintenence crew with guns and 1/4 being first year fashion students making the most out of 1 fabric
And "toad"
They call it a "hero shooter" but they show us "public works shooter"
Now im imagining a cartoony construction worker arena fighter game and that sounds more appealing.
Honestly yeah, they should've embrace this "stylistic suck" approach and instead make an absurd game where you play as bunch of bored 9-5-ers using available stuff around them as weapon & armor akin the likes you see at r/bossfight.
19 year old ipad kids making armor out of 3d printed parts only to discover that if you lift your arms your shoulder pads squeeze your head off like a zit. Literally just look at the giant womans shoulder pads, she physically should NOT even be able to lift her upper arms more than 2 inches. So dumb.
engineer tf2
i think if they did them just like a bunch of janitors or random working class people with comon things as weapon would have been more fun but this is like let's make a fun idea the most boring thing posible.
@@raydhen8840To be honest, I would play if it turns out that way.
"I don't really use Twitter and I do not care"
Holy fucking mega based
no sane human being uses Twitter
@@figureviews when I look at Twitter users and their activities I just ask myself
"How tf do you mfs just spend all day arguing and making thread of why you find this problematic over some really petty stuff"
@@silver_stone6510 I only access Twitter when I need to see Hews uncensored art
well,he DID say he was a normal human being
@@silver_stone6510every one of you losers are doing the exact same thing in TH-cam comments JFC the lack of self awareness 😂
This is like an art professor spending an entire lecture using YOUR work as an example of how disheartened he is that his students are STILL this bad.
BWAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAAHAHA. 0/100, IM FLUNKING YOU OUT OF CLASS, NO APPEAL. ALSO, BLACLISTED FROM COURSE. GO BACK TO BEING A CASHIER AT WHOLE FOODS.
LMAO
Genius comment! Holy shit! 😎
btw, author's character designs are ugly too, but in their own way.
it looks like author learned just one design principle and lives and dies by it. your chars are boring and coockiecutter. extremely uninteresting.
at least author of these abysmal characters from failed game know, what "form" is.
I remember after WW2, in the cold war, a man wanted to win monet selling a plane to the soviet army and to win money he name the plane after Stalin, Stalin being a dictator live it, and the plane was fast as hell but was so badly design the plane literaly disarm itself as fligth, the engine was so big and powerful it vibrate and damage to plane, the plane landing gear could not retract and were so small that the propeler hit the land, and it was so bad that they put it in the disgn unniversity and said these is how you dont design planes.
They should do these at the start, first year these is what not to do and be tree classes dedicated to show how bad these was
The fact that every single character has the same flaws tells me that either they kept making the same mistakes over and over without knowing, or they knew but decided "this is my style" and ran with it. It's like a writing student creating an incoherent mess and going "you just don't get my writing style".
Whoever is the art director is clearly the culprit because like you said, all characters have the same flaws in their design. It means the culprit had a hand in the design of every character and the power to enforce their choices.
*completely fucking obliterates the anatomy with no rhyme or reason*
"Nah man it's just my artstyle"
Thats the thing with art, Very subjective sometimes
My thoughts exactly re tonal design. Intentional bad. The posing, balancing, and visual storytelling do seem more unintentionally bad though.
@JaimeDuendeDeGongora sometimes. There are things that you can point to that are generally liked or disliked. It's subjective but there are patterns that you can turn into principles to work with.
When the problem repeats itself so often, it's not a problem with the artists, it's a problem with the art direction. I feel sorry for those who worked on this.
It’s definitely the manager or at least the person who decides what design is good and bad. The artists probably tried hard to curve the design while management gave them a straight
As a former fashion designer, these costumes pained me SO MUCH. DID THEY NOT CONSULT A N Y O N E ABOUT THESE FUCK-ASS LOOKS???? Almost NONE of the colors go well together, the silhouettes aren't interesting/unique, there's almost NO patterns (do they only have hobby lobby solids in that world??), the fabrics all drape with the same "weight", and worst of all they have absolutely nothing to say, a true nothingburger with a side of apathy 😭😭
Thanks for chiming in and sharing your thoughts. I wondered what fashion designers would have thought about these and now I have an idea. I absolutely feel your pain. They had so much funding and 8 years and this is the result. At least we can share the pain with other like minded people online who understand how frustrating this is and then let it go.
It seems almost like they're trying to go for a sterilized look as if many of them are members of some kind of science team. But even then the visual design for that is extremely disjointed and leaves me very unsure.
@@CrizzyEyes Daw's lab goggles & chem-resistant gloves give me that vibe too, same with tupperware head daveers, but then they throw in a random puffer trench coat and weird metal shoes 😭😭
That's leftism for you. A bland, amorphous blob where nobody is exceptional. 😂
They consult but only for forced DEI to make it woke and please the "modern audience" all 700 of them.
You're giving medication to a corpse here dude!!!
It's the least I can do. I absolutely dig your channel, by the way.
Dr Frankenstein at work here XD
I'd say that he is trying to do an autopsy on car wreck.
While you can't save Concord, you can still learn how to design and how not to design characters for other games by using this game as a case study.
It’s GURU LARRY!
Character designers that just don't understand the BASICS. Colour theory, unique silhouettes, communicating a character's role, strengths and weakness through their design, making a COOL character that people actually like. They get it all wrong.
Humans dressed by a bad fashion designer not designed by a game designer.
This is what happens when you hire diverse designers by quotas, who believe they have skills because everyone was too afraid of criticizing them.
Huh? I'm almost certain the terrible Mish mash of clothes was by design.
They spent more time on pronouns. They even had someone who is still undecided.
tf2 is lost knowledge
The lizard guy should have had a lizard snout . The problem is all the characters are humanoid . And the abuse or orange and teal and leather in all chars .. not to mention everyone is in a jump suit no mech suit at all
You really hit the nail on the head about everything being flat. My art teacher has a great saying about this: "Value does all the work, color gets all the credit."
My high school life drawing teacher was ALWAYS encouraging us to use more contrast to make our drawings pop.
The artists at Firewalk should have taken his class. 😂 Thank you, Mr. Love!
In fashion "it has to be interesting in either color, texture or shape" and so many of the characters miss all 3
Thanks for adding that. I think the purple grandma Captain Marvellous is the only design that fits those requirements even a little.
What you don't like the color, texture, and shape of the burlap sack tunic Vale is wearing?!
You know what makes it worse? Knowing the roles of these characters.
