this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2025
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Such a comprehensive example of poor decision making at so many levels. From the decision to charge for a PvP hero shooter in a saturated market of free PvP hero shooters, to spending what appeared to be tens of millions on marketing, PR, and CGI cut scenes, to the worst character designs in living memory. It’s clear they did zero focus group testing on those characters, or if they did, they ignored all feedback. As is so common now, everyone involved in the fiasco is going to be integrated into future projects and destroy them too. They’ll learn nothing and keep doing it.
"Am I so out of touch? No, it's the kids who are wrong."
Where has the marketing budget gone into? Because I literally never heard of this game until a Penguinz0 on Youtube made a video about it
That's me too - never heard about it until I started seeing news about how it failed
Where had the marketing budget gone, the game was shut down like a week after launch
There was a big run-up in the prior months
There's a pretty long video about why this sort of thing happens. Basically this sort of game is relatively cheap to make and investors think they have a chance of recreating the success of Overwatch or Fortnite or smth
The character design was derivative but they weren't awful, come on now. Absolutely true about the rest
I struggle to think of worse examples in the AAA space. The colours weren’t just badly complemented, but intentionally violated colour theory. Their skills had nothing to do with their aesthetic or stories. They were just kind of thrown together without any care. Why was Baz, the bulky man, given ninja-like skills? None of the characters were attractive. One was morbidly obese. Almost all of them were gender non-conforming. And the biggest sin of all: none of them were cool. They were all lame as shit. You must know all of this if you’ve been following the story and criticism. It’s fine to disagree and in many instances there is room for subjectivity, but this was one of those rare examples where we can all come together to objectively declare these characters a train wreck.
Some real capital G-amer takes here. Come everyone, let's join hands and "objectively" agree to hate minority bodies.
Yeah I’m with you like this take always gets weirder to me.
I’m a straight man. I love hot girls (or if you want me to get pedantic girls that I find attractive)
I don’t have a requirement that I must want to fuck a majority of the women presented in each video game.
It’s also okay for people that aren’t like me to be in video games. Even for, gasp, the entirety of the cast to be people not like me.
It’s the one thing with those conservative media grift circles that gets me. If they truly had their way and every piece of media conformed to their “standards” it would be an absolutely boring fucking world where all media would just be sterile versions of the same turds pumped out. There’s be no new perspectives. No differing thoughts or challenging themes.
Concord sucked and had a lot of problems. The characters not being conventionally attractive and “gender non-conforming” weren’t problems.
Just take Overwatch as an example. People aren't exactly ranting about how Winston (a Gorilla) isn't sexually attractive, and therefore represents the moral downfall of society and that. He's just there.
Well that's for 2 reasons:
If you make all your characters these "minority bodies" that are unappelaing to the wider audience, then your shit is going to flop
You think we have to be attracted to morbidly obese and ambiguously sexed people in order to be accepting? What kind chronically online take is that? People are allowed to find others unattractive. In your race to be the very virtuest of all, you’ve accidentally looped around to intolerance.
I don't think you're trying to engage honestly but I'm going to on the off chance someone is reading this thread on a bad day and thinking "maybe he has a point? Why can't I be attracted to XYZ?"
You're trying to twist this into a question of "do I have to be attracted to everyone in order to be accepting"?
The original question that's being engaged with is why, in your words, does
Make for "the worst character designs in living memory"? Why can't gender non-conforming characters have an interesting character design? Why is physical fitness required for an interesting character design?
The subtext I'm reading from this is you think that in order for a character to have an interesting design that they must be attractive. If that's not what you're trying to say feel free to claim otherwise, but I don't know why else you'd bring those factors in if you weren't...
A counter argument to your claim: I claim deep rock galactic has very interesting character designs. The costumes all have a similar theme but are distinct enough I can tell the difference between the characters. The colors are both grimy to indicate being underground for long periods of time but also each has a bright color palette so you can easily distinguish between characters. I think these designs are great.
I am not attracted to any of these characters. I would never want to fuck any of them. I still think their designs are great. I don't think attractiveness is a requirement for interesting character design.
You wouldn't fuck Scout? Prude.
I get your point about sexual attraction not being necessary, but you're still kind of making the other user's point for them. Deep Rock Galactic works because of a cohesive aesthetic with characters that actually fit the world they're in. Concord was like a cast of soulless GI Joe toybait characters who went through a corporate intersectional diversity blender.
I mean I wasn’t really arguing that Concord had good character designs. Just that a chunk of his criteria (obesity and gender conformity) aren’t good criteria of it.
There's something deeply funny to me that the same political side that demands representation for everyone in everything is then stunned to know that if EVERY character doesn't represent something the typical audience likes/wants to see that audience will go elsewhere.
This is not rocket science, and it's such a deeply american problem it's honestly hilarious and frustrating at the same time with your culture's obsession with moralizing media consumption and production only somehow ever registering one way.
