Concord cost something like 400 million dollars to make, and was the biggest video game disaster of all time, with all servers shut down and all purchases refunded in less than two weeks from launch, which is definitely a world record for high-budget games. You can read a lot more details about it in my previous blog posts.
However, when Sony announced that they would be shutting down the servers, they didn't say that they would just be abandoning the project for good. Instead, they said that they will re-evaluate the situation and research their options going forward.
Which, I assume, implies the idea of a complete redesign of the game.
Well, if that's the case, let me give some ideas to Sony about how to make the game actually better:
1) Drop the "modern audience" stuff from the game. Drop the pronouns, drop the "queerness", drop all that. The "modern audience" are not your clients, and thus you don't have to, and shouldn't, placate to them. They are not the ones buying your games.
2) Design characters that are actually likeable. And yes, that means going "traditionally attractive", as scary as that might sound to your progressive ears. Traditional is not bad. Embrace it.
3) And yes, to be more explicit: That does indeed mean that the female characters should be traditionally sexy, traditionally attractive, traditionally cute, and the male characters should be fit, tough, but likeable. Make your players love these characters, not hate them.
4) Better writing! The dialogue in your Concord animations was horrendous! Hire some actual non-woke professionals to write this stuff for you, and professional (non-woke) voice actors to speak the lines.
5) And very importantly: Drop the "hero shooter" idea. It's a very bad idea. It's a saturated market and nobody is interested in the genre anymore. Particularly, nobody is interested in new entries in that genre. Instead, here's an idea for a better game genre:
Your highly polished in-game animations already hint at a universe that's much closer to games like Anthem and Destiny 2 than to Overwatch. Embrace that! It doesn't need to be a clone of Anthem (particularly because that game wasn't very well received in the end), but it could use some ideas from it, such as:
- Vast open world with rich and lush landscapes that are easily traversable by foot or vehicles.
- Missions, both single-player and multiplayer. Think of Destiny 2, for example (again, don't blindly copy, just get some ideas from the genre.)
- Imagine a mix of Anthem (or at least what it promised to be before it was published) and a wide open sandbox RPG, with Destiny 2 elements to it.
- You can still have your vast amounts of cutscenes, animations, "mini-movies", character interactions and so on, but they would be part of the missions that the players could take, rather than just being some extra FMVs.
Also, study and learn from the big failures in recent years: What made those games failures, and how to avoid making the same mistakes. Why did games like "Evolve", "Anthem", "Star Wars Outlaws", "Skull and Bones", "Kill the Justice League" and your own "Concord" fail? Research it, study it, learn from it, avoid the same mistakes, do better.
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