@@GloriousSwordHorse round, single color characters, with no accessories or texture just might no be doing it for me.
I believe they do know that because they have many talented designers who perfectly avoid all designs that leave a lasting impression on characters. This is their goal, and they have been very successful in their work
Another thing you haven't mentioned is the shapes of these designs. The short characters aren't short enough. The tall characters aren't tall enough. The old people aren't old enough. The fat characters aren't fat enough. The male and female features of the characters aren't exaggerated. Most of them look like really, really tall 12 year olds who haven't gone through puberty. It's like they went for ultra realistic body shapes while forgetting that their artstyle is more suited to make super exaggerated cartoonish characters. There is a serious case of incompetence going on here where everyone involved is super obsessed with being accurate to reality but forgetting the first rule of drawing stuff is that you gotta exaggerate what's real.
Yeah, this. It's frustrating to me because I WANT more characters that break conventions by having a wider range of body types and gender expression and such... And I know you can do that and still have compelling designs because I've seen it done in everything from D&D OCs to Webtoon characters.
But I'm starting to wonder if some people are hearing "we need more diversity and less unrealistic body standards" and so throw out those conventions with no understanding of why they're there or what needs to be adapted to suit the new versions.
There's really only two ways to go with designing characters. Either you don't go for photo-realism and exaggerate, or you go for photo-realism and don't exaggerate. These people went for a Disney 3D animation style, yet didn't exaggerate...
I dunno man the fat characters were pretty fat
@@Sparkplugcrazytalk They're fat but also look like I could beat them in a fistfight
I've been realising the new sensibilities make characters mush together. Everyone is a pansexual genderless chubbo with an ironic nasty attitude and mental agony.
I've seen someone describe this game's artstyle as plumberpunk and I think that's the perfect word for it
Design elements that should be metallic such as robot parts, cybernetics, armor plates or weapon paneling are all covered in tubing material or rubbery plastic
The characters in this game don't look like scifi heroes, they look like a gang of plumbers making the streets unsafe in some fucked up future scenario
That's quite an astute statement. I see that with all the pipe and tube like structures. Thanks for sharing that.
They look like they're cosplaying characters from another game but only had access to cheap materials for the costumes lol
But then the game renders those cheap costumes in bizarrely photorealistic super high detail. It's so jarring how bland it is.
I like how Kevduit described them in his review.
Instead of Guardians of the Galaxy, we got "Custodians of the Gas Station"
Punk implies cool. These designs are not cool.
id play a plumbergunk game about that sounds awesome lmao
I think the real problem is that Concord clearly took their inspiration from the Guardians of the Galaxy movies where most of the characters are realistically proportioned and the costumes are not too outlandish except for the aliens. That aesthetic is great for the movie but not really good for a hero shooter. Almost all great hero shooters have stylized or exaggerated designs that help sell each character's personality and visually communicate their role. They all have strong silhouettes and striking colors that help you recognize them.
Interesting. This is well said. I think you are on to something here.
by far the biggest issue with almost all of these character designs is that if you removed their weapons, youd have almost no idea what role the character is supposed to do in game. compare it to classics like TF2. take away the guns and youd still be able to pretty much figure out what theyre about
This, this is the nail in the coffin. If you showed me the silhouette of sniper I would immediately panic. If you showed me the silhouette of a friendly heavy it makes me calm that I have protection (he's a spy disguised)
It feels like they purposefully avoided any and all gaming stereotypes that we use to identify different characters and roles.
TF2 fans trying not to talk about the game (it's been a dead slopfest for the past 5 years)
@leonardo9259 doesnt matter if the game is dead or not, its character design is a masterclass and should be learned from.
@@leonardo9259 "dead slopfest" 50,000 concurrent players
I just realized something . . . you know what the Concord characters really look like? It's like you had a character creator with all the options and you hit "maximum randomization". They appear to be barely "designed" at all.
There's no creativity or thought put into their designs.
It's not mentioned much in this video, but I also think they are conceptually just so ugly. I look at the old lady character at 28:25 and nothing about her design makes sense. She's clearly older, but she's wearing a jumpsuit which is a style of clothing associated with being physically active. It's not a contrast, it's a contradiction. You compare her design to Ana from Overwatch, and Ana is also an older lady but her concept is as a talented sniper, past her prime but still heads above everyone else. Ana's design is complimentary to her concept, while the designs in Concord don't feel like they have a concept to begin with.
No actually you would get better characters out of a randomizer. These have to be intentionally bad. 😅 They are the most bland and boring characters I've ever seen in a game where the characters are everything. I get it if the characters aren't important but a hero shooter is a game that relies on good character designs. Similar to a fighting game.
The worst examples to me are the designs that are the opposite of that, the characters where you get where they were coming from but are made so bland that it's actually hard to actually understand that they were trying to do something.
Case in point : the lizard dude. They toned it down so much to the point of just making it a green human with random spikes on his arms that I would never have guessed that it was supposed to be a lizard man in the first place, they probably just slapped some add-ons on the face of their mocap actor and called it a day.
At least the terrible designs that have no cohesion, I can let slide because at least it's sort of funny, but those are just sad
It even has that effect when you wear 2 pieces of clothes from separate sets so your character just looks weird
Like the fat guy for exemple because of his "chest armor" it just looks like he is wearing his pants all the way into his belly button when in fact that is just a one piece suit
I am also a Character Designer and I was shocked as to how the character lacked color that says anything about the character. Color isn't just a paintjob. Dante's red tells us he is hotheaded, Virgil's blue tells us he is calm and collected. Mercy's white tells us she is virtuous, Tracer's orange tells us she is vibrant. It's ingrained in our psyche to recognize these colors. I don't know of their purpose was to break the norm or sth but making all the characters flat, pastel colored was a horrible choice.
Thats very cool to know
There's a character in this game that is basically a Pharah, she flies and has a weapon that does splash damage with an explosion, there's nothing, NOTHING in that character's design that tells you she can fly, she has no Jet-Pack, her propulsion are her shoes unlike Pharah that not only has a Jet-Pack that yells "SHE CAN FLY", but also her outfit resembles a bald eagle and her Jet-Pack has the shape of wings.
It feels like they wanted to try to avoid stereotypes in their character designs, but also in turn decided to avoid ANYTHING that could be considered normal. It tries to break the rules without understanding what the rules are in the first place.
Reminds me how valve spends years designing tf2 characters so you can recognize each class just by looking at their outlines from any angle
@@cubetamalvada893ow1 is truly the pinnacle of character design, you can tell what each character's role is just by looking at them and their weapons.
