Today on rhe 5: If you have even a mild interest in video games, you've likelty seen at least a few news items over the failure of the recently released hero shooter Concord. The game was declared DOA by many before it even launched because it was clearly trend chasing, but I don't think that's what really doomed it.
Ozone Nightmare
Made To Fail
Welcome to Daily 5 for Wednesday, September 4th, 2024. By now, many of you, if you read anything or hear anything about video games, have probably seen that Sony has pulled the recently released video game Concord from sale and is going to be refunding anyone who bought it. I think the game launched within the last two or three weeks and has got nothing but negative attention because when it launched, there really were not many people playing it. It is a, I guess they call it a MOBA or a hero shooter now. I don't even know what the classifications mean at this point, but essentially it was another game that looked a lot like a lot of other games that have been part of a trend that has already long been over. And so most people, before this, honestly, I would guess that most people probably didn't even know what this game was until it launched and suddenly got a lot of negative news attention. Every most folks may have remembered seeing something about it, but then forgot about it. It's, you know, I looked at it once all these stories started coming out and I thought, okay, well, it's, it looks just like a bunch of other games that I've seen. I didn't even realize who was putting it out. At first, I thought it might be some kind of overwatch connected expansion or something. And then I realized, oh, no, this is its own game. And I think to some degree, this is exactly what the problem is with many of these games and many other games that come out when they are clearly chasing trends. And that's what this game was doing. Let's be honest about it. They saw that other games were successful in this space and they made one to try to imitate it. There was nothing. I watched a couple of gameplay videos of it. I watched a couple of reviews, none of which were very favorable. And at no point did I see anything that made it look interesting, special or different. And that is fundamentally what the problem here is you can come into a space where other people have made similar games that are successful. Even if you're doing 90% the same thing, but if you do that extra 10% in some interesting new or you add a new mechanic to it, you can actually succeed. This is what's happened with or what happened with, I think Fortnite came in and replaced PUBG because it was doing things just differently enough and just in appealing enough ways that that's where people gravitated towards. And that is not a new story. There are many cases where a video game came out, was largely successful. And then somebody else came out and largely imitated but changed just a couple of key things to differentiate it just enough or to add some kind of special element to it, that then changed it. That was the case where when the original Shadow of Mordor game came out, the thing that made it interesting wasn't that it was a third person combat game. There were many of those. In fact, there was another game very similar to it at the time, which I can't remember now. But the Nemesis system, while not ever quite living up to its marketing, was something that made the game different because, if you don't remember, you never played the game, the Nemesis system, which is one that has never really been retried since, which is kind of strange because it was a really good idea. I remember reading at least a couple articles that said, "Why did the Nemesis system never catch on?" But any enemy, any major enemy you would encounter in that game could change the hierarchy of all the other, I wouldn't say boss characters, but kind of mid-level boss characters. So if you killed a character, or if you didn't, more importantly, if you didn't kill a, let's say, a mid-level character, one that was stronger than the typical kind of cannon fodder, but again, not a boss character, let's say you attempted to kill this character but got killed, you would actually run into that character and that character would remember you. It would be scarred depending on what attack you used. Or if you did kill that boss, or that, not really boss, but that mid-level strong character, it would reshuffle all the other kind of mid-level characters so that if there was one that was a lieutenant to that character, that character moved up and became stronger and that was in charge of the gang that that other character had been in charge of. It's a beautiful system. Again, the combat was very familiar. If you take that out of it, there was really nothing that was all that special about the game, but with that in there, there became a level of tactical planning and repercussions to some extent when you either succeeded or failed at a character. So it wasn't that Shadow of Mordor reinvented third-person combat, it certainly did not, but it put one interesting twist in there and even though, again, it wasn't quite as impactful as maybe they made it out to be, it still elevated the game and it made it different. It made it stand out. It gave it an edge that others should have imitated and never did and that still makes it somewhat unique. So again, Concord didn't have to be a failure, just chasing a trend isn't necessarily going to do in the game, but when you chase a trend and you do nothing, you add nothing, there's nothing special, you should be able to look at a game and understand that there's something unique about it pretty quickly. If you can't do that, then this is almost going to be what the end result is, so did Concord have to fail? No, was it put in position to almost be guaranteed to? Yeah, it was and that's what happened later.