Oh for sure I was mainly referring to how the larger community as a whole when talking about Concord's character designs.
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Oh for sure I was mainly referring to how the larger community as a whole when talking about Concord's character designs.
It's takes like this that made me feel insane. I've also seen them described as "body horror". Yes a handful I agree aren't good but I think a lot are really good to great (for me at least half the roster) sometimes it takes looking at the model in game and appreciating the level of fidelity.
If you're a creative professional, like myself, there is always going to be constructive and non-constructive criticism of what you do. Some of it may be warranted and some of it isn't, but there is never going to be a day where you make something perfect and no one is going to talk about it. The hardest critic is normally going to be yourself.
It's understandable that the team is going through some anxiety with Concord failing. However, stay off social media and don't respond to people then. And if you have to engage, then just do a simple "Thanks for the feedback. I'll take it into consideration" and do not continue to engage while you're emotionally compromised. That's the worst thing that you can do because then you've opened that channel for them to keep going and to keep drawing you in.
Dealing with criticism is part of the job. If the slightest pushback makes you suddenly not want to do it anymore, then stay off social media and take a mental rest for your own health and sanity.
It's understandable that the team is going through some anxiety with Concord failing. However, stay off social media and don't respond to people then. And if you have to engage, then just do a simple "Thanks for the feedback. I'll take it into consideration" and do not continue to engage while you're emotionally compromised. That's the worst thing that you can do because then you've opened that channel for them to keep going and to keep drawing you in.
Dealing with criticism is part of the job. If the slightest pushback makes you suddenly not want to do it anymore, then stay off social media and take a mental rest for your own health and sanity.
The level of fidelity is part of what hurts them. In concept art I'm sure they looked much better, just like almost everyone agrees that they look better in those animated shorts. It's an artistic failing to not consider how they would look when married with the in-game visuals.
This is an excellent point for a lot of potential GAAS projects. There's obviously some games where this wouldn't work but a lot of projects that probably would benefit from this in some capacity.
Let's be real. Neither of those are helpful, really. The game has already been removed from stores.
It's also an entertainment product produced by a multi-billion dollar company. I'm not saying there isn't art involved in the AAA space or that the team didn't put in tonnes of hard work and creative energy on a personal level but often, companies exploit the passion of workers in order to get more than fair value out of their work. When you're working on projects where your input is such a small part of the work as a whole, it's important to remember that what you're doing is just a job and to separate your self value from what you're working on.
Knowing what I know about game dev, I'm fairly confident that almost every member of the Concord team likely went above and beyond their job description to deliver more than was in their job description and the game released in a better state than it would have if they didn't do that extra work. I'm also confident that if the game came out and was wildly successful, they wouldn't have been rewarded for that extra work.
I get that negative criticism hurts the dev's feelings but they really should try and separate themselves from the work as much as possible unless they have direct ownership or monetary compensation from that work. I know that's easier said than done though. The Concord team should be proud of what they done.
Wanna agree with it but I liked and retweeted so many artists improving character designs from games like genshin impact so I'd be a hypocrite lol
In all of these examples you'd be complaining about something you paid for. Most people complaining about Concord are just dunking on it from the sidelines.
If you walked into some artists studio, did some browsing, and instead of just leaving politely decided to walk up to the artist and tell them their art sucks you'd be considered an asshole.
Not every interaction in the world has to be "helpful". Sometimes, it is okay to yell into the void that you think something sucks without being useful or helpful with it.
The idea changes radically if you're someone in a position to genuinely critique a work; A mentor, someone meant to oversee the project, a team lead. Those are the people who should be thinking about their tone and what they can add to the conversation.
Otherwise it's just insane to demand that everyone provides a genuine and well thought out critique any time they don't like a thing.
Agreed. I feel bad for the artist in that Twitter thread, but honestly the person they quoted didn't deserve it unless that poster had some history of being passive aggressive about it.