Then in ow2 we get Kiriko, illira, and whatever venture is...
I really like "Cyborg 99"'s design too. Having a noncomplicated robot design in a business suit tells a lot of story. Usually we expect robots would be used for menial or dangerous jobs, so having one in a suit tells you straight away that theres something unique about them on the inside. Maybe they gained higher inteligence and decided to do something more with themselves, for example. Its a deaign that benefits from the very "low key" trend in all the designs.
What works best about that design is that it isn't cluttered or messy. It is the most focused visual concept here.
this is one of those times in gamedev where the actual advice to fix issues basically boils down to "build a time machine, go back in time, fire whoever decided this was a good idea, and don't make these mistakes in the first place." Once it hits this point your game is well past the point of no return lol. The whole thing needs to be redone from almost scratch
the game is dead already, maintenance mode probably called before Christmas...
I bet many people with good intentions made this game, and were managed into oblivion.
@@LordBillington42as is with many things
*cough cough* sweet baby inc *cough*
@@DatBoiOrlyyeah bc sweet baby inc creates games from scratch including the characters and the gameplay
It's also highly uncanny that the characters (base model) are highly detailed, made to look photo realistic - yet, not one of them (save granny magi with her gold trim) has any detail at all - to the point you cannot identify what any of the material is...or might be. There is no texture, no wear and tear, no contours, no insignia, no flair, no patterns, nothing.
It looks like, if you were to reach out and touch any of them, they would all feel like room temperature plastic. There is no character there, no personality...it's all very "born yesterday".
That's an astute observation. Though, the Pink character does have tears on her shorts he seems born of fashion and not necessarily battle. The new Avatar Netflix show also had the issue of costumes being absolutely pristine.
thats something thats really been bothering me but i havent been able to put my finger on it
@@poorlymadeproduction It's actually something most people don't really think about, but you do notice it. You can see it in a LOT of movies and tv shows. Not considering that the costumes are still clothing, often they are way too "clean" for the scenes and characters wearing them so it creates a kind of "clothing uncanny valley" effect. It's definitely the kind of thing where you go "this just doesn't quite look right" but you can't really figure out why.
@sungrandstudios a lot modern movies and tv shows have this problem: characters that are supposed to have "lived in" clothes and gear and yet everything looks pristine, like straight out the packaging.
Same thing can be applied to the sets.
Totalitarian ideologies dislike the idea of history, as it isnt easy for the ruling class to control.
"Born yesterday" is the go to, and history is continously rewritten.
"I came from laser tag and I lost one of my shoulder pads"
💀 i am dying
Your professionalism is refreshing I’m not in game development but i find these types of videos interesting it’s like getting a glance behind the curtain I miss back in the early 2000s when it was regular for devs to release diaries to break down the tech side of designs and mechanics of games
Thanks for sharing your comment, and I'm so glad you're not the FBI. I remember seeing those small dev diaries years ago too and always found them so interesting!
There's a reason Goku resonates with so much kids around the world and stood the test of time. It's so iconic and not just Dragon Ball, Shonen Jump takes those silhouettes very seriously because if your character isn't even cool looking by the bare minimum, then what's the point?
That's a good statement. The focus of this game was on the wrong priorities.
Yeah, look at any shonen protagonist (Yusuke, Luffy, Naruto, Ichigo, Deku, Itadori, Tanjiro, etc) all of their designs are striking.
Most famous gaming example is probably TF2, Valve stated they wanted to make every class identifiable by just silhouette alone, to which they succeeded at
It kinda reminds me of that episode in Gintama. Gintoki explained that if you want to make a titular character, they need to be recognizable by silhouette alone. Cue Gintoki presenting Goku and Vegetta silhouette's and then revealing it's actually Gintoki and Hijikata ( it's still part of the joke of course 😅). However it still proves that there is a reason why they take these fundamentals to heart.
@@melodybaoin1425 a fellow Gintama chad
You know you have a hit game when one of your characters gives off the "I came from laser tag and lost one of my shoulder pads" vibes
the astronaut
@@htoaletaarxidatet Nah, that the helmet one
Thrashtronaut
@@ceropuntocinco toiletnaut
It feels like whoever was in charge wanted "realism" and just thinks that means desaturating everything.
That could be right, since they were taking cues from Marvel movies which tended to desaturate colors.
@@sungrandstudios I'm curious do you have an artstation or portfolio somewhere since you're a character designer?
I mean irl a lot of military and technology is desaturating like cars that are mostly grey and black and things like McDonald’s are staring to turn grey. A lot of corporate products are grey and in a futurism world like this, desaturation might just be a as common I guess. It’s unappealing which is why I sorta like it. This could mostly could work irl compared to the other games
I mean irl a lot of military and technology is desaturating like cars that are mostly grey and black and things like McDonald’s are staring to turn grey. A lot of corporate products are grey and in a futurism world like this, desaturation might just be a as common I guess. It’s unappealing which is why I sorta like it. It looks pretty bland like most cars and suvs too. This could mostly could work irl compared to the other games.
@@othergoogleaccount-wy9hcthat style would be pretty hard to convey coherently in concord's direction tho
His forgetting that he was talking about Concord at the end of the video was so fitting.
"I'm not here to criticize"
10 minutes later: "This is a nightmare design"
Its not even a critic its a factual statement
@net343 a good critic sticks to factual statements. He can like it or not, but he was a good critic 😆
A man can only take so much before he cracks.
He couldn't even try to be kind too its that bad 😂😂😂
@@Left4Coragem I think crack might have been involved in some of these character designs... just sayin'.
Concord has become a case study on game design failure
To the devs, thank you for your contribution to the gaming industry
Massive contribution to the industry! I'm going to use Concord as a case study for lessons and talks for years.
It is "Extremely talented" devs for you.
That's why they sold $40, not make it free to play, because they know they can't sell skin for bad characters
Concord is to video games what The Last Jedi is to movies. Both titles could be used to teach future developers and directors about how not to create games or movies.
at any point in the progress of their work, a game designer must compare their work with Concord and if there are any similarities they must be removed immediately at all costs.
These designs felt like the creators went with the very first concept art of each and every character. Practically each of these characters would have benefited from a re-design.
That would definitely save them some time. They only had a measly 8 years to create this game.
I would say this designs are AI generated, however 8 years ago AI wasn't that good.
