The actual gameplay seemed fine? I think the main problem (coming from a concept artist) was just the terrible character design. they had big colourful setpieces but so many of the characters were just bland, had basically just random clothes on or extremely boring armour and just, terrible and i mean terrible colour palettes - either drab and muted or like they threw darts at a colour wheel
Absolutely. Concord didn't LOSE a ton of players quick- it never got them on board to begin with. And considering the core gameplay looked fine enough to at least put up a halfway decent player count, the bigger problem was clearly the unappealing nature of the style/characters/setting
Oh shit, he do be speedrunning those video essays. I huh.. do think it was bad. But yeah the biggest issue is that nothing stands out (except that they wasted money on story cinematics??) but I really don't think they knew who their audience was. They couldn't even explain the game during the beta. It really feels like people had no idea what they were doing, or at least there was no clear vision for what the game should be (again, besides its story). And you probably can't sell a game is you don't even know who you're supposed to sell it to.
I'm sure there were some crazy changes that happened during the production of this game. This doesn't look like 8 years of vision, it looks like 8 years of turbulent decisions and changes that left us with a game that doesn't even know what it wants to be
Pretty delusional to equate Deadlock to concord as the only thing they share is being hero based, but yes I also disagree it's solely the genre that made it fail, I'd say everything played together, from wokeness, boring characters, boring premise, oversaturated market, failed marketing, price point, offering nothing new, looking cheap as gotg knock off despite their graphics, not establishing character lore to make people engaged, same old game modes and being an easy target for ridicule. And I don't believe F2P will save it as it's become the Morbius of video games.
But deadlock has great character designs though... this isn't the debunk you think it is. This isn't about woke, Valorant is woke for example, but the characters look great, cosplayers are excited to portray them, there's plenty of fanart of them, etc.