This is obviously a traumatic experience for everyone in the studio and I don't pretend to know what the feeling is like of working on a product like this for years and have it flop as historically bad as this has. At the same time I don't think doom scrolling through social media during this period of grief and reading and engaging with people criticizing your art is helpful to your stress in any way. Social media is going to dunk on anything that's high profile and has flopped. If you've worked on anything that's on the negative spotlight you absolutely need to be staying off social media. This is regardless of the fact that the person they were quoting wasn't even being toxic.
The Twitter user in question that got chastised by the artist was not walking into a private studio space and directly telling the artist their art sucked, however. They were posting to the general Twitter public critiquing publicly available art to no one in particular. They weren't tagging the artist or specifically trying to engage them. Art isn't immune from criticism (as long as the criticism isn't in bad faith) just because it flopped commercially
I think these comparisons have wandered a bit far afield, comparing someone tweeting "here's how I would change thing" out into the void, not @-ing anyone in particular, to walking into an artists studio and refusing to leave doesn't seem like a particularly apt comparison.
Most people complaining in general dunk on the sidelines so that arguement is irrelevent. You really think the posters here are going to watch Borderlands or the upcoming Minecraft movie to get "permission" to dunk on them?
I think it's probably less the designs and more the colour palette. That is far more egregious and hard to look at for me. If they went with a more vibrant colour way for this, it would probably work better
Main difference is that barbers don't do CGI trailers and open betas.
You kinda have to get a haircut and pay to know if they are good.
With Concord, the design and characters clearly failed to connect with 99% of people they tried to address. There was no need to buy the game for them.
And their opinions are actually way more valuable because nobody gives a shit why a few thousand people liked the art in the game. Much more interesting to find out why millions did not buy it and the art was a big part of it.
I've seen that complaint and I do feel like one or two (which I already categorize as the bad ones) look like real people wearing cosplay, as you say because of the fidelity. But I feel like the ones that work, work with the high fidelity. I also feel like those are the ones that were part of the marketing originally for the most part.
I totally agree! This type of feedback or critique is not useful to the creator, and is in fact more likely to be detrimental.
But really there are multiple types of criticism, right? The first type of criticism is direct feedback, what I would would usually think of as critique, where you are trying to help someone else improve their work. This might take the form of analyzing what they've done and giving feedback on what you think they should specifically change, it might take the form of analyzing where you think they're going awry and letting them know without suggesting exact changes, it might take the form of simply experiencing the thing and telling them your reactions. And these require decreasing levels of expertise--the specific changes would probably come from a project director or maybe a script doctor type of person, looking at where things are going awry might be a colleague, experiencing the thing is something a layman could do.
The second type of criticism is discussion. You're not trying to help anybody improve, you're reacting to a thing--casually chatting about it, or having a thoughtful discussion, or giving your personal review. You're expressing your feelings about a thing, engaging with other people about it. You might do any of the three critique-style things, talk about what should specifically be changed, or analyzing what's wrong, or just giving your reaction. The key is that this is not intended as feedback to help the creator! The lines can blur somewhat these days when we put our takes on social media where a creator could potentially see them and be bothered, or in some cases we might even think we're doing something like offering critique and try to actually @ the person who made a thing. Unsolicited feedback is honestly kind of rude. But it's fine to simply have opinions about things and then talk about them.
Unless there's some missing context, the person being responded to here was just engaging in discussion. "Here's how I would remake Season 8 of Game of Thrones" was a thought exercise a lot of people did (and usually with orders of magnitude more vitriol), and I think people generally understood it was discussion, not an effort to tell the showrunners how they should've done things. Or even an effort to improve their own personal storytelling skills. That's essentially what this person is doing--people seem to broadly agree that the character designs in Concord don't work, this person wanted to try to rework one to see if they could figure out where things went wrong, adding to the conversation and potentially improving their own skills in the process. Arguably it's a little insensitive to do on social media while the people involved are probably worrying about whether they'll still have a job next week, but that's kind of unavoidable with social media.