I'm gonna guess they're gonna do a cyberpunk refund and release the game in a year or so. It's their only shot unless they wanna lose 200mil or whatever it was
@orcishh it's jover. Too many negative reviews on the game already exist, people are always gonna be prejudiced even if they fix the game a year later
@@LampolukeAI would do a better job than this to be honest.
imma critique the critic for a moment here:
All he did was talk about tones. Yes, they're a big problem with these designs, but tonal contrast and color theory make up only a fourth of character design at most. What about the shapes? The themes? The narrative? It's not that hard to say some notes about those things as well. Yes, he made a few quick remarks, but it came across as him believing that tonal contrast is the #1 most important thing.
Also, I'm not buying his character designs. They're bland. Designing normal people is one thing, but the IT factor is missing. They look like random people you'd see in the grocery store then promptly forget about. Why should I care about his characters? They could be the most fascinating, well-written characters on the globe, but nothing draws me in.
BTW, I'm not defending Concord in any way. Honestly I forgot it existed until this video popped up.
@@Modusiticate thank you for bringing up those points. You are absolutely on point here. I wanted to keep the video from getting too long so I focused on aspects I could quickly modify and explain in a way that would be helpful to artists and designers. Certainly the topics you discussed are astute and deserving of full video all their own. Thank you for taking the time to share your perspective.
@@sungrandstudiosNot knowing how the game is themed and the classes of the characters didn't help.
The game is supposed to be retro-futuristic sci-fi, and the characters do not read as that;
The only one that even comes close is "lieutenant Tupperware".
It's also impossible to read their class through their design (the medic reads as a gunslinger, the wall builder reads as a magic user).
They are fundamentally not fit for purpose designs.
@@starlettdragonI hate that the healer wears fucking blue and orange and has nothing resembling a healer(like a Red Cross)
almost as if the characters are supposed to be realistic...
@@Blanktester685 you can be realistic AND interesting.
"award winning, universally beloved" - LOL
It is in his Timeline.. thank God im still in MY Timeline though.
"smash hit"
"most popular game on steam"
Funny guy
on steam and x box
In which universe? 😅
Accurate. Haha
They hired an apprentice from Balenciaga
I had to look up Balenciaga. The first thing I saw was a $3.5k pair of distressed jeans for sale. That explains a lot. Thank you.
@@sungrandstudiosthey made thy rounds last year in international news (read: outrage) when they unveiled an ad for a collection with very blatant references to CP. It was pretty disturbing and I assume that was the point of the whole thing. They're basically a fashion label for real life Bond Villains.
@@sungrandstudios distressed jeans? What does that mean? The jeans is crinkled to hell and back?
@@talkingmudcrab718 I assume you're not talking about cyberpunk aesthetic ?
@@muhammadapriputrakurniawan2222 Distressed, because they were designed by Balenciaga. If I were a pair of jeans I'd be distressed by that too.
This makes sense why their characters looked so muted. It seems the designers completely avoided contrast and accentuating features.
or graphic design lessons when they were going through color theory.
that's what happens when there are diversity hires in charge of the character design
Seems like their aesthetic preference follows their ideology
They should have taken a page from games like Team Fortress 2 character design. Their design process is something else.
To put it short, they basically started out with the silhouette, then for color it's purely in black and white ONLY (colors were added in the final stage). The reason is because readability in a class-based FPS is important. You must be able to glance at the character from distance and tell what they're capable of, and distinguish them from the rest of the cast, even in the middle of a busy team fight.
They also ditched all the unnecessary details (for example pockets), not due to limited technology at the time, but because when a character moves, all those details blur and you won't see them. To them, those details are just icing on the cake, cool if it's there, but should not be the main focus.
They prioritized on details and vibrant colors from the torso upward, to guide your eyes to the important clues, such as what weapon they're holding out, and where they're looking. They only add colors last and built the universe to compliment the colors of the characters.
It's just a shame that now the game is pretty much abandoned by Valve, and the community-created cosmetics all seem to ignore these design philosophy, making the characters more confusing to look at with certain cosmetic combination.
As someone who spends a little bit of time painting Warhammer miniatures.. I've struggled to figure out why my Miniatures don't look as vibrant or good as the other Miniatures I see and in about 20 minutes here I've learned more about my mistakes that I keep making compared to other people who are probably instinctively doing it at this point.. I feel like I should go home and sit down with my brushes a little bit and experiment more. This is some really good educational stuff
I've painted Warhammer miniatures for 20+ years and believe me, you'll get colour theory drilled into your head whether consciously or not.
Go look at a color wheel sometime and or google color theory. Army painter has a good article on it l believe
At least you know you are missing something. Imagine painting bland, trash miniatures and submitting them to a contest thinking they were amazing and trying gaslight the judges into pretending they are the best. That's basically what they did with this game.
Agree. This video will fix my issues with colour and tone
"Not everyone sees color the same way" after the internet spent a year arguing over the color of a dress, no truer words have been spoken
wait which dress
@@ARStudios2000 He's referring to the viral sensation that was a black and blue dress that in the picture of it that was taken caused a large amount of people to see it as white and gold. It's been heavily discussed and studied and there are extremely complex explanations of why it worked that way. Google "viral dress color meme"
@@ARStudios2000 the blue one
@@MFFISHyou mean the white one?
And racism!
"I can only assume, that this is an NPC, a mob" 😅
He ain't wrong about that 😭😂
Mfs when they see me on the street:
That was the most savage attack ever. 😅 Calling the faceless helmeted character an NPC trash mob like that. I will never recover from that. 😢
That rule about the character needing to look interesting while blurred is interesting. I've always noticed that any character with good visual design always has a a good looking silhouette, from just about any angle, especially the front and profile of the silhouette. Every character in Overwatch has a great looking silhouette and profile.
Props for trying to improve these iconic award winning designs. Jokes aside, when you went to grayscale I knew you were legit
Well some of them are iconic now, but not in the way that anyone would want.
@@sungrandstudios Infamy and fame are two sides of the same coin.
The former is least desirable though.
Well, not really. Grayscale just helps pinpoint lighting and values more easily. A lot of concept artists, including me, work directly in color. Working with grayscale isn't the standard for concept art
@@sextrance.enjoyer He’s trying to revise already existing designs, so I think it makes sense here
@@frankzappa3156 I've been working in the art industry for quite a while, so I know what he's trying to do here. But as long as the art is aesthetically pleasing to the investors and 'most' of the player base, it's good to go. In the case of Concord, though, it's just straight up ugly because it's not what the player base wants.