If your game's characters look lame, uninteresting, and nothing like most people would want to be, nobody's gonna buy it. It's that simple.
Progressives keep banging on about how people need to be represented to want to partake in a piece of media,* then when a piece of media that represents exclusively stereotypical members of a portland polycule shows up people are surprised if it's played exclusively by some polyamorous portlanders (not even all of them if you look at the stats).
* which is yet more horseshit america-centrism, the rest of the world is used to not being represented in most media we see since americans make most of it, and i'd rather laminate my own testicles than subject myself at an earnest attempt from an american at representing my demo.
Furthermore:
Overwatch is super diverse, but all their characters (yes, even the fucking gorilla, Winston is handsome as fuck and he passes the harkness test) look appealing.
Their bodies look well proportioned, even Roadhog who is a morbidly obese alcoholic with visible cirrhosis looks more visually appealing than any concord character, because even he looks like an idealised and larger than life (pun very intended) version of a morbidly obese alcoholic.
Meanwhile concord characters look like frumpy cosplayers that wouldn't qualify for 3rd place at a backwater anime con somewhere in whatever US state has the worst inbreeding rates.
Your example with DRG is very fitting as well because I don't think most people would call those characters sexually attractive (but trust me, some absolutely do), but they are extremely visually appealing. Bold recognizable shapes that fit their roles, good color combinations, fun presentations.
Concord looks like it's about to scold you for microaggressing someone, DRG looks like it's about to attempt to burp another country's national anthem it hasn't even heard before.
DRG oozes goliardic fun, while Concord looks and feels like the used dishrag at the bar where that team's art director will end up working if there is any justice in the world.
ETA: two words, punctuation
Exactly!
In games like these, there's absolutely room for minority or less "appealing" character design. Give them interesting abilities that match their character design and they'll see play. But you should also have some conventionally "appealing" characters because it turns out people like to role play as someone more attractive than they see themselves IRL.
Provide a good mix so people can role play however they want, and keep things balanced such that some of the minority characters see play by the min/maxers.
You're the one suggesting that your lack of attraction to these character models is an objective flaw. Which is, of course, semantically silly, if nothing else. Not finding a character (or person) attractive for whatever reason is your business. Taking to the forum and yelling about androgyny being objectively unattractive (in an online space which I'd wager has a disproportionate representation of trans and NB individuals) is an interesting choice.
I called them unattractive. You called that a flaw. Maybe it is. Like it or not, people prefer attractive characters in PvP hero shooters. See the outrageous success of Marvel Rivals which launched just three months after Concord. You seem to be taking this very personally. If you’re more attracted to fat, lumpy, and sexually ambiguous people, more power to you. You just don’t represent the vast majority of people who play these games.
You call the space saturated with sameness then rip on the game for taking a different stylistic choice. You're contradicting your own arguments.
You absolutely can. Something bad and uninteresting is not an improvement on something mediocre and uninteresting.
You don't get points for the jump if you shatter both your knees on the landing and the kneecaps fly out into the stands killing one of the hotdog vendors.
Where are all the fuckable men?
Baldur's Gate got them all, sorry.
The uno reverse card you're trying to play is so silly. Yes, I am intolerant of intolerance. This sort of queerphobic bigotry is hateful, cringe and diametrically opposed to "acceptance". You can't be supportive of queer lives when you are also demonizing queer repsentation as ugly.
They're not, they're specifically saying Concord's character design is ugly for a lot of very practical and valid reasons, and also it's only representing a very specific minority of people who are a spit in the bucket of the total audience numbers necessary to support a paid live service title.
So it's both doing a disservice to itself by just being incompetently made AND playing into the stereotype that minority rep always ends up ugly (an already very common sentiment due to how often cases of it sucking are spotlit) because it has basically nothing but that.
Ironically had Concord had a more actually diverse cast, and not overwhelmingly represented a handful of pet groups the designers seemed to overwhelmingly favour, it would have not been possible to attack it as "they're all lame fat and/or gay."
It still would have tanked, so on balance not much of an issue, but still.
There's absolutely room for interesting LGBTQ and minority characters in a mainstream game. For example:
And so on. Make them interesting to play as, and also include some "traditional" characters (hot, scantily clad women, muscular men, etc). Each character should be interesting, visually distinct, competitive to play with, and not too stereotypical.
Games should be fun first and foremost, then interesting, etc. Including minorities is a pretty distant nice to have, so if you're going to do it, make them fun and interesting to play with.
Queer people don’t have to be ugly and fat. What an insane take. It’s not “queerphobic” to be unattracted to people. It is homophobic (and queerphobic) to tell people what they’re allowed to be attracted to.
I don't think you know what objective means.
God, can you imagine if Overwatch had launched with a muscley ninja or a fat guy?