It Is Wednesday: Let's Talk About Concord

EDIT: Wednesday! It's Wednesday, not Tuesday. I can't believe I screwed that up.

When I started this Patreon, I promised weekly blog posts about game design or the game industry in general. I haven't lived up to that. I've delivered on game betas, sure, but not everybody is backing at the beta tier and I wanna make sure everybody's getting something out of this.

So, I'm making it a rule -- every Wednesday I'll do a blog post with my thoughts on a game, or the industry, or a design topic, or just like... something game-y. And if you dig it, read it! And if not, s'cool.

This week, I think I'm gonna laser in on Concord because I've been following that story with interest -- a AAA game with the backing of one of the big three console manufacturers falling on its face right out of the gate. What I'm curious about are the lessons learned regarding its failure, and the discourse around those lessons. Because I think a lot of it is getting overhyped (overhated?) and other aspects being overlooked.

Concord came right out of the gate with nothing but a prerendered cinematic. Not unusual; plenty of games do that. But the absolutely obvious aping of Guardians of the Galaxy (weird aliens, rough and tumble space underworld, characters not taking a serious situation seriously, lots of quips) poisoned it. But why? GotG is a billion-selling franchise and beloved, wouldn't a game emulating that work well? Even the actual, factual GotG game did pretty decently. Problem is, because Marvel's box office returns have been sagging and they're relying harder and harder on that style of humor, it creates an interesting association with fans. "Marvel = Overdone, Marvel = Quips, Therefore Quip = Overdone." End result? The instant a concord character started sounding like Starlord, the fan reaction narrative wrote itself.

You can see a curious echo of this in Dragon Age Veilguard. Because they went with a prerendered trailer and it had almost the exact same setup as Concord (a bunch of misfit adventurers taking a serious situation unseriously) it got the same narrative applied -- and the same negative reaction. But unlike Concord, it's attached to a IP with some weight behind it, so the fans didn't completely dogpile it. Just only, like, slightly dogpile it while taking a "let's wait and see how it actually plays" attitude, in hopes of recapturing Dragon Age magic.

But back to Concord. The game itself comes out, and the same perception problem persists -- it's Temu Guardians of the Galaxy. And as the actual game gets played in the beta preview, it's clear the problem runs deeper. It's somehow both bland AND distinctively weird at the same time, going for a "1970s pulp scifi" aesthetic, like Mobius artwork. Inscrutably strange alien designs, but not exaggerated and stylized to make them more approachable, done with Sony's AAA backed photorealistic system-selling high fidelity graphics. Washed out color palettes, lumpy sci-fi environments, all of it carefully rendered nonsense that has no real distinctiveness.

Contrast this against Overwatch, its closest analogue. Overwatch is massively stylized. It's damn near a saturday morning cartoon. Everything is shiny and smooth and curved, characters have immediate and obvious aesthetic hooks that explain who and what they are, starting with surface level gimmick (this one is a gorilla, this one has a bomber jacket, this one is blue) and then layered on top of distinct personalities. Instead of photorealistic to the point of seeing tiny pores and flaws on the skin, Horizon Zero Dawn style, Overwatch uses a minimal amount of detail and paints with a large brush instead.

But Overwatch has a problem that Concord actually does not -- Overwatch relies very, very, VERY hard on Extremely Generically Cute Girls. Everyone's a body builder or a slim little waif. Normal for cartoon style, which intentionally pushes things away from the center, but it does mean a lack of variety in the design and a reasonable call that diversity isn't really on their minds. Concord has a MUCH wider variety because they're going photorealistic, so they have small, medium, large, wide, tall, a whole swath alongside a couple of "waif" like figures. They intentionally tried to make real people, not cartoon archetypes, and real people are not stamped out of a template.

All of this loops back into public perception issues, though. Concord would say "We reflect reality because that was our design philosophy," but thanks to the bifurcated political bullshit of gaming culture right now, that translates to "We are woke DEI snowflakes wah wah" for most -- and they hold up Overwatch in contrast as their exemplar because it's so much easier to Rule 34. It's ugly and gross and that's becoming the narrative. Not that Concord's devs leaned too hard into realism and ended up making characters that are both indistinct but also kind of weird, but that the devs didn't go cartoony porn-friendly and therefore that's why they failed.

Finally, aesthetics aside... gameplay. Here's where I feel not enough people are paying attention, too fixated on screenshots and character designs.

SkillUp did an AMAZING rundown of the problems baked right into Concord's design: https://youtu.be/vRrWp_MVAxU In short, unlike other games where you pick your character and go, there are so many rules and restrictions and sub-systems built into who you pick and why that it becomes a bewildering, confusing mess. The devs encourage players to choose from the whole roster, not stick with a favored "main," but they do this by forcing them to switch and switch frequently. Either you lose out on huge bonuses by not switching, or the game straight up doesn't let you re-pick. And that's just one thing on top of progression and skins and more being a bit wonky and weird.

Everything about Concord feels like it was done with intention, but missed the mark. And sadly everything about the public's response to Concord feels like it was also done with intention, but missed the mark. We're not talking about the reasons for its failure, we're talking about why we wanted it to fail -- pushing personal narratives that don't require us to engage with the actual work. It's a failed game, yes. But we need to take home the right lessons about that failure to avoid repeating them in the future, and I don't see that happening.