"Concord, the award winning and most popular game on steam on xbox right now" I almost shit my pants laughing.
Dude needs to blink twice if he's being held hostage.
The best part was that he didnt even mention the ps5 even though the game was published by Sony 😂
It's so popular, it's got dozens of people playing it!
@@jinxie712He blamed the color tones, not the ugly characters
@@MrPathorockWe all know that the characters are abysmal as a whole but we need a scapegoat, you know ?
I took a beginner's drawing course (and I mean absolute beginner), and from time to time there were events for people to draw original characters, these concord designs look exactly what some students of this course made, people who've never drawn before in their life or aumateurs that didn't even knew what fundamentals were.
Yikes. Ouch.
The diffrence is, those people were there to learn. If they took the lessons to heart, then those failures meant something. This? This is just a waste.
Concord 'designers' learn on the job, by themselves, but what they really lesrn is how to use the softwares and thats it 😂
@@Sorain1 🔥🔥🔥
@@MollyHJohns and they had 8 years to learn and still fucked up heavy, at this point they did it on purpose
6:00 this looks like what the undersuit would be under the epic battle armor a character should be wearing
What bothers me about Daw in particular isn't his weight- it's that he actually IS coded quite well to having ice powers. Cold blue, thick jacket that looks well insulated? Check. Goggles? Check. And yet no, he's the... medic?
You mean Tom Bombadill?
Wait, that's not an ice-based character? So what, somebody liked Mei from Overwatch, but they already had a design for that character archetype, and they went with "OK, what's left?" Shockingly awful. And I say this as a person that really avoids being negative on the internet.
I thought that the blue jacket told me that she was just a crackhead, not even in a million years i would thought that she was the medic
He also wears his pants over his belly, thats what old geezers do with their long Johns.
That isn’t a fat chick? Either way ozempic needed.
When "this is an award wining game" is used as a subtle insult to the awards.
😂😂
You know it's bad when everyone agrees that "this is a award winning game" is used as a insult. Andrew Tate's flavorless rice with salt and pepper have more flavor that whatever that slop is.
Despite the servers being shut down, I can imagine this will SOMEHOW win GOYT 😂
@@Youthfullegendthat somehow is a lot of money and sweet baby
@@Youthfullegend Your imagination is faulty
The silhouette of these characters are non-existent. Everyone's either just round or blocky. And the issue is made even more evident by the lack of dynamic poses. They all look like awkward dorks trying to pose in a cool and badass way but are secretly embarrassed by what they're doing.
Bro I play Brawl Stars and even for me these suck. Like in that game you can play as a trash can but these somehow look more ugly wtf.
They stand like...standing
You're right, the characters look like struggling actors embarrassed to be in cheap sci-fi trash
That's how trannies see people and the world
@@cevatkokbudak6414 Brawl Stars chars at least have good silhouettes.
0:17 female eggman
I think that's a dude
Eggma'am real
Don't insult eggman like that
"This is a Nightmare Design!"
"It's a little bit annoying that the same design flaw are appearing over and over"
"It's hard to salvage this"
"It is so frustrating, it is disheartening, to see this, because I do not want to see people fail THIS bad"
LoL DAMN it felt like it was seriously just character after character where he was genuinely describing blatant errors that you would not expect from a team with as much experience as the developers at Fire Walk Studio to make... over and over again.
It was there first game, they didn't have much experience.
I would not put the blame on the designers, at the end of the day they just execute what has already been approved.
These designs all feel like the 8th revision of the characters after the executives told them to remove all signs of character,fun and interesting design to appeal to ""Everyone""
And by trying to appeal to everyone they appeal to no one.
@@qaztim11 art design is different from gameplay. The gameplay doesn't seem that fun.
@@qaztim11 thus confirming my "Design by committee" theory
@JMDAmigaMusic Which is an amateur problem that activists run into because they have a great disdain for centralized leadership.
The greatest games we have are all coincidentally done under the vision of a unified leadership, usually under one man.
It finally clicked for me halfway through the video that these designs were supposed to evoke the 1970s. It's just that they took all the wrong lessons from the 1970s.
How do they evoke the 1970s?
@ARStudios2000 he's sort of right. Sci fi in particular during the 70s had a lot of puffiness, tubes, etc. You'd have to look at things like star wars (lots of drab colors, tubing, etc), zardoz, dark star, alien. It's membrane thin but I think the reason it's so hard to see is how poorly it was executed.
Came here to say this...
Their 'jackets' reminds me of how "Back To The Future 2" 'futuristic fashion' was designed...
So many puffs. Soooo round. Soooo insignificant.
It's literally a 70s interpretation of how the 2000s would look like.
The dynamo hooked up to syd mead is now powering a small commune
In what way though? It certainly wasn't in color choices. The physical design is vaguely reminiscent of a particular kind of 70's sci-fi/futurism that you'd see in films like The Andromeda Strain or Logan's Run - but there's no cohesiveness to their application. It looks like a blind stroke victim was trying to dress themselves out of a box of old 70's sci-fi wardrobes... but it's even worse than that, because each individual piece is mixed and matched. Like they took bits and pieces of various outfits and stitched them together with other pieces of outfits they had no relation to or had any mind at all to color matching. Even Bethesda got closer to that aesthetic mark with FO4's Institute and Starfield.
As an interior designer I will tell u that everything this man said is 100% accurate, it might seem like hes memeing but hes opinions of the characters is pretty much on point.
At no point in this video did I think this guy was memeing, he seems to be extremely knowledgable in his field
This really is a good video for those trying to do visual design
He did well with what he was given. But honestly, as a designer the root issue here is further up the chain/ earlier in development: lack of clear identity & art direction. The char designs give no indication of the setting, story or game-play. All your fave games have clear identity: Fallout = retrofuturism, Skyrim = medieval/ Nordic + Tolkien, Cyberpunk = cyberpunk, Witcher = medieval/ Polish + Tolkien, etc.
An interior designer has what relevance to game design? lol people who feel this need to advertise their profession :facepalm:
@@bobbobb5759 Everything is in some way relevant to everything else; if it wasn't, we'd never know about it.
I came for the character design insight.
I stayed for the Pokeball mug.
"Hi, I'm Jerrel and I'm a normal human being." Never heard shots fired this early in anything that was uttered before
I feel like early in development they had that animated flat retro 1970's look but then they were forced to make it 'realistic' and that's how this happened.
