EIGHT YEARS?! EIGHT YEARS. Firewalk Studios took EIGHT YEARS and the end result is Concord?
Seriously?
This particularly baffling and laughable insight into the upcoming (and largely unwanted) title was brought to light by its lead character designer, Jon Weisnewski.
Sharing a series of celebratory posts to his personal Twitter account on August 20th in honor of the game’s official release to purchasers of its Deluxe Edition, the designer asserted, “Today @FirewalkStudios launched @PlayConcord! The game has been in development for around 8 years and I’ve been there for almost 5 of them. We don’t get a lot of Launch Days in our careers so today is special for a ton of reasons. Oblige me some good vibes today.”
“A big reason is being invited into a position of creative trust on a new experience,” he continued. “Obviously it’s a group effort, and having a seat at the table with others who inspire you and push you to do your best is a tremendous privilege. That trust gave the game so much identity.”
Turning to praise his team for their contributions, Weisnewski then beamed, “More personally I feel so lucky to have had another run at game design with my long time friends and colleagues @Josh_Hamrick, @Claude_Jerome, @Wertle, @vacatedmonkey, @meliavir, & more. Close friends, wonderful people, and literally some of the best developers in the world.”
“Concord has so much humanity and depth to it,” he concluded. “I really hope people give it a shot. Insanely proud of the game and we’re strapped in and ready to push it for years to come.”
Again, I hate to repeat myself but – EIGHT YEARS?!
This insane timeline aside, these tweets provide some interesting hints regarding the apparently bumpy and disastrous road that was Concord‘s dev cycle.
First off, a quick run of Weinewski math places the game’s ‘green-light’ date sometime in 2016 – the exact same year as what many would arguably consider the defining title of the hero shooter genre, Overwatch.
Second, the fact that the game’s lead designer did not join the project until roughly three years into its production suggests that, at that point in its existence, Firewalk Studios decided to make a huge change regarding its overall direction.
The following is pure speculation, but in light of these two facts, it would seem that after starting life as an Overwatch imitator, someone at either Firewalk Studios or PlayStation realized that Conord‘s initial form would be unable to compete with Blizzard’s then-top-tier product.
And given what the game has turned out to be, it seem that the resulting solution was to…copy Guardians of the Galaxy in tone and atmosphere and put an emphasis on ‘representation’.
Stepping back from Concord‘s specific problems, the fact that this game took so long to develop is symptomatic of an ever-growing trend of developers – both Western and Eastern – spending absolutely way too much time on a single title.
The fact of the matter is, absolutely no game needs to spend that long in development, as doing so only opens up the game to more problems than such an extended calendar might solve, including a loss of audience interest in either a specific IP or genre, insanely inflated budgets (that in turn require insanely high sales, thus leading to many publishers to choose to only publish assumed ‘winners’ instead of taking risks and experimenting), and, perhaps worst of all, keeping devs stuck working on stinkers instead of allowing them to try again with a new one.
Funnily enough, you know what other game took almost eight years to develop?
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. And as we all now know, even seven years in the cooker couldn’t stop that game from being one of the worst produced in the modern era.
As noted above, Concord is now available to players who purchased the game’s Deluxe Edition.
Meanwhile, everyone else will have to wait until August 23rd to not play.
