''It was the most beautiful car that we crashed'' - Ex-CONCORD Devs

Plane crash. It was worse than just a car crash.

If Sonic the movie could redesign Sonic, so can anything. Yes it'll cost time and money, but your own damn fault. Should've paused other bits, redesigned the characters and released it F2P.

Every single character looked crap. Don't get me started on that ugly alien furry.

Then seeing Marvel Rivals come and be so successful...wonder how they felt. Hopefully "Duh, of course, cool looking characters... no rejects".
 
Saying "We know" and "It was really special" would indicate you, in fact, don't know. From the very moment Concord was revealed, no one liked it. To even get to that point meant there were multiple catastrophic systemic failures at every single level within PlayStation's publishing arm. Vision, concept, design, vertical slice, milestones, progress reports, internal reviews, internal playtesting, marketing, mock reviews, and good old fashioned focus groups. I'd bet a pretty penny that this game failed more than a few of those in a big way, but was waved through anyway. Each concession, each allowance, contributed to the what is among the most expensive entertainment failures in human history.
 
"It made news for how poorly it (the beta) did. Like, people would go out to news sites to, like, hear about our game and how negatively it was doing instead of like, hearing what the game was about. People heard about our game because of how poorly it did. But people didn't hear about what the game was, or even really tried. There was no shortage of news articles and YouTube videos and hate on the internet about how poor the numbers were, so it was pretty apparent."

'The game failed because of the haters - nothing to do with us or the game itself'.

Seeing this attitude makes it very clear why the game failed and, harsh as it was, I can see why Sony made the decision to just close the studio.
 
i wonder what drugs the devs consume...
Q Help GIF by Quirkies
 
Are you mistaking my boy daw with that fat bitch of emari?


concordemariabilitiestrailer-ign-blogroll-1723054136540.jpg


Let me see some barvhe action and don't stop until i say so.



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Lol and here's Emari's original concept vs final design.

Just try to imagine the ideology that motivated these changes. And how many people must've realized this looks fucking repulsive but chose to keep their mouths shut and pretend to love it.
 
some-concord-redesigns-plus-emaris-first-design-artist-v0-mzey7d352nnd1.jpg


Lol and here's Emari's original concept vs final design.

Just try to imagine the ideology that motivated these changes. And how many people must've realized this looks fucking repulsive but chose to keep their mouths shut and pretend to love it.
They should have changed her name into Obesi aswell.
 
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"It was the most beautiful car"

Mf talking about the fucking Geo Metro of gaming.
Nah people can do cool things with geo Metro's.
I would say closer to a cybertruck, ugly, expensive and can't do anything a truck should be able to do. The cybertruck actually sold though.
 
Multipla is the craziest one.
The guys that made it operate at a level of design i didn't even know existed, some might even say at a level of design beyond design itself.
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"Yeah man we heard you liked cars so we put another car on top of your car"
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I spent all my youth in kangoos and twingos i can mock them, it is out of love.
Meet Multipla's asshole older brother who beats up kids on the playground, the Asstek.

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some-concord-redesigns-plus-emaris-first-design-artist-v0-mzey7d352nnd1.jpg


Lol and here's Emari's original concept vs final design.

Just try to imagine the ideology that motivated these changes. And how many people must've realized this looks fucking repulsive but chose to keep their mouths shut and pretend to love it.
no need to imagine when you have stuff like ActiBlizz proudly showing off the diversity calculator tool they use to design characters. Leads to stuff like WoW having a wizard on a magic wheelchair.
 
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"We were excited locally in the studio, but the public had no idea what it was at first."
We knew exactly what it was. An Overwatch clone, with some of the most horrific character designs ever committed to code, shamelessly ripping off Guardians of the Galaxy at the molecular level, anchored to a cookie-cutter "modern Disney" type of storyline that people had long been tired of.
 