It's clearly obvious they're trying to go for that campy sci-fi pulp look mixed with Gunn's "quirky" Guardian of the Galaxy reimagining. But the choice for the photo realistic look just clashes badly.
@@ericfrancisco6615 i woudn't be suprised when Sony came in they made them do it.
It does look like a low budget Netflix live action adaptation.
I saw a comment in another video that said it looked like they went with a pastel Brady Bunch color scheme. That description fit really well 😂
I think you're all on the money, the game takes many inspirations from 70s culture and sci fi which gives all the colours and the Chris Foss style ship design
The colors on these characters reminded me of what you get when you hit randomize on a character creator in a different game.
Yeah, I hear you. What's weird is that I normally LIKE the result of hitting the randomize button.
@@sungrandstudios It's truly baffling that this got made. 8 years and 100 million? Or 200? Something like that 😬
Exactly, my first reaction is they’re all wearing some cheap palate swap skin but from different sets, not the default design.
@@sungrandstudios because the designer/programmer who made the random button knows what they are doing. Haha
My theory is that they were trying to make the game colorblind friendly. For one thing, forced accessibility to the detriment of all else would totally fit wit the DEI motivations this game is clearly infested with. And, I have noticed that color blind mode in other games look similar to this. They usually shift reds to be either more yellow-orange, or pink-purple, to make them easier to distinguish from green and blue. And that's exactly what I see here. There are very few characters with red anywhere other than small details. But orange, yellow, and pink are very common.
That kind of color balance tends to look unnatural to most people, because its not how the real world looks. It makes everything feel dead and desaturated, because the most common vibrant hot color is missing. And here it looks even worse, because they also use shades of pale green as the base for like half the color schemes in the game. So instead of anything looking red and full of life, everything is dead and decaying green.
And while that might be helpful for some people, forcing everyone to deal with it is awful. So if that was the reason behind their color choices, they are idiots.
There’s no saving these designs except with a full back-to-sketch redesign. But you did awesome with what you were given.
There's no saving Concord, but I think that these character designs can be improved with the right tweaks and possibly an entire art style change. I appreciate what you've tried to do here.
I agree. Just a bit of adjusting would have made the designs more pleasant to look at.
@@sungrandstudios That makes sense.
What if they intentionally made the default skin bland and planned to introduce paid cosmetics for the character.
@@bobcatinsag739even then some of the elite skins suck
Nah bro this game is cooked. They want to do storytelling through "weekly cinematics" instead of incorporating it in their character designs, voice lines and the environment designs
Well dressed game designer: “I’m going to make concord’s characters look visually better” Blurs the photos of characters “Now you don’t have see these nightmare designs again, thanks watching” 🤣
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
'To the blurred and grayscale hell with you'
The character designs adhere to the leftist ideals of "Nobody is allowed to be beautiful or normal looking" and "Paint yourself in random colors to warn the rest of nature". 😂
Where's my Bob the Builder meme where he says, "NO, IT'S F*****!"
You made me snort in an embarrassing way while laughing out loud.
@@sungrandstudios You're not the only one man.
Half way through the video i died due to alcohol poisoning.
I drank with every time "nightmare" was spoken
Forgive me.
Something tells me this is an art director problem. The artists do know what they're doing, it's just that their boss is forcing them to make terrible, terrible decisions consistently
I heard the game used to have a more cartoony cell shaded style but towards the end some higher ups decided the characters should be more realistic and high fidelity. Of course a lot of the issues would still persist, but it wouldn't have been quite so egregious and obviously bad as it is in the realistic style.
That being said it's clearly bad, I don't know why they approved of this art direction for the character designs realistic or not.
games are designed so bad on purpose to see right wing internet clout talk about said game, they don't care about losing money
@@dragon_nammiSomehow I never thought of this possibility.
Because it makes SO MUCH sense.
Obviously the characters look dogshit regardless, but an artstyle that mimics some old cartoons or comics where the designs are kept minimalistic seems like it would work.
Thinking about it, they start reminding me of 3D renders of anime characters except with horrible lighting, texturing, rigging and no cel shading with a painful lack of any detail.
@@gibleyman it reminds me of (poor) live action anime costumes from the late 90's early 2000s.
But what if the goal was to purposely make the characters dull so they can sell skins later on?
Then they have played 4D chess... At an EVO fighting game tournament. No one is going to play.
eric what are you doing here?
You can have base skins that look good I wouldn't be confident in any of their skins if these are base
"Congratulations you have played yourself"
😂 Dull? They ate awfull, horrible
Something to keep in mind is that you don’t need to check off every box in character design as long as the other aspects you do are solid.
You are absolutely right. So many games, especially in the genre, have been getting this right and setting an example for years and years.
I laughed way too hard when you named tha character Tom Bombadil. You really should have gone all in and give him boots of yellow.
The character designs, to me, are the epidemy of trying to be different and unconventional while failing to understand why conventional designs are what they are.
Also, I believe the reasoning for Javier Bardem lacking one shoulder pad is because you butt your gun to your shoulder when aiming, so having a big ass pad like that would get in the way, and the designer is correct. Maybe that's why real life contemporary shoulder armor isn't stupidly oversized and gaudy.
"Conventional designs are toxic and don't vcalidate me personally!"
There. That's the mindset of the designers for the game.
What i hate even more than characters centered around gender, is characters that are centered around weight. Like, i dont mind fat people, BUT HOW THE FUCK ARE THEY IN A MOVEMENT FOCUSED, RUN AND GUN HERO SHOOTER WHERE PEOPLE JUMP AND DASH AROUND. Doesnt it make sense that the characters are fit??? What the fuck
@SuperCosmicMutantSquid you nailed it.
They made a game for weidos and then they get surprised that nobody can relate to their characters.
Hey I'm surprised they still have phallic guns in this game. I was expecting to be shooting lasers and bombs out of vulvas
Your left side also tends to be presented more towards the enemy if you’re right handed, so if weight is a concern, you armor that side more than the other.
It's funny how proud the developers are that they made a diverse cast in their game, but you, the player need a perfect eye sight just to see them normally
Nothing wrong with a diverse cast in a game. They just chose some boring designs and made questionable color choices for them.
I despise the "keep forced diversity out" crap, but this is pretty damning evidence for how lazy and bad it could be. It really does feel like they just rolled a dice to figure out the skintone values for every character.