Anyway didn't mean to turn this into a lecture, this was intended as discussion. :P
I wasn't intending to claim that anyone needs to have purchased the game to dislike things about it. I was responding to a poster saying it's no different than complaining about a botched car repair, which I'd argue is a wholly different situation. If someone creates something bad and you are under no pressure to be inconvenienced by it then it's creators aren't "deserving" of complaints in the same way that a chef who made you a bad meal would be.
This isn't really a fair comparison, either.
If I talk about art on my Twitter account, then went to an art studio followed by tweeting on my account giving my thoughts on disliking the art, I think that's fair of me to do.
I think people have some sympathy for those that were in the kitchen while one of the biggest disasters in gaming was being cooked. How sincere these people are in their sympathy is another question.
I mean maybe the plant person could be body horror if you got Triptophobia.
You cannot control what people are going to talk about on their personal Twitter accounts. And I'm saying this as a working professional fulltime artist. I absolutely sympathize with what the art team is going through--but Concord is a commercial product. It is going to receive criticism from that perspective, and some of it may be scathing, and some of it may be unhelpful. If that is something the devs dont want to see, they should remove themselves from the conversation. It sucks, but that's how it goes. I've done work for things people hate, it happens. It's part of the job. You can't stop a conversation from happening.
I know :/ but by God it sucks so much, and I'm this instance, people who had absolutely nothing to do with anything kept just piling and piling.
Just.. I don't know, be humans sometimes.
It does suck! And I feel for the devs, I can't even imagine. It's probably why we shouldn't have a direct pipeline access to everyone's thoughts about everything at all times (Twitter) lol. It's not great for mental health.
I haven't been following any of this but just glancing at some gameplay footage it strikes me as a well-polished take on Destiny crucible with set character choices
(probably better balanced in that respect).
Shame it had to go this way, but I can see how any game in this genre might flounder unless they do something to really stand out given the competition is f2p.
(probably better balanced in that respect).
Shame it had to go this way, but I can see how any game in this genre might flounder unless they do something to really stand out given the competition is f2p.
Same. I hadnt paid any attention to it until now and it just looks like same old shit with Polish and insanely unattractive art design.
So they have removed all traces of the game from the storefront, I also cannot find it on PlayStation.com besides the shutdown message in "Support" and the wording of the Discord sendoff is rather finite sounding as well. It really doesn't seem like this is coming back in any form, which is a pity, regardless of design flaws etc when so much effort was put into making it.
Did anyone get a PS refund? I got mine on Steam the day they announced the close, used it for Warhammer. Nothing on PS yet.
You double dipped on this game? You were the target audience all along.
Waiting on it here as someone who bought it digitally with Store Credit
not sure how long it'll take but with Sony mentioning 30-60 days for it to show up in bank accounts I suspect even with it going straight back to my psn account I'll probably be waiting around that long
100% agree that the people who worked on Concord should not be contacted in any way by nobody.
Personal blame is also out of line.
But when someone posts on his own twitter "those characters suck" or "they are terrible" the people who worked on it need to suck it up and move on.
Everyone who works on stuff that is relevant to millions (any game by Sony shown in a SoP qualifies easily imo) gets the good and the bad consequences.
Doesn't really do anything for anyone if we keep posting "oh the poor devs" and "pls think of the people working so so hard on this" when games get criticised.
Pay for the games you play, don't pirate or use shady VPN loopholes and recommend good games to friends. Thats really all you can do to help workers in gaming.
Dunking from the sidelines is what people do to products they don't pay for because it isn't to their tastes. The idea people can't criticize things without becoming paying customers is a little insane since the entire idea of the game is to be interesting enough before people play it that you'd eventually be willing to spend time and money on it.
Artists that sell their art for a living need to understand why their art isn't selling and if it is because people think it sucks... that's feedback you have to process and adapt to. You also can't expect the general population to be trained on how to give directed constructive criticism, being able to read player reactions and understand what it really means is a skill that has to be developed and is incredibly important because most people just say stuff sucks and move on with their lives if they don't like something.