They didn't waste anyone's money. They were making a game. They showed it to Herman and Ryan. Herman and Ryan loved it bought it, bought the studio, and pumped it up saying it was the future of Playstation. Herman and Ryan were shown frequent milestone updates. They were shown trailers, and showcased it at 2 Sony events. Then Sony released it.

Yup, ultimately the biggest failure was from Playstation leadership.
To be fair to Firewalk, if you are making a game for Sony, you show it to their highest ranking executives and they are so blown away by it that they want to straight up buy your studio and treat your game as major first party release, I wouldn't really blame you for thinking you are doing a good and don't need to do any major changes to your game.
 
I'm not absolving Ryan or Hermen from blame, they definitely deserve most of it. But they weren't the ones making all the creative decisions.

And anyway even the best bosses need employees who push back and challenge them.

If you're a well-paid white collar employee, and you keep your mouth shut and go along with stupid decisions because you don't want to rock the boat, you definitely deserve part of the blame.
We know damn well these environments are breeding grounds for cultures of fear around telling the truth about objective reality, lest you are paid a visit from HR.
 
Also gamers have refused to take anything devs said after the initial impression as neutral.
We are also very opinionated. You have to do No Mans Sky Returns for years to persuade people.

'The game failed because of the haters - nothing to do with us or the game itself'.

Seeing this attitude makes it very clear why the game failed and, harsh as it was, I can see why Sony made the decision to just close the studio.
I don't think she is saying that. I thought of it as a neutral shrugged shoulder sigh of, "we thought something was good was infact trash but the headlines didn't help the modicum of good the game did had", which even I agree on.

The 'game' (the thumb twiddling actual playing the game) wasn't an awful trash, just below mediocre. But everything around it even in social space was so trash Sony absolutely did the right thing and set that garbage on fire. Good Riddance.

like, if I could sit down with any individual that said something bad about the game and plead our case, I could convince them 100% to be on board with the game.
That delusion. Even after so much feedback they still didn't understood why it failed.
 
A narcissistic cunt till the end. Zero remorse, zero accountability and self-awareness, just burning money that was blindly given to them.

No, dear, you are not special. You are just a lucky moron.
 
ps hot take i wish it had a sp campaign
You're not entirely wrong. The gameplay was incongruous with the story they wanted to present. All the characters were supposed to be crewmembers on this ship so why are they killing each other?

I think a co-op mission game would have been better received. Like deep rock but not by much. Maybe enough to keep going.

Everything around Concord was poorly thought out.
 
The only good things about the game were the animations/lip syncing seemed spot on, and the netcode seemed good too as nobody seemed to complain about lag or frozen lobbies.

Rest of the game was ugly. Ugly characters, ugly pastel artsy palette, watching gameplay the maps were boring and ugly too. And the scripted lines and voice overs were cringey as well.
 
I don't believe this. There were all signs of the typical western toxic positivity culture there and people smelling their own farts thinking they were the next breakthrough in gaming. This is someone trying to save face.
 
I don't believe this. There were all signs of the typical western toxic positivity culture there and people smelling their own farts thinking they were the next breakthrough in gaming. This is someone trying to save face.
Nah, I think this is still the effects of that toxic positivity culture.
I believe many of them are genuinely cueless as to why this flopped so hard - because after all, they created such a good thing, right? ....

Might just be people's brains doing gymnastics to avoid negative feelings.
 
Reminds me of songs I've made that I think are the best I've ever done, then I listen to professional tracks and remember mine are dog water.

Hard for creatives to separate their perspective of their art from how the world views it.
 
Im only going to say that when you spend 400M dollars in a game... that money doesnt dissappear. It doesnt evaporate. It goes to the pockets of the developers. Those that are now saying it was an expensive and beautiful car crash.

Same as movies when they say they spend 200M budget filming a movie. All that money goes to the crew who created the movie. The money went to them, it didnt dissappear as a magic trick.
 
And more often than not, it's (changing the game) just not possible given the circumstances, given the stakes, the sunk cost into these things."
Of course it's not changing.