Having a diverse cast is a great thing, but only if you actually _care_ about diversity and aren't just filling out a freaking checklist. Further supported by the fact that shortly after launch Sony quietly removed the "Political" and "LGBT+" tags from the steam page in hopes to somehow improve sales-- their lack of support for the queer community is blatantly insulting. We're a crowd to market to, until we don't buy their shitty uninspired designs, then they just quietly try to backtrack from that. It's really dumb, and I hate this game for giving ammunition to that crowd :/
I COULD NOT POSSIBLY IMAGINE the different possible skins they could make for these characters other than color variations and VERY MINOR detail changes. For a game like Overwatch, the devs have the ability to be so creative with their skins because their characters are so easily recognizable and unique. If what they did was translated to Concord, it would be IMPOSSIBLE to differentiate the characters. They really shot themselves in the foot with these designs
That's a great point. Well said. They really made a logistical nightmare with these designs.
Every single character from Overwatch is unique in their own way, even though Blizzard and Overwatch get clowned on a lot and rightfully so but they ARE good at character designs. Each character is just bursting with personality in their design and animations...yes, even Bastion! If you put different skins on the Concord characters, you wouldn't know who they were anymore cause they're so indistinct and boring. They just look like random people at a cosplay convention.
As a rookie deisigner I’m learning from other artists but you gave some god tier advice my friend
I'm glad I could help.
What got me was the stealthy assassin character had the most vibrant and colorful outfit outta all the characters. Im sure big hair and a big ass red jacket will not interrupt my stealth.
WHY RED
The thing that aggravates me the most is these designs don't tell you ANYTHING about their roles in the game. I played the beta for 2 hours or so and outside of the 3 characters I used I have NO idea what these characters do or what their playstyle is.
team fortress 2 once again schooling devs nearly a decade later
@shishkebaba I will never stop simping over the superior vanilla tf2 designs, just at a glance in the heat of battle you know who is who and what color they are. It really is a shame seeing cosmetics approved that ruin the visual aesthetic and team recognition these days.
@@krylotik team fortress 2 came out in 2007 it's almost 20 years old now.
@@krylotiknearly 2 decades* its coming up on its 17th anniversary
@@zascoco6617Fun fact: Minecraft and Dota 2 are now considered "retro" hahahahahahahaha
The thing that really stood out to me was trying to guess the characters name. Like, yeah, they look generic, but the fact that you had nothing to latch onto really gets me.
I'm not a character designer, but I get a lot of Baldur's Gate 3 stuff in my recommended.There's one video about Karlach that I think gives you an idea of what I'm going for. They spoke about how the character's design tells you a story about who they are. In Karlach's case there are burns and scars, showing you that she's been through things, but also how she ornaments her hair with these silver medallions showing that she still cares about her appearance and takes the time to do some basic self care. There's also the glow of the engine in her chest, and the exhaust ports on her shoulders. Tough but caring, has an engine in her chest. You know that about the character at a glance because of those details.
All I learn about these characters when I look at them is that they're derivative of pop culture characters like Peter Quill from Guardians of the Galaxy, or that for some reason fashion in that setting incorporates a lot of tubes that look like a digestive tract. There's nothing here that gets someone interested in who a character is as a person, or their role on the game. I think the only thing that lets you distinguish anything is that some characters are larger, and presumably can take a hit or two at the cost of moving a bit slower. Which is super basic.
baldur's gate is also great with the names thing because a lot of the time new players get into the name knowing about characters names or feats, like the first time they see halsin they go "oh he0's the bear sex guy!" or the first time they meet karlach FROM AFAR they can go "yup, that sure is karlach" and shadowhert? just a look at her in the illythid vat tube and you already know it's her.
names don't necessarily bring visual flair to them, so it's fine to mess a name, but even in real life we have things like "the karen" who you know is likely a middle aged blond woman, or "the spike" who is likely someone straight outta the 90s sporting a guy fiery hairstyle and who likes hot rods or something like that, names still carry a *feel* to them and being able to see a design and go "imma give them this name, i can just see it" is a sign of good design choices, i mean, just look at the kiki and bouba experiment, it's a real thing.
Your insight about tonal values is so interesting. I didn't even notice the first character had shorts before you changed the colors. Great video !
I came from Lazer tag and lost a shoulder pad 😂. Shots fired
They just needed to do the “Big, medium, small” shape design. And like you said “light middle dark” values to just make them basically readable
"Big, little, small," good input on that. They didn't seem to consider that with these designs.
@@sungrandstudios woops I said big little small 😂, I meant big medium small.
Either way, using the basic rules of 3 can get designs far. Like you mention, make an armour piece used in 3 pieces of equipment per character to add cohesion etc
yeah, lacking strong design fundamentals and going straight to "fidelity" and details is such a trap nowadays
Bro is actually really educating them how to use colors😂😂 it is like putting a bandage on a headshot brother the least problem is coloring
How bad the entire design is overall is how little he can make a workable example out of the characters. If he must improve anymore problems than just the colour schemes, he better recreate the entire characters altogether from scratch!
Came for the Concord bashing, stayed for the lecture on character design
It wasn't until you mentioned tonal values that I understood why I felt the characters were so off putting or uncanny. Everything, all the characters were dull and even "vibrant" colors were greyed or washed out. Even in real life you'd see clothing with contrast or brighter colors in a crowd, and even faded clothing would be contrasted with something else.
I believe the characters were given the washed-out look for gameplay purposes. The game environment has brightly colored materials, and putting the characters a tone lower would make it easier to see them and wouldn't clash with the line silhouette you see occasionally in the game around the characters.
Otherwise, during cutscenes, the characters have sharper colours with stronger tonal values. While the video is no doubt educational, I feel a lot of people are going to interpret this video the wrong way because of their sentiments surrounding the game.
@@Manganizationthat's a very good point. Do you think making the environments more washed out, and the character colours pop out would've worked?
@@ManganizationWhich is so strange considering saturation usually has more visual weight to it and draws the eye more than desaturated colours. Why would they want your eyes pulled away from the characters and towards the environment if the whole point of the saturation contrast is to make the characters stand out more? The art for this game is fascinating.
@oz0451 it should also work.
@Manganization "We done the color design wrong on purpose, as a joke!"
My man was born passive-aggressive. He slapped the doctor.
Because nothing says "passive-aggresive" like a good slap to the face. Next, you’ll tell me he’s a pacifist with a black belt in karate.
@Mustard-Seeds my young friend, don't be so quick to be so stupid 🙄 your ignorance is showing
@@libertyquest Woah, did me jokingly pointing out you don't understand a simple definition was enough to upset you and made you go straight into personal attacks?
Apologies my dear sensitive snowflake, I won't point your errors next time.
@@libertyquest shutup
@@jackiehollow6611 are you twiggerd
"I do not want to see people fail this badly" Absolutely savage xD
All the designs come off as "Bad cosplayers cosplaying a hero-shooter with whatever they had in their garage in a 1-day build"
Imagine creating a hero shooter in 2024 and expecting it to sell to begin with, but then you also create these monstrosities
Then try to sell it at $40 USD while all other hero shooters are f2p.
It’s really cool how we all “got it” but didn’t “understand it” till he explained it.
Right?
huh
@@cevatkokbudak6414we knew it looked bad but couldn't put it into words exactly why
It's not just the color compositions that are off, many of these designs have very boring and uninspiring shapes as well. Nobody will want to draw fanart of these characters.
They look like someone messed about on a generic Blender model for 15 minutes and said "that'll do."
They saw what happened with Overwatch Rule 34 and clearly decided "Oh hell no. Not OUR game!" ;)
the yellow robot is the only one i can remember, and i can only remember it becuase i see "skyrim cheese wheel on legs" i don't even remember he has a minigun, just "skyrim cheese bot"
My brother is one of the 17 active players on PS5.
One of the first things I asked him to do when showing me the game, was to show me all the alternate skins and costumes, because I thought "surely the BASE COSTUME sucks... because there'll be loads to unlock!"
WRONG!!!
They have 1 "Legendary" skin and a couple of palette-swaps, and the legendary on practically most of the characters is somehow worse than the base skins we're ALL mocking.
I am sorry but unless your brother was trying to platinum the game and get the "living legend" achievement need to be charted to a evaluation because no way he spent 40$ on that objectively bad game
When you can't tell if your characters are pandering to an audience or mocking it, then you failed as a character designer.
A satire mocking modern politics would look the same.
You're right! It does feel like these designs take themselves a bit too seriously in some parts.
A lot of these recent "woke" games look like they were supposed to be satire. Dustborn and Concord especially. The character design in dustborn is so bad you almost can't believe it is real.
You've managed to put the off-putting feeling I get from Concord's character design into words. It's so bad that it feels like it's parodying the people it's trying to include.
It really is the worst of all worlds. You look at games with a diverse cast like Apex Legends, Overwatch, Rainbow 6 and they all do a solid job of making their characters fit the world and look cool individually. Meanwhile this game couldn’t be bothered to give any of their characters outfits or designs that were flattering to their body shape or identity in any way. Even the skintight outfits somehow don’t look properly fitted.
these devs forgot the rules of game character design:
1) Make them attractive
2) Don't make them unattractive
3) Don't be racist to your customers on social media
Much like Thanos in Endgame, the developers used the rules to destroy the rules.
@@sungrandstudios destroyed that 200m dollars 🔥🔥🔥🔥💀
You don't really have to make them attractive, a lot of characters people like aren't really attractive or not even meant to be a huaman in the slightest, you just have to make them look nice to look at. For example I could take Ben Bigger from the new game made by Hoyoverse which is literally just a big bear and people love him
You can have ugly characters, they just have to be interesting and cool instead of boring and lame.
I'm pretty sure OP is referencing a meme about flirting vs harassment, so the wording is a bit off compared to reality.
I learned a lot from this and even had your feedback in mind while I’ve been drawing now and I already see an improvement in my character drawings. So thank you. The whole Concord thing has inspired me because it gave me confidence that I am able to draw characters better than they can apparently lol
I am glad to hear from you and am grateful to hear the video was able to help you. You will do great work and keep improving. I'm certain. I will keep up regular uploads to share more insight with artists and developers.
Your version of One-Off(?) looks amazing, because the darker bits looks like battle damage while the brighter bits are replaced, factory new parts. It looks like a walking trash can, and it has this synergy of being clean and dirty at the same time. Not to mention I THINK he uses what is effectively a vacuum? A little on the nose, but I think that one would benefit far better as a recyclable bin-blue color scheme, so it's a robot made with recycled parts which plays into the theming of the robot being a recycle bin model and cleaning up trash.
I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a combat unit but having it be a maintenance unit modified for war would make this design pop off more. That's my observation after seeing your before/after. I've no clue about art design, I just thought that he was the biggest misstep for having the simplest, yet could have had the most expressive design of the roster. I had to make this comment after seeing the comparison
your poppin off. id like to think you put more thought into it than tbey did but im 100% sure the people making this game for 8 years probably had the exact same thoughts but some weirdos said "No, make it boring."
I do more stylized design for games/ film, but I can tell you the #1 problem here is lack of cohesion/ specific art direction. When you look at concord’s designs you’ve got no clue what the setting, gameplay or story is.
An Art Director on a project MUST make decisions. We cannot include everything. If you want to go bright & stylized, that’s a decision. You cannot then try to make everything realistic, or you’ve got multiple visions battling one another & it looks like a watered down mess. If you want to go future or modern, you’ve got to be careful with the “retro” vibe. Yes there’s a specific style called “retro futurism” which is what you see in Fallout and to some extent in Borderlands (& that was ripped straight from Disney World’s Epcot of the 1970s, btw). But that’s quite over-used atp.
When we do blue sky design at the beginning of the project we make those major overarching choices. Retrofuturism? Cyberpunk? Modern? Victoriana? Gothic? Punk? All your fave well-designed games have clear identity. Cyberpunk is cyberpunk. Borderlands is retrofuturist space opera. Fallout is straight up retrifuturism. Skyrim is medieval Nordic. Blizzard games, for all their faults, are fusions with the common thread being a high degree of charm. In Blizzard’s classic age, every char was either cute, powerful or attractive. Nothing was blah. WoW is a fusion of Tolkien + Western comics with anime flair. Overwatch is a Western/ Eastern comics hybrid. These games are all beautiful in their own way.
I can understand not wanting to be negative, but i can say that it is very appreciated. This game closed in 2 weeks. It was an enormous failure, and it needs to be learned from. Despite there being pretty much all negativity, it needed to be said, and while the gamers could say "these characters look bad", i think it takes a professional designer to be able to put into words WHY they aren't good, and to have enough weight to those words to really make people listen. As a somewhat professional miniature painter, I really enjoy discussions on color theory and enjoy putting it to use and i teach a bit on miniature painting as well. So, while I can only imagine how frustrating this was, it is very much appreciated to basically have a lesson on what not to do that i can share with my own students that is calm, clear and professional.