First one a few days ago "until the next update" at the end of it.
This one said "thanks for joining us on this journey, with deep gratitude and love".
Just to further spotlight this comment because it's on the nose. No one should expect the general public to tell them constructive criticism beyond the "This sucks" and "I don't like this". The only people you should expect not to hear those words are other artists and creatives within the creative field. The general public isn't concerned with the intricacies about why and how they don't like something and sure, some may be willing to divulge more information on their opinions, but most are not going to be willing and think that alone is enough.
If someone is coming into your art studio and going on about how your art sucks, let us not forget that people are willing to pay thousands of dollars for a banana taped to a wall even if I personally think that's a crazy idea.
Had never heard of this person. Blunt and a bit like a cross between AVGN and Stephanie Sterling, but no lies detected.
oh look its almost like i was right again, after some told me I have no idea about these things :p
Anyone on social trying to target a specific artist and/or designer can kindly shut the fuck up in the future.
That's who these people, and even some from here, affect with their armchair criticism and "lol i, a GamEr, could do better". It fucking sucks.
Honestly, this response isn't surprising and this type of fragility was probably rampant at the studio and baked into the culture. This isn't exclusive to video game development. In any organization, if people are tiptoeing around one another's feelings and no one is actually saying when something is very obviously shit then guess what? You are going to end up producing shit. The responsibility goes to the leadership and management who clearly were not good at their jobs and incapable of either giving or receiving feedback (or both). If you as an employee had concerns while doing your job and attempted to raise alarm bells to leadership and they didn't listen, then it isn't on you, and you shouldn't be placing any of the responsibility on yourself. And even if you didn't vocalize concerns and rather kept them to yourself, it still isn't on you because managements job is to elicit and gather that kind of genuine feedback and cultivate an open and honest work environment. What the fuck does "emotional labor" even mean in this context?
Yes, there are financial consequences and people's livelihoods at stake. That is the fault of capitalism, not some random fuck on twitter. Name the actual problem rather than a blanket "don't criticize our work. We don't want to work in games anymore because of posts like this."
Toxic positivity is very real and a danger to any creative industry that exists under capitalism. Would be significantly less problematic if people didn't have to actually sell their art to survive but that isn't the world we live in.
We finally getting that Jim Ryan discussion. Dude needs to be dragged for a lot of decisions.
I feel the same way. It looks like they were trying to create a completely positive environment without any toxicity. Yes, that's a great idea, and I support it too. But! It seems like they forgot that constructive criticism isn't toxicity. However, it's true that some people don't accept criticism in any form, and the main job of a manager is to find a way to work around that. But how? From my own experience (I started my career in full-stack development), there was a time when a designer made a website layout but refused to make any changes. In that case, I made the adjustments myself based on user feedback.
But again, this is just speculation. We don't know how their work was organized, only hints that the problem was with some leadership.
I 100% agree with this. The characters designs combined with the high fidelity art style is the main reason I didn't want to give the game a try. I agree that if the game looked more like the animated shorts, or just more like any other game with a less realistic art style, it would have really helped it look more appealing.
I'd be curious to know if the hyper realistic graphics were a mandate from Sony or something Firewalk chose on their own.
I kept hearing about all the reasons a game like this wouldn't be F2P in the run-up to its release, and to me it sounded like a list of the downsides of eating food. They exist, you know. You're telling me I need to eat, but now that I'm eating regularly I also need to shit regularly. I need to make sure I have a functional bathroom in my house, and even a bidet - or at the very least some TP. And not just that, this food doesn't come free! I now need spend money on ingredients and time to prepare them into meals, or even more money on ready-made meals. And does the hassle end there? No, you still to also make time to eat all that food. Think of all the time and effort wasted on this; I want to try the downsides of the alternative.