I don't see anything wrong with diverse designs, women that aren't perfect little Barbies or ordinary-looking people in video games. The main problem with the characters in Concord though is that the characters feel very token and unappealing when it comes to the costumes and hairstyles. Sony wanted to tick every box in their DEI list and focused more on that rather than the gameplay and appealing character designs.
I'm not complaining that characters aren't super models, I'm complaining that they're ugly. If you are going to market a product though, it's best to have characters that are appealing to look at since sex sells. It doesn't even mean revealing outfits, chiseled abs and big bazongas, it can simply be a cool outfit on a normal or nondescript character. I think the Master Chief is an absolute badass and he looks cool despite existing entirely within a suit, when I see someone in that set of armor mowing down a bunch of ugly but threatening aliens, it draws my attention.
It seems they'd have to go out of their way to make a lot of these designs.
Based on appearance alone, which of these characters would you want to play as?
- 3rd on the bottom row is normal looking white/hispanic guy with headphones.
- African-American Trench coat guy if you could get a skin where he doesn't have a bright teal coat.
- Attractive oriental weeb bait holding a hub cap again with a skin to swap from grass seed green to something else.
- Maybe the humanish alien and the samurai hornet guy with raptor feet at the bottom right
Obviously everyone has their own biases, and maybe there are a few others would prefer to play as, but as a non-shut in with a group of friends, I can guarantee based on looks alone that every guy I know if they were forced to play this would pick one of those 5 characters.
So let's not pretend this is about not accepting different body types, or tokenism or blatancy, it's about intentionally creating ugly characters that don't appeal to audiences. The fact that with a few tweaks a third of these characters look good shows they're capable of it.