Gameplay and hero shooter info was told to the public only about 3 months before launch. And the beta test was done about two weeks before launch.

But great job making a game for around 6 years wasting tons of money thinking you got the greatest game ever not needed to be shown to anyone until the last minute. Firewalk studios was created in 2018. But if you go by very prelim development, it actually goes back to 2016 which is 8 years.

The employees actually thought they had such a smash hit, they kept it secret the whole time except for the last 3 months. LOL
 
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Im only going to say that when you spend 400M dollars in a game... that money doesnt dissappear. It doesnt evaporate. It goes to the pockets of the developers. Those that are now saying it was an expensive and beautiful car crash.

Same as movies when they say they spend 200M budget filming a movie. All that money goes to the crew who created the movie. The money went to them, it didnt dissappear as a magic trick.
No doubt.

Like all high budget failures (which seems to skew to tech companies, movies and media), it's a fantastic grift. Get high budgets, get a ton of workers making bank for years, and then nothing to show for. It ends up a cancelled project wasting the company's/investor's/bank's time and money. Or a failed launch with a bad game and bad sales, which is the same effect.
 
"We were excited locally in the studio, but the public had no idea what it was at first. I thought people were just harsh during the reveal trailer. I was like 'You know what? There's things we need to work on but it's okay. Once people touch the game, it's going to change things.'
And there it is. Still "its the gamers fault." They just cant comprehend that they made something that absolutely no one wanted to play.
 
Reminds me of songs I've made that I think are the best I've ever done, then I listen to professional tracks and remember mine are dog water.

Hard for creatives to separate their perspective of their art from how the world views it.
I've played in a few bands and have played on a slew of demos and albums. This mentality of thinking that the general public owes you something just because you worked hard and thought it was great is baffling to me. People don't owe you shit and sometimes hearing those opinions are very productive. Sometimes you step out of your bubble a week later and go hey yea...this song is kind of stupid...
 
Reminds me of songs I've made that I think are the best I've ever done, then I listen to professional tracks and remember mine are dog water.

Hard for creatives to separate their perspective of their art from how the world views it.
I've played in a few bands and have played on a slew of demos and albums. This mentality of thinking that the general public owes you something just because you worked hard and thought it was great is baffling to me. People don't owe you shit and sometimes hearing those opinions are very productive. Sometimes you step out of your bubble a week later and go hey yea...this song is kind of stupid...
Ya.

That's because a lot of creatives pour their hearts thinking their personal views, politics, drawing, painting etc.... are the greatest things ever. And it seems a lot of them put their personal beliefs into them, so what you get is really in tandem - one part product, one part personal life. Because they sat there all night at a table making something it has some kind of automatic boost in quality or forced likeability everyone has to indulge in.

All the while, the guy probably thinks half the tools he uses to make something are dogshit.... which are products also made by someone at a different company. So he'll think his thing is great, but something else he uses or owns can be crap. But when a customer says his thing is crap, he goes ape shit or defends with his last dying breath.
 
And there it is. Still "its the gamers fault." They just cant comprehend that they made something that absolutely no one wanted to play.

How you could intuit that meaning from the statement you quoted is beyond me! There's nothing in there "blaming" the players.

The statement "it was the most beautiful car that we crashed" is a gigantic mea culpa !

Honestly, the sheer dead-horse-beating commitment to shitting on this game and its makers some of you are showing is really something else!
Its truly pathological!
 
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Sometimes you just wonder, what the F are these higher ups thinking.
What a great guy.

Abandon ship after the Jaguar fiasco. Now when sales of those awful looking cars comes in 2026, the new guy will get the heat and have to answer all the questions. He's also a Jag/Tata exec, so he'll know what's going on already. But talk about playing hot potato when he gets passed the grenade. Mardell isnt leaving until end of year. So Jan 1, the new guy will have the grenade. lol